Ableton DJ edits - best practices?

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svennirusl
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Ableton DJ edits - best practices?

Post by svennirusl » Sun May 02, 2021 5:48 pm

I just sat down to "fix" the fluctuating BPM in a disco track I was playing last night. I've done this with ableton since I started using it 17 years ago. With time, my ears have developed a sense of the changes that the different time stretching algorithms make to the sound of the track.
A friend of mine told me he did his edits completely manually, in a different program. He'd just chop every beat down and then tweak as he went.

I started thinking, are there any people here that have long experience with this type of work, and have found "best practices" they'd like to share?
For me, it differs with every track. Sometimes I'll use the "pro" algorithm for the first and last bit, since it sounds the least bad. Then I'll make the middle bit, the track proper, sit between just two warp markers, and set that clip to Beats, usually to something like 1 bar. And then I'll make that clip control the master bpm. Then I set that bpm as the track bpm, so the first and last bits sync properly in Traktor. The majority of the track is then completely unadulturated, once I've set things up like this I could even turn off Warp. I think. So it sounds just like the original recording, unless I feel like EQing or mastering.
When you're playing music through gigantic speakers all the time, your ears pick up things there that you don't hear in headphones or on 5" monitors. Or more accurately, things that don't bug you until they get really loud.

So, what are your tricks? How do you navigate around the stretch algos making the sound woozy, the bass distuned, or shaving off the transients of the drums?

Sv.

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