It never totally made sense to me that Live lets you “swap” a rack using the hot-swap button.
Since racks contain other devices, it always seemed a bit odd. I thought of swapping as traditional preset loading: once you’ve picked the device, you can try out some presets for it. Swapping out a rack means you could be loading distortion with one click and reverb with the next. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but…
It turns out that there is one absolutely fantastic reason for swapping out racks, and it’s particularly helpful when modifying a performance Set, or anything with a lot of custom MIDI mappings. Today, I’m swapping out my DJ EQ for my new, improved DJ EQ 2. (wanna see it? gimme a dollar! just kidding!)
Here’s my current EQ with it’s mappings:
Now, I’m gonna hit the hot-swap switch and load up the new EQ. Once it’s loaded, take a look at the MIDI map:
Yesssss! The MIDI mappings are preserved in the newly loaded rack. Since I have six EQs in my set, this technique saves me having to map 18 knobs.
