Racked and ready

Modern DAWs’ workflow features can be the secret sauce for getting your mixes finished quickly with professional results. By combining multiple processors – whether that’s individual plugins or your host’s stock processors – into a single shell, you can call up the same formulations you’re used to, time and time again.

If you find yourself using the exact same mixing chain on certain tracks, it’s time to group those processors into a rack and save it to grab at a moment’s notice later on.

The other major advantage of rack systems is macros. Most often, gathering a collection of processors or instruments in one place means that you can take command over multiple parameters at once from a single control. You could, for example, set up a parallel compression rack with a single control that will automatically increase the strength of processing and rebalance the levels of the dry and wet signals at once.

In order to use racks in Ableton Live, you should group multiple items together or drag items into a rack device (Audio Effect Rack, Drum Rack, Instrument Rack or MIDI Effect Rack). You can customise multiple parallel chains, create macros, and then save it all for later use in the browser. Logic’s Smart Controls can be accessed by pressing B.

They offer routing, scaling and arpeggiator controls. Studio One users can save effects chains and route it all together using the Routing Editor, Bitwig has Containers to combine and instruments and effects and use the same modulators for all, Reason has the classic Combinator rack devices, and FL Studio’s Channel Racks let you use the functionality of multiple channels on a single one.