Racks

One of the most exciting features of Live is Instrument and Effects Racks. These allow you to group together numerous Live devices to create a flexible “superdevice” that you can treat as a single device. Not only that, but Racks also enable you to work with effects and instruments in parallel as well as serial chains, blending together the output at the end. This makes it possible to create an infinite variety of new sounds by layering instruments and effects from your collection. You can then save these layered instruments or chains of effects as a single device that can be recalled at any time.

Creating Racks

There are two different ways to create Racks. Start a new, empty Rack by dragging one of the generic Rack devices from the Live Device Browser into a track. You can then add your choice of devices to the Rack by dropping them directly into the Rack’s Chain List or Devices View. If you have already set up a chain of devices on a given track and you want to combine them into a Rack, simply select the title bars (Shift+click to select multiple devices) in the Track View and use the Group command from the Edit menu. Alternatively, you can right-click (Ctrl+click) in one of the title bars and use the Group command from the context menu that opens there. To break up a Rack into its component devices, repeat this operation and select the Ungroup command in the Edit menu or the context menu.