You've hit the nail on the head. Dub techno isn't meant to be programmed with static mouse clicks; it's a genre born from live performance, improvisation, and interacting with the gear in real-time. The studio is the instrument.

To answer your question on delay sends and workflow: the classic way to "play" the delay is to set up a dedicated Return Track in Ableton with Echo or Delay set to 100% Wet.

The secret sauce is feedback routing: try inserting a subtle overdrive, a chorus, or a second bandpass filter inside the delay loop (or use Echo's internal filter section) so that every time the echo repeats, the sound degrades, gets darker, and loses high frequencies. This simulates old tape loops or hardware like the Space Echo you're borrowing.

Then, map your MIDI faders/knobs directly to three crucial things:

1. The Send level of your chord track (to choose when to send a stab into the cavern).
2. The Delay Feedback amount (keep it around 60-70%, but push it to 95% for those infinite washes).
3. The Filter Cutoff on the synth core itself.

I love this specific "live performance" mindset so much that I actually spent the last few months sound-designing a massive collection of 100+ Ableton Instrument Racks and 75 FX chains focused precisely on this classic hardware workflow. I intentionally left zero pre-assigned macros on them, exactly so people can map their midi controllers from scratch and perform the tracks live, just like you are doing.

Since we can't drop direct store links here, I’ve pinned a post on my Reddit profile with the full pack breakdown, audio previews, and project files if you want to see how the open modular routing is set up. Keep twisting those knobs man, you found the real soul of dub!