Bussing Individual Tracks for Live Performance in Ableton

 

This blog is part of our new series of tutorials based on the functions and features included in Ableton for Live Performance using background tracks.

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Bussing Individual Tracks for Live Performance in Ableton

When you are using background tracks, you might find yourself in situations in which you have way many more tracks in Ableton than actual outputs.

Let’s say you only have 4 outputs for example, but you have 8 tracks of drums.

What can you do to get all of those drums out of the interface?

You need to buss them out to a stereo pair.

How?

Create a group!

Let’s give it a shot!

 

 

1. Open your Live Set:

 

 

From this set, we can see we have both the BASS and KEYS tracks being sent out using outputs 3-4.

Now, we also have 8 drum tracks, but we only have outputs 1 and 2 left available.

So, we will create a “Drums” group, and treat that group as a stereo audio track that we can send out to a pair of outputs.

 

2. Click on the first drum track to select it:

In this case the “Kick”:

 

 

3. While holding “shift”, click on the last drum track at the bottom:

Now they are all selected:

 

 

4. Right click on any of the drums tracks:

 

 

5. Click on “Group Tracks”:

A group called “3 Group” was create as:

 

 

6. Rename the group to “Drums”:

 

 

7. Change the output of the group to “External Output 1-2”:

 

 

Now, you have all the drums going to output par 1-2, while the keys and bass go to 3-4.

Since your drum tracks have been bussed or grouped, you can still change the individual volume of each element with its associated volume slider as well as panning them within the group.

 

And that is it! Now you know the process to Bussing individual tracks for Live Performance in Ableton.

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