Life is an inspiring tool for generating unique sounding beats and there are some cases in which your mixing can benefit from using the separate outputs method. This means sending the individual lanes in Life to separate tracks in your DAW. Separate outputs lets you:
- Use a third-party effect like a compressor on a single lane from Life.
- Apply the same reverb that you have already used for other tracks, like vocals and guitar but only on some of the Life lanes.
- Use one of the lanes from Life as a side chain source in your arrangement
- Export the different lanes from Life to separate audio files so that the tracks can be mixed by someone who does not own Life.
- Send the different lanes from Life, via an audio interface with multiple outputs into a mixing desk, for instance when using a midi keyboard or a percussion pad to trigger Life in a live situation.
Enabling separate outputs inside Life
To route the Life lanes to separate channels in your host, you must first enable the outputs inside Life. Simply open Life and click the “M” button (the M stands for Master) furthest to the right in the "Sound" column for any of the 4 lanes you want to route. You can route the Kick channel to a separate output by clicking the "M" button in the bottom right. You also get the option to choose between routing the lane with or without the Master channel and you can select to auto-route all the separate outputs.
The rest of this guide contains instructions on how to continue routing the outputs in your host software. This guide may not be up to date when you read this, so please refer to your host manual if you have any questions.
Select your DAW:
Logic
1. Create a Software Instrument channel and load Life Multi-Output (6xStereo).
2. Open the Life interface, go to the EDIT page and click on the “M” in the "Sound" column for each lane you want to route to a separate output. If you want to route the Kick channel the "M" is in the bottom right corner. See Enabling separate outputs inside Life in the beginning of this guide for more info.
3. Go to the Mixer in Logic and look at the track with Life, there’s a plus sign near the bottom if you loaded Life as a Multi-Output plugin. Clicking on that plus sign a number of times creates the Aux channels for the separate outputs in Life.
Reaper:
1. Go to “Insert Virtual Instrument On New Track...”
2. Select XLN Audio: Life and click OK.
3. A “Build Routing Confirmation” dialogue should now pop up, prompting you to add tracks for this effect. Click Yes.
4. Open the Life interface, go to the EDIT page and click on the “M” in the "Sound" column, or for the Kick channel the "M" in the bottom right corner for each lane you want to route to a separate output (see Enabling separate outputs inside Life in the beginning of this guide for more info).
Ableton Live:
1. Load Life on a MIDI track.
2. Open the Life interface, go to the EDIT page and click on the “M” in the "Sound" column for each lane you want to route to a separate output. If you want to route the Kick channel the "M" is in the bottom right corner. See Enabling separate outputs inside Life in the beginning of this guide for more info.
3. Insert Audio tracks for each channel you want to route. That’s 5 stereo tracks if you want to route all lanes and the kick from Life into Ableton Live.
4. In the “Audio From” input dropdown on the first audio track, select “Life”.
5. In the dropdown box directly below (it says Post Mixer in the screenshot), select the Life bus you want to send to this channel, for example BUS 1-Life.
6. One step below, click the Monitor [In] button to let sound through the channel.
7. Repeat steps 4-6 for the rest of the tracks until all lanes are routed.
FL Studio:
1. Load Life on a track. Note that the AU version unfortunately doesn't work correctly with separate outputs.
2. Open the Life interface, go to the EDIT page and click on the “M” in the "Sound" column for each lane you want to route to a separate output. If you want to route the Kick channel the "M" is in the bottom right corner. See Enabling separate outputs inside Life in the beginning of this guide for more info.
3. Open the Wrapper Settings for the Life plug-in, then click the tab labeled Processing.
4. In the Connections tab, individual outputs from Life can be sent to different channel strips in the FL Studio Mixer. Clicking the "Auto map outputs" should automatically set this up. Make sure the tracks are enabled, if not click on the circle in front of them.
Cubase:
1. Load Life on an Instrument track.
2. Open the Life interface, go to the EDIT page and click on the “M” in the "Sound" column for each lane you want to route to a separate output. If you want to route the Kick channel the "M" is in the bottom right corner. See Enabling separate outputs inside Life in the beginning of this guide for more info.
3. In the Inspector view for the Life track you will see the multi-out return channel instrument dropdown (named Life 01 in the screenshot). Clicking on this will reveal the outputs available from Life. Click to select the ones you wish to activate and you should see new bus tracks created in Cubase in the mix console.
Pro Tools:
1. On a new Session create a stereo Instrument Track. Next add Life to that channel as a multichannel plugin.
2. Open the Life interface, go to the EDIT page and click on the “M” in the "Sound" column for each lane you want to route to a separate output. If you want to route the Kick channel the "M" is in the bottom right corner. See Enabling separate outputs inside Life in the beginning of this guide for more info.
3. Create Audio tracks for each lane you want to route. That’s 5 tracks if you want to route all lanes and the kick from Life into Pro Tools.
4. Assign the individual Life buses as inputs to each track in the Mix View of Pro Tools. Select the audio channel, click on "no input" under I/O and select plug-in > Life inst X - Insert X and you should see a list of the buses from Life that you can select as input for the audio channel.
Cakewalk:
1. Click on Insert in the top menu, select Soft Synth and load Life into your project. When you do this make sure to select Instrument Track Per Output and Stereo Audio Outputs. This will route the audio outputs of Life to separate tracks in Cakewalk.
2. Open the Life interface, go to the EDIT page and click on the “M” in the "Sound" column for each lane you want to route to a separate output. If you want to route the Kick channel the "M" is in the bottom right corner. See Enabling separate outputs inside Life in the beginning of this guide for more info.
Reason:
1. Load Life into your project.
2. Open the Life interface, go to the EDIT page and click on the “M” in the "Sound" column for each lane you want to route to a separate output. If you want to route the Kick channel the "M" is in the bottom right corner. See Enabling separate outputs inside Life in the beginning of this guide for more info.
3. Toggle to rack rear (shortcut: ⇥).
4. Click on "Optional Inputs & Outputs) at the bottom of the back of the Life module.
5. Right click on Optional Audio Output 3 and select "Route to new Mix Channel". This connects Optional Audio Output 3 & 4 to the inputs of a new mix channel.
6. Right click on Optional Audio Output 5 and select "Route to new Mix Channel", and repeat the process for all available outputs.