Routing: Creative Flexibility
By Shawn Balm
Live 4's powerful new routing scheme allows you to take your mixes to the next level. Tapping individual outputs of instruments, submixing, patching, flexible resampling, and much more, are all possible with the new routing options available in Live 4.
Out to the In
The key to all of this power can be found in Live's "patchbay", the In/Out View. The In/Out View is accessed via the Session View Mixer by clicking on the In/Out View show/hide button.
The In/Out View handles all routing and monitoring. You will see "Audio From", "Audio To", "MIDI From" and "MIDI To" choosers for determining how signals are patched between tracks or external hardware. Also, there are "On", "Auto" and "Off" switches for controlling the behavior of the track's monitoring.
The combination of these simple controls can yield very useful and creative options to your music productions.
Keep Them Separated
So you have created a great drum pattern using Impulse. However, something is not quite as exciting about it now that you have listened to it a few times. The groove is nice, but the kick sounds a little weak, the snare is a little flat and the hi-hats are not sizzling as much as you had originally thought. What you need is some advanced mixing, which is easily achieved through routing individual Impulse sounds to separate tracks and adding some effects.
Create four new audio tracks and name them "BassDr", "Snare", "Closed" and "Open", or something similar, so that you can keep everything organized.
Now select the MIDI track that contains Impulse, in this case 7-MIDI, in the "Audio From" Input Type chooser on the "BassDr" track. In the Input Channel chooser, directly below, select the individual slot containing your bass drum sample in Impulse to isolate the particular sound on this track. Repeat this process for the other tracks to isolate the snare and hi-hats.
The last step is to switch monitoring "On" so that you can hear the input.
Now try adding a compressor to the "BassDr" track and a delay to the "Snare" track. We will also add an EQ Four to the hi-hats, but instead of using two instances of EQ Four, one for each hi-hat track, let's submix the "Open" and "Closed" hi-hats to a single track. To do this, create another audio track and name it "All Hats" and on the "Open" and "Closed" tracks' Audio To chooser, select the "All Hats" track.
On the "All Hats" track, drag in an EQ Four and adjust to taste.
As you start to add other instruments, you may find that the drums need to be turned down in the mix. This could prove difficult with so many tracks. To make this a simple task, create another track and submix the entire drum kit. Name the track something like "All Drums". Now, in the individual "BassDr", "Snare" and "All Hats" tracks, select the new "All Drums" track in the Audio To chooser. Remember to keep the "Open" and "Closed" tracks' routing set to "All Hats" to keep your EQ Four in the mix.
Finally, select the "All Drums" track in the Audio To chooser of the track that Impulse is in so that the remaining sounds in the kit are routed to the drum mix track as well.
Now all of the drums are routed to this single track. This will allow you to easily control the volume of the entire drum kit in the rest of the mix without needing to move all the tracks' faders individually. This is also useful if you want to process the entire drum mix through an effect such as a reverb.
A Simpler Random
Create a MIDI track and add Simpler. Record a pattern and drag in the Random effect to create some variation to the pattern.
Now, create another track and add a couple of additional notes to the pattern by choosing the track containing Simpler in the MIDI To chooser. This will send the additional pattern to Simpler and play it along with the first in the Simpler' track. For this example we do not want the Random effect to alter the new notes we are feeding to Simpler, so select "Simpler" in the Output Channel chooser instead of "Track In".
This will route the notes of our additional pattern directly to Simpler, bypassing the Random effect. This means the pattern sitting in the track will be randomized, but the pattern from the other track will not be randomized.
Take a Load Off
Once you have your drum mix the way you want it, you may decide to record the results as an audio file to free up your CPU or to tweak it with clip envelopes and warp markers. To achieve this, create an audio track and select "All Drums" in the Audio From chooser and record the entire drum mix, post-effects.
You can grab audio from anywhere, which allows you to sample virtually any source. You can create a lot of new sounds this way.
Those Special Moments
You can also record MIDI data between tracks just as you would with audio. Suppose you have a MIDI clip playing an instrument and you have used some of Live's MIDI effects to spice things up.
You like the results and would like this to be a new MIDI clip.
Simply set up another MIDI track to record the results as a new MIDI clip.
By now I am sure you are beginning to see how powerful the new routing possibilities are in Live 4. You can streamline your setup and creatively enhance your mixes very easily with routing. So go ahead, experiment and find some new tricks of your own.