You can use the racks in Live to do a lot of things. They can be used to make your own MIDI effects, audio effects and instruments.
Today we will start with the very basics of making your own audio effect. We will make a rack that has 2 chains. The first chain will be empty, so that it can let our "dry" signal pass. The second chain will contain the effects you want to use. We wont be making an actual effect, just the building block that you need to create a cool audio effect rack.
• Select an empty audio effect rack from Live's browser.
• Click on the "show/hide button" on the rack, to display the chain list as seen in the picture below.
• Now drag 2 effects to the effects drop zone. (I will be using the flanger for this example)
• Now delete those effects again. Delete them by selecting the effects individually, so that you end up with 2 empty chains. We do this because there is no button to create empty chains.
• You now have an audio effect rack with 2 empty chains. Rename the first chain to "Dry" and the second to "Wet".
• Press the "chain button" to display the zone editor.
• Select both chains. (you can do this by clicking on the first chain, then hold the shift-key and click on the second chain)
• While the chains are selected, drag both zones from 0 to 127.
• Select chain 1 and make the zone 1 value shorter, so that it goes from 0 to 126 • Select chain 2 and make the zone 1 value shorter, so that it goes from 1 to 127
• Select the end of the fade range bar (the little bar above the zone bar) on chain 1 and drag it to 0, so that it reads 0-0.
• Select the beginning of the fade range bar (the little bar above the zone bar) on chain 2 and drag it to 127, so that it reads 127-127.
• Click in the "show/hide macro's" button to display the macro's controls on the rack. • Click on "map mode", so that we can map a macro to the "chain select ruler". • Click on the "chain select ruler" and map it to macro 1. (you can map a macro from the right-click menu that you get when you right-click on the selected parameter or by pressing the "map button" under the macro that you want to map it to)
• Turn off "map mode" and click on the "hide button", so that you end up with your dry/wet rack just displaying the macro's and the chains.
• Save this device as a preset, so that you will only have to do this once.
We have created our dry/wet rack. Now you are able to have a dry/wet parameter for any combination of plugins you might be using in Live. Simply put your effects in the "wet chain". Macro 1 controls the mix between the dry signal and the wet signal.
- Click here to download the Rack
