Matching tempo to Live drum take?

[h_razack]

I've got a live drum take, that has been recorder without any click-track, so it's free-tempo.
I will need to have some rythm-dependent VST effects in sync to the take (mostly the LFO of a filter, or similar stuff).
Obviously, I can't do it , as there's no steady tempo (we've got a good drummer, but still it's impossible to have a regular and precise tempo. It jumps back and forth from 1 or 2 bpm all the time).

I've recently purchased Live 2, and have been experiencing with the warp thing. What I've done is adjusting lots of warp points, to match the drum take's variations. So now the take is kind of "quantized", and is matching the current tempo.

However, what I'd like to do is actually the opposite. I don't want to turn the take into a steady tempo, but I'd like the tempo to follow the take. I've tried doing this by recording some tempo changes using the tap tempo, but while being a good feature, it can't be used for things like that (it's not precise enough, and records some funny tempo changes).

Is there another way to do that using Live?

When I was setting all the warp points, I noticed that between 2 warp points, Live calculated the tempo according to those 2 points, and put it in the "Original tempo" box. So basically, the feature is almost there, as Live can already deduct the take's tempo from the warp points. Now what I'd need is the actual tempo to change accordingly.

Any thoughts? (I hope I'm clear enough!)

[h_razack]

bump.
?

[Andrew K]

h-razack,

I have an answer but it would make use of Cubase or Logic as the master application and then LIVE would follow (through Rewire) all the slight tempo changes beautifully.

In Cubase (what I use) you would take the Drummers audio track and create a master tempo track to follow the drummer's tempo changes. Then you can do anything you want in Live and it will lock up the the drummer's original tempos.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think there is a way to do it only in Ableton LIVE without setting up markers (and therefore changing his/her perfromance).

Anyone else??


Andrew K

[neuronaut]

The problem is that the drummer's rhythm isn't something that has smooth transitions. My experience is that there are 2 groupings of tempo shifts. The 1st is the overall tempo change through out a song. The other is a tempo shift for 1 beat. In both cases you will find it hard to do anything other than follow an average of the tempo. You can use Cubase or Live to change tempo over time.

There are only 3 solutions I've ever had any luck with:
1. Play all the other parts along with the drums and respond using your musicianship skills as the song progresses, forget loops
2. Provide the drummer with a click track and redo the drum line
3. Time sync the 1st beat of every measure of the drum part to be on the beat. Variations within each measure can be left alone and regarded as a human timing.

-neuronaut

[h_razack]

Thanks for the reply.

I suppose I'll have to do some complex tempo changes in Cubase or live! The thing is, again, Live knows all the right tempo from my warper marks! But I'll have to manually insert the tempo changes. I suppose I should put this in the "feature request" part of the forum.

For all the other songs, we in fact just play along the drum tracks, and we don't really need any fixed tempo. But for that one I wanted some tempo-dependant effects... I that's one of the only tracks we've done without a click track!

Oh well

[neuronaut]

In your case, I would just beat match the entire drum file to a fixed tempo in Live and put up with a perfect, fixed tempo for the song... some of the human variations won't get lost...

or..

just approximate the tempo in the samples you want to use on top of the drum channel and retrigger them every measure or as often as needed to keep the triggered sounds from slipping out of sync with the drums.