MIDI in time with pre-recorded audio with time floating

[badEnough]

Hi,


I've found this thread but it doesn't solve the problem viewtopic.php?f=1&t=161039

The question is if and how I can I use Ableton Live to have MIDI played in time with pre-recorded audio which has some time floating (just because the audio is the recording of musicians playing, with no metronome).

If so,

• 1) Can it be done with version 7 of Ableton Live?
  2) Could you please point me to some detailed tutorial explaining how to do so (hopefully in a manner that it doesn't turn out to be a pain)?

Thanks!

[badEnough]

More clearly, this is what I'd like to do:

Import an audio track, a pre-recorded track of musicians playing with no metronome with normal time floating, piano bass drums.

Import MIDI tracks of some arrangement I'd like to test with that audio, trumpet trumpet flugelhorn trombone.

Have the audio track act as master, and the MIDI tracks as slave, that is the MIDI "timeline" should contract or stretch to stay in time with the beats or bars of the pre-recorded audio.



I wouldn't mind going through the audio playback once marking quarters or bars on the keyboard or mouse on the fly.
Let's say that (on the fly or the awful painfull way) I put warp markers on the one of each bar.

What's the next step?

I don't see anything (at least in Live 7) to put markers on the MIDI tracks (or on the MIDI tracks group) and activate the MIDI equivalent of warp, to have MIDI follow audio time.


Any hint would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

[yur2die4]

Warp the track. Make sure it is in Arrangement View, then in Clip Properties, hit the master/slave button to let the warp markers be the tempo control.

More info in the manual.

[badEnough]

Warp the track. Make sure it is in Arrangement View, then in Clip Properties, hit the master/slave button to let the warp markers be the tempo control.

More info in the manual.

Thank you A LOT for replying.


The track has _some_ time floating which I'd like to keep, they are good jazz musicians.

Besides I fear that such amount of stretching might compromise audio quality. This wouldn't happen of course changing the position and duration of MIDI events on the timeline.

As a workaround, maybe I'll finally import audio instead of MIDI and warp it keeping the pre-recorded audio as the master track.



I've been using warp in Ableton Live to keep in sync tracks coming from separate recorders (H2 & H4n), it was a small amount of compensation involved and the audio quality didn't suffer.

I had read in the manual how to do it.

I went through the manual (Live ver. 7) in a hurry, admittedly, and the impression that I got was that it was a treasure quest game: finding and understanding the needed information was more time consuming that the average manual I came to read (being the books coming with Borland C++ 4.02 the worst I ever saw, very badly translated, I had to reconstruct the English sentence to obtain the correct meaning, which I could do because I knew C++... yes that translation was the only language in which I could buy the package, in those days in the country where I was living, nowadays I'd use the English pdf manual of course).

What I was thinking that day was "Ableton should get a Live guru + a good teacher + a total newcomer to Live and review the manual". This is My VERY Humble Opinion however, and it is well possible that they have already improved it since.

[yur2die4]

A few extra tips.

One thing is, when warped in Beats mode, since the tempo is basing itself off of the warp markers of the audio file, the file itself will be playing without any warping being applied to it at all.

If you still don't feel right about the above statement, you can still have that channel, mute it, and make another channel of the same clip, except with warping turned Off. Then Live's tempo will be referencing the markers you set, but your audible clip will not be touched by markers.

If you're into grooves, you can tamper with finding the groove of a work and applying it to other things. Personally, I have limited experience with this, I am sure there are efficient 'average' ways to do it that could yield better results than trying really hard to get a precise result beginning to end.

[badEnough]

A few extra tips. [...]

Quite interesting! That confirms my feeling that I really need to find some good tutorials on Ableton Live warp feature, I'm going to look on Youtube for it.

THANK YOU AGAIN!