[keycloak-user] common roles within multiple clients

I have a keycloak realm that contains a number of clients (app1, app2, app3 ...). Those clients share a set of common roles (user, editor, manager ...). Is there a way I can directly assign those roles to the keycloak user so that they apply across all clients? The only approach I can find is to set up each of those roles for every client (e.g. for 5 clients set up 5 sets of identical roles) and then for each client apply the relevant roles to each of the users (e.g. repeat the same process for every user/client combination). Is there a better way? Thanks Tim