MIDI CHANNEL always 1 in UNIFY ?

I'm pretty sure this is an Ableton issue. Instances of Unify in Reaper receive correctly on all MIDI channels, but I can verify that in Ableton Live Suite v11.3.22, everything seems to get converted to channel 1. I'm a complete novice with Ableton, so I don't know why or how to fix it. You might find something useful here:  https://www.reddit.com/r/ableton/comments/198j1lh/helping_defining_midi_channel_per_midi_track/

MIDI routing in Ableton Live seems to be overly complex; see https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/routing-and-i-o/

Update: with a little more effort I was able to set up a single instance of Unify on one MIDI track in Live 11, and route MIDI input channels 1 and 2 to it using two additional MIDI tracks, one per channel, and then record-enabling both. Here's what it looks like, with Unify on track 3, and tracks 1 and 2 as the additional MIDI-routing tracks. When I change my MIDI controller's output channel between ch1 and ch2, Unify receives on that channel.

As I said, I'm an Ableton novice. Experts might be able to suggest a better method.

Update 2: Maybe this is the only way. See this video, which uses Omnisphere 2 as the multi-timbral plug-in instead of Unify, but the principle is the same. https://youtu.be/j0r_1xHKL4I

Based on your original screenshot, it looks like you're trying to set up Unify to play multi-timbrally, i.e., to play one sound for MIDI input on ch.1, and a different sound for input on MIDI ch.2. It would probably be simpler to just use two instances of Unify, and put each one on its own track in Ableton Live.

This is the only way to do it in Ableton as far as I know too - sending a specific channel to another track with the plugin. Frustrating right?

Possibly a MIDI translator plugin can be added in front of Unify - but there's no built in one in Ableton for channel translation or CC message number translation.

Although perhaps not the originally intended function, you can also enable MPE mode on the plugin (right click the instrument title bar in the Ableton rack), and it should then receive ALL channels coming from the input device.

Normally with MPE, most MPE controllers would send notes on channels 2-16 (sometimes less) and modwheel/pitch bend on channel 1/master control channel, but if the plugin is not actually a MPE plugin, and you don't use a MPE controller, notes should just go through on whatever channel the controller is sending them on.

Actually... sorry.. ignore that.. looks like Ableton only allows one note per channel when it's set in MPE mode... 

Edit..OK.. found the trick! 🙂  Set the MPE channel mode to 'Multi-channel', select first note channel to the desired input channel, set last note channel to the same. Set the channel filter on the track to the same.

Yep.  Same as what has already been said. I find it best to assign a MIDI Channel to each track and have a separate VST instance per track.  Then arm all the tracks.  I kind of have to give up on a VSTs multi-timbral ability.

@ssquared There's no need to duplicate the plugin in Ableton, you just need multiple other MIDI tracks targeting the one instance of a multi-timbral plugin. See attached screenshot.

However if you just want to target one specific channel, you can use the multi-channel/MPE mode trick I shared above.

@wavesequencer 

Yes, it can be done, but I, personally, find that way to be a little bit cumbersome to setup so prefer breaking it into individual parts.  Maybe others might feel my suggestion is the cumbersome method.  😀

@ssquared Yes - seems a little cumbersome to me to duplicate the plugin (without even considering the CPU load/memory load overhead), as then you lose the benefit of using a multi-timbral plugin, in that you can save the state of multiple layers each on their own channel as a preset - e.g. in Unify, or Hyperion. Sure you can save the state of your DAW project, but saving your multi-timbral preset within Unify lets you share it or move it to a different DAW. Of course duplicating the plugin allows treating each layer as a separate audio source in your DAW for further per layer processing.

@wavesequencer

Yeah.  I get it.

Ableton Live tracks are single-threaded, or at least they used to be (unless maybe using an instrument rack or chain), so I thought breaking things up would help spread things across multiple threads.  Now, something like Unify that is already multi-threaded won't be an issue, but I don't know how things like Omnisphere (I thought this was single threaded but not 100% sure), SampleTank or other multi-timbral synths work.

@wavesequencer Thank's , it's simple and it works ! I hadn't thought of that.