easily changing audio playback speed during performance

[bengazale]

hello all

i wanted to know if there was some kind of function in live to easily change the playback speed of an audio sample, ie something which could be mapped to a controler a allow for a manual control of playback, like a jog dial.
i've been trying to do this to act on the playback of an audio text read, to interact with a dancer, but so far i can only see such an option using warp functions (but i do not know when then playback will have to be slowed down or accelerated, since this is interactive), or the main timeline.

which is the simplest way to do this ? i only need to "scratch", ie manual playback, fast forward, slow down, stop play back or repeat a sequence of the text.
this would have to be without any sound drops or clicks, so far what i've tried to do with the timeline creates clicks.

thanks in advance for your help

ben

[Superchibisan]

i would set up several instances of the same clip, adjust them to the activity you would like, and then use a midi controller to launch each clip you need. (probably would avoid launch quantization for the effect you're looking for. you can set this variable for each individual clip)

[bengazale]

hi and thanks for your answer.
i'm afraid that would not work as this is an improvised duet relationship with a dancer.
I have no way of knowing which part of the clip will need to be slowed down or speeded up. if i did i would prepare a track in advance.
and if i had multiple instances of the same clip running at different speeds, they wouldn't be synched. ie if the sentence goes
"the cat ran up the tree and fell down all the way to the well" and i wanted to have a normal speed playback on "the cat ran up the tree" then speed up "and fell down all the way" and slow down "to the well", multiple clips would make it very hard to maintain textual continuity.

the clip has to be continuous playback ( it's a text that's being read, so it has to move forward). however i'm trying to find a way to speed up or slow down the playback during live playback ( as one would with a manual jog dial) in reaction to the the dancer's actions, without clicks or drops in the sound.
so far i haven't found a solution. The show's on friday eve, i thought this would be easy to do in live but apparently it's much more difficult than i thought since the warp technique seems very loop orientated. but i'd love to be proved wrong as it would be very useful to have such a function accessible.

right now i'm considering preparing a soundtrack ( thus losing the improvised dialog aspect) in advance, or doing the playback manually on protools as apprently there is a manual jog dial function which doesn't create clicks in the sound.

but really, i would love to able to acheive this rather simple task cleanly in live.

thanks

b

[naulboy]

Couldn't you do this by simply warping the speech, to play at it's original tempo with Live set at 120 bpm. Don't bother moving warp markers and let the speech play at it's normal tempo by default. IF you map a controller to the BPM of your track, you could set the midi map for the tempo range to whatever might suit the degree of tempo change you need (20 to 200 BPM for very severe alterations, 100 to 140 or whatever for fine tuning). You could even map two controllers, one for fine and the other for aggressive. The warp algorithm should be on Complex or Complex Pro if you're using Live 8.

If you need other music just playing as a backing track in Live while you're doing this you could just leave warping off on this backing track.

Hope that helps and I understood what you wanted to do.

Cheers,
Phil.