I know Cantabile doesn’t support the use of multiple instances of a rack in a song. However I’ve come up against a scenario where it would be really useful for certain types of “utility” rack, and I wondered if there might be a way to achieve it.
I’ve set up a “Pedal Fade” rack, which contains no plugins, just two things:
- A route from my expression pedal input to the rack MIDI output
- A trigger on Song State Load to set initial pedal level, sent to the rack MIDI output
Its purpose is to send MIDI controller messages to a target racks, which internally use bindings to FreeG with jump prevention enabled. The rack has various states like “Fade up from zero” (which sends a zero via trigger, and enables the pedal binding), “Fade down from full”, “Set to full, no fade”, and so on. Basically various useful combinations of enabling/disabling the binding and trigger. It’s handy because I can throw it in a song, and as I step through the song states it’s really easy to set up reliable fade-in/outs in a very visible way, just using the rack’s drop-down list (the alternative would be to have loads of triggers/bindings scattered everywhere). Using a state-dependent output route I can re-use the rack for fading different instruments in different parts of the song from the same pedal.
However I have a song where it would be incredibly handy to have several of these, since the same pedal controls multiple instruments, in close proximity (probably too much detail, but in my specific case I need a fade up instrument A at the same time as resetting the previous fade to full on instrument B, in the same song state). This means I really need two of these racks.
So I was wondering if there could be any way we could have multiple instances of certain categories of “utility” rack like this, that contain no plugins, only routes, bindings and triggers. Maybe another example would be a fader rack, which just internally uses the Cantabile gain faders with suitable bindings.
Neil