Best way to warp stems for live use?

[StijnK]

Hi!

Recently, my band played two new songs live for the first time and we noticed that their BPMs were a little bit too slow for a live show. I will explain our setup to make the situation more understandable.

In Ableton Live 10, I have 4 stereo stems going to 4 stereo outputs of the RME Fireface 802 (interface):

1+2: Drums
3+4: Bass
5+6: Leads
7+8: Everything else that can't be categorized in the stereo pairs above

We have two midi keyboards which trigger instruments in Ableton and routed it so that when a midi keyboard is playing a bass line the audio is sent to outputs 3+4. When a midi keyboard is playing a lead sound, its audio is routed to outputs 5+6 and so on...

Now we would like to adjust the tempo of the stems of these two new songs so that they are a little bit faster. I'm quite familiar with the whole warping thing in Ableton but just to be sure I would like to have your opinion on this.

Do I warp each stem file as a whole? Or is it better to go back to the mixing project of the song and warp all the individual tracks that are in each stem. Which algorithm should I use? Is ProTools better at this? If yes, which algorithm in ProTools is best? How big is the quality loss? We would like to speed up the songs by 3 or 4 BPM maximum.

Thanks!
Stijn

[McAnix]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8w9fI9v19w

This video will pretty much clarify everything about warping.
Protools wouldn't be any better.

If you want the best possible audio quality then going back and adjusting the original project file would be the best.

However experiment, I have found the tones and texture modes to sound much better than the complex modes with small bpm adjustments, but give the complex modes a go since they may help you to experiment with live bpm adjustments, and since you're already playing with live softsynths and samples they will help cover the audio quality loss.

Edit: realised you're using stems.

For the drum stems 1st choice would be beats mode, check the video for best settings.

For the other stems beats could work as well but that would depend on the content of the stems and of course the bpm change.

[dredd i knight]

I suggest warping the stems as a group, by detecting thenm all, then all the slight adjustments you make will be reflected across all tracks. It's a slightly labour intensive procedure, and there are a couple of YouTube clips about it. Then see which algorithm works best for which stem...