DJing in Live

lipidfish · Post by **lipidfish** » Fri Jan 25, 2008 3:37 pm

It seems to me like DJing in Ableton Live is useful only if you are working with Warped files of songs in a common tempo.

If I am interested in creating a very simple set where songs of many different tempos are played one-by-one with a little overlapping, that requires me to turn warping off in all my clips. Once warping is off I have very limited functionality within the clip. So much so that they become unusable to me.

So the question to you all is - Are you able to use Live effectively to play simple DJ sets without warping beat-matching?

Patch · Post by **Patch** » Fri Jan 25, 2008 3:44 pm

You can do it, but you lose most of the functionality of live. All of the beat sync effects become useless...

kabuki · Post by **kabuki** » Fri Jan 25, 2008 3:56 pm

Sounds like you could do what you need to with iTunes with the fade in out setting turned on.

You could warp everything straight, but al lthe cool tools (Beat repeat, LFO Filters, etc) are moot.

lipidfish · Post by **lipidfish** » Fri Jan 25, 2008 5:04 pm

Patch wrote:You can do it, but you lose most of the functionality of live. All of the beat sync effects become useless...

That's what I thought! I've been using NI Traktor for these types of sets since you still have a lot more flexibility in navigating around in the song.

It seems like Ableton is too complicated for simple DJing, and Traktor is too simple for complicated DJ sets

I was hoping to be able to consolidate down to one DJ program, but it looks like I'll be using two for the time being.

chrysalis33rpm · Post by **chrysalis33rpm** » Fri Jan 25, 2008 5:42 pm

What kind of functionality are you looking for for your non-warped set?

lipidfish · Post by **lipidfish** » Fri Jan 25, 2008 5:53 pm

chrysalis33rpm wrote:What kind of functionality are you looking for for your non-warped set?

Lets say you suddenly come up with an idea for the next song, but it is a different tempo - so you just want it to play "As Is". You bring it into Live, then you want to poke around to find a good cue point. If it is warped, this is easy. But in an unwarped file you are stuck with just playing it from the beginning. You can move the start point, then play but that seems too cumbersome.

I guess I'm looking for an easy way to navigate an unwarped file.