How to crossfade between more tracks in Ableton Live?

Question

I decided to pursue Ableton Live as opposed to the traditional Traktor / Pioneer CDJ standard, and I've been trying to find optimal ways of DJing and mixing songs, loops, and live drums.

I hit a road block where I can't find an effective way to route and manage multiple audio tracks in the same place.

It seems that I need a global macro that alters multiple tracks, since I can only send one track at at time to a Return track for manipulation.

The whole concept of Wet/Dry summing to 1, where two individual tracks sum to 2 is driving me crazy. There's got to be a way to manage multiple tracks without using MIDI and global mapping. What's the best way to mix multiple tracks that work off each other?

Answer 1

It turns out that you can actually import Audio From another track -- using a Compressor Sidechain 'Audio From' -- then clicking the blue headphone, preview button.

Not sure if there's a better way, but I'm hoping this method reproduces the original quality audio stream (and I think it does).

What this means is that you can have an Audio Effect Rack with multiple chains that are pulling from different sources. Even though the compressor isn't operating on any signal with the Audio From, the preview button forwards the signal.

You can then just use the chain selector faders as a sub-master crossfader, or assign EQ8 to each chain and filter sweep in planned directions (like / or like \ on both EQ8s enabled or disabled by another knob so track 2 plays in the missing frequencies of the parallel track).

I know a very professional technique is to have multiple sub-bus mixers before the master out, especially in production more than DJing.