I recently talked about how to use sidechain reverb in your mix. In that tutorial, I mentioned how, while you can use a return track for your sidechain reverb, this is typically better used as an audio effect rack in Ableton Live as this is typically a single track specific effect. Audio effect racks allow you to create parallel processing on a single track, creating potentially drastically differently processed versions of the same audio within the same track for you to blend to taste.
With that in mind, I thought I’d talk how to use audio effect racks in Ableton Live – how to set them up and in what situations you might want to do that in my DAW of choice.
Audio Effect Racks in Ableton
First, let’s talk how to set up an audio effect rack in Ableton.
How to Set Up an Audio Effect Rack
The first thing you need is obviously a track (preferably with some sort of audio on it).
With that track selected, in the bottom of either view (Arrangement or Session) you’ll find the area where you drop or access previously dropped audio effects.
Drop an effect, any effect of your choice on that track by dragging and dropping it from the left menu bar where all of your plugins are kept or simply double click on one to drop it at the bottom, engaging that effect on that track.
For our purposes and in keeping with the aforementioned sidechain reverb tutorial, I’ve dropped a reverb plugin followed by a stock Ableton Live compressor on a track.
For now, it just looks like this, my reverb plugin followed by my compressor:
Now hold Shift while clicking on both of those effects to select them both and type Ctrl+G, or right click either effect while they’re both highlighted and select “Group”.
Just like that, an Audio Effect Rack will appear. Right now it doesn’t look like much more than an extra container for our two effects:
For the moment, nothing has actually changed. To do that, we need to click the “Show/Hide Chain List” button which is on the far left, around the center of the Audio Effect Rack (three vertical dots next to three vertical lines).
This will expand the Audio Effect Rack in Ableton:
Note the name of the “Chain” defaults to whatever the first effect in line is, but we can right click the name area to rename it as we like.
For our purposes, this will be our “Reverb” or “Sidechain Reverb” chain, so rename it accordingly.
Now right click in the “Drop Audio Effects Here” and select “Create Chain”.
This will create a new chain which is essentially just our audio but dry without the processing, independent of the sidechain reverb version.
Let’s rename this one “Dry” so that it now looks like this:
You’ll see that, in addition to setting up the compressor, I turned down the sidechain reverb chain’s volume relative to the dry version of my track by 8 decibels.
For what it’s worth and as the open space in the Audio Effect Rack in Ableton suggests, you can just drop audio effects in that space in the rack to create a new chain each time you do it.
Now this track is set up so that the “Reverb” chain within the Audio Effects Rack exclusively is adding sidechain reverb to this (vocal) track.
You can now turn up or down each chain’s volumes with the decibel control to adjust the blend between the various chains on an individual track to taste.
You can also pan each chain within the track using the “C”, clicking and holding as you drag it left or right to move the audio to that respective side in the stereo field. You can mute or unmute a chain by clicking the yellow speaker icon, solo it by clicking the “S”, or quickly change the effects on that chain by clicking the rotating arrows/Hot-Swap button and selecting a new plugin/effect.
How to Use an Audio Effect Rack
The main reason to set up an audio effect rack is that it saves you from having to set up an extra track or a return track.
This is ideal when you want parallel processing which is specific to one single track like in the case of sidechain reverb.
The idea in sidechain reverb is to control the reverb based on the behavior or specifically the dynamics of the track it’s sidechained to. While it’s certainly an option, it doesn’t make sense to create a return track which you can only practically use for one track.
I like return tracks for effects I want to apply to multiple tracks in my mix, like delay, (conventional) reverb, New York compression, etc.
I like an audio effect rack when I have any kind of parallel processing on a single track. You can use this for delay throws, reverb throws, etc.
As an aside, be sure to set the Wet/Dry of any effects on their dedicated, non dry chain to 100% wet. This is because this is essentially just another way to serve up parallel processing but within a track itself – the volume controller of that “wet” chain (like the “Reverb” chain) is essentially acting as the “Wet/Dry” controller when it comes to audio effect racks.
Audio effect racks also work when you have a track you want to apply an effect that you’ve already got a return track working for, but the track has distinctive behavior as compared to most tracks in your mix.
For instance, if you’ve got a track with a drastically different dynamic profile, one which is especially quieter or louder than the rest of the tracks in your mix, but one which you still want to use that parallel compression on, in that case you can set up an audio effect rack for it.
You’d just create an audio effect rack and create two chains, one for the “dry” audio and one for the “parallel compressed” audio, dropping a compressor with the parallel compression settings you want on it on that latter chain then adjusting the decibel balance between the two chains accordingly.
In this scenario, you can adjust the threshold of that parallel compressor to be tailor made for the dynamics of THIS specific track, something you can’t or shouldn’t do on a return track with parallel compression.
One last note – the location of an audio effect rack matters just like any other effect.
If the rack exists at the end of a number of other effects which preceded it, all chains within the rack will be processed accordingly.
If I want whatever the purpose of the audio effect rack is meant to be to be processed just like the “dry” version of that track, I’ll place it at the end. Alternatively you can drop it at the start ahead of any effects to create a “Pre-FX” situation where it’s completely dry.
There’s no practical limit to how many chains you can create within one audio effect rack, allowing you to create your ultimate blend of effects as if you had multiple tracks representing what’s all happening on a single track.
Whenever you want to use parallel processing which is specific to a single track and don’t want the mess of extra tracks or setting up a dedicated return track for it, don’t discount the usefulness of Ableton’s audio effects rack feature.
