I’ve been working on some parallel routing ideas in Ableton and wanted to share what I have come up with. Instead of using sends I’ve created audio tracks with ‘audio from’ as the drum buss. Parallel compression is then routing to the mix buss and the parallel reverb is routing to the parallel compression bus. This creates 3 independent mixes. Any thoughts? Hope this photo will attach 
2 Likes
that’s how it’s done. ableton does have that advantage over other daws in that any audio track can be routed to the input or output of any other audio track. simple coding really, dunno why its such a hangup for other daws.
You can do this in an audio rack. No need for parallel tracks at all… (I used to work this way and will never go back…) You can map the parallel level to a macro knob and name it what you want, and save the preset for easy recall.
What most people who use racks do are make empty parallel rack configurations. I.E. One parallel chain, two parallel chains, parallel multiband chains (and multiband chains in general). You just drag and drop any effect in there and adjust level to taste… Map the level to a macro and it’s a breeze to automate… Racks are the way to work in Live. So many benefits… Once you go rack you’ll never go back 
(BTW, you can make parallel instrument racks… Have stacks of your favorite synths, or have a sine wave for sub with a band split for top bass…)
Re: other DAWs… You can route busses to audio tracks in Logic easily. (Not sure about other DAWs.) It’s how I create stems for a score or big arrangement.
Just create an audio track for you’re busses and set the output of each aux/buss to the audio tracks and turn on input monitoring. To record them arm all tracks and hit record. All your stems done in one pass… (Sounds like a pain, but if you have a few hundred instruments in an orchestra/scoring template it’s the only way to deal with a template that size… )
2 Likes
Parallel Racks in Live
Multband and Parallel Multiband Racks
Mapping Macros
Shortcut: Instead of hitting “map” and selecting parameters you can just right click any parameter and select map to macro and pick the macro number you want, like he does with map to frequency.
Works with 3rd party plugs too, just need to hit the disclosure triangle, select the slider and right click–> map to macro x,y or z… 
1 Like
racks are pretty amazing and work for alot of people, unfortunately for my particular work flow (mostly due to heavy macro automation) I have found them to be too cpu intensive to make much use of. it’s fine if you’re using stock plugins but try more than one multi-stacked rack with alot of third party plugs and I believe you’ll run into trouble. great advice on the stem setup : )