Help with warping at beginning of songs

[luddy]

Hi,

There's an operation concerning warping that I've never been able to figure out.

I have an audio file of a song that I want to warp, i.e., get the bars of Live to align with the bars of the song. If the beat (drums etc.) begins right at the beginning of the track this is easy: I put down a warp marker on the first downbeat of the first bar, set "start 1.1.1 here", put another warp marker on the first downbeat of the second bar, pull the second marker to an even bar boundary, and that gives me the tempo. I then put in whatever additional warp markers I need, at least one at the end of the song, and I'm done.

If the song has a free-form intro, not an even number of bars, my 1.1.1 clip marker is maybe a few seconds into the clip. My question is, how can I get that first segment (the intro) to be warped to the right bpm and still have the first downbeat on a bar boundary? If I set the segment bpm for the first segment to whatever the bpm of the song is, it moves the warp marker that was on 1.1.1 for the clip, so that it's no longer at the downbeat. If I pull the left edge of the clip in the arrangement out without changing the bpm of the first segment, the intro plays at the wrong tempo.

I must be missing something obvious....

any suggestions much welcome.

-Luddy

[patrick.olson86]

I know exactly what you mean. So, if I'm understanding correctly, the intro is kind of free form but you want to keep it tight for your reasons? It's very similar to when I was warping Skin Tight by the Ohio Players. What I did was this:

Find where the first kick comes in (the first beat of the bar) after the intro. Then basically work backwards from there. Put a warp marker (yellow) at that first kick and then guess and check everything you do before that point (free form intro). The remaining portion of the song should be able to be warped normally.

Hope that helps!

[luddy]

I must be doing something completely stupid, haha.

I do exactly what you say: find the first kick, put a warp marker, and everything after the kick is warped just fine. I don't want the intro to play at a different tempo; I just want it to play at the same tempo as the rest but have the first kick land on a bar boundary.

Example: the project tempo is at say 80bpm. I drag the audio file in, and click warp. The Seg. BPM now shows 80bpm for the clip. I put a warp marker on the first kick, set start 1.1.1 here, and then set a warp marker on the first kick of the second bar, drag the second marker to the bar line, and now the Seg. BPM shows 123, which is the tempo of the song. Perfect. So I set a warp marker at the end of the clip, and set the project tempo to 123, and when I hit play, it plays at 123bpm from the first kick. Perfect.

Now I want the intro to play before the first kick, also at 123 bpm, and otherwise for nothing to change. I move the clip to bar 5 of the timeline, and the intro is before the start point of the clip (grayed out in the Clip View, off to the left of the clip start point). At this point the first segment of the clip (the intro) is still at 80bpm because of the original project tempo. If I set it to 123bpm, the first kick warp marker goes flying to the right. What can I do to get the intro at the right bpm and still start the first kick at a bar boundary?

Thanks,

-Luddy

[gitu]

I have lots of interest to do wrap. The above advise are so cool for start doing wrap. Thanks for giving great advice.

[jeff_u]

I think where you're a bit off track is when you set 1.1.1 to the first downbeat. Rather than setting the downbeat as 1.1.1, drop a Warp Marker on the transient of the first downbeat, wherever it is, and choose "Warp from here". If you correctly warp the track after the first downbeat, and thus know the correct tempo of the track, you should be able to determine at what bar the kick/drums percussion start, assuming the track has a consistent tempo and time signature.

For example, if the marker you placed on the downbeat is close to 32.2, then its safe to say there are 32 bars in the intro. Align your first warp marker so that it lands on 33, allowing 32 bars of intro.

The next step is to delete the first Warp Marker that Live assigned at the beginning of the track. When you do so, Live should then nudge the intro section from 33 where you dropped your first Marker backward to the proper 32 bar length. Now go to the beginning of the track and drop a new marker exactly on 1.1.1

You should then have 32 bars of intro that are time aligned (roughly, you might need to tweak it a bit) to the rest of the track.

Again, this is assuming the intro is in fact a proper division of the time signature.

Kind of difficult to explain. Hopefully I made sense.

[luddy]

The next step is to delete the first Warp Marker that Live assigned at the beginning of the track.

that's it! That works perfectly, even with the 1.1.1 thing, because I can simply pull back the left edge of the clip after deleting that marker. For some reason I've been treating that marker as sacred and something not to be deleted.

thank you!

-Luddy

[patrick.olson86]

Yep, I think that method is the quickest, thanks for sharing ^^^ just to recap:

- First, turn off autowarp, it will save you some time
- Load in your clip ( you can turn off warping in the clip properties if it DOES, in fact, autowarp the clip)
- Find your first downbeat after the intro and drop in a yellow warp marker.
- Bring that back, or forward, to the first beat of the bar (in our example bar 33.1.1)
- Right click and select Warp From Here straight. This should warp everything after this marker.
- Delete the first Warp Marker that live drops in at the beginning of the track. This will remove the time stretching between the intro and the first downbeat on bar 33.1.1
- make adjustments on the intro from here.

Then you can warp as necessary from there. Turn on your metronome, adjust the global tempo to match the clip's tempo, play the track and make sure it all lines up. From here, any warping you need to do after bar 33 should be done using gray warp markers (so it stretches audio before and after it to line up properly). I recommend choosing a point near the end of the track. Then you can go back and adjust the intro with the same method if need be.

Kapow! done! Skin Tight by the Ohio Players is an example of this. If you have it, it's good practice to try with that song, as the intro bassline actually starts on beat 2 of a bar (or maybe even an eighth note, I forget) and the snare hits sometimes fall outside of the traditional 2 and 4.