Beatmatching in live (not warping)

[keyboardcowb0y]

Hey There,

Is it possible to actually beat match in live? What I mean is turn off the quantization and just launch clips on your own and change pitch to line the 2 clips up then mix them in. It would be cool to emulate how turntables work. I know how to warp and all that, I was just curious if you can beatmatch the traditional way.

[AudioRuso]

I used to do this... and i know you can do it better then I did it...

You can adjust the start point of a clip to line it up with the other.... after warping... and you should be able to midi map the start point.

This is not what you want because they'd still need to be at least warped to reflect tempo and would be running at the global tempo.

The better option is to run two copies of ableton.... you can enable this in the preferences... a lot of midi controllers allow multiple programs to access it.... if not you could use midi yoke to forward the messages to the other instance of live...

The obvious problem here is the audio driver.... you should be able to run both of them in dx mode with no problem at all... the problem being they'd be going to two channels and you couldn't cue....

You could also run two seperate audio interfaces which would be the best option for this....

Best of luck, it's not possible out of the box but you can get it to work in a bit of an awkward way and it will work.

[gabrielsaint]

I used to do this... and i know you can do it better then I did it...

You can adjust the start point of a clip to line it up with the other.... after warping... and you should be able to midi map the start point.

This is not what you want because they'd still need to be at least warped to reflect tempo and would be running at the global tempo.

The better option is to run two copies of ableton.... you can enable this in the preferences... a lot of midi controllers allow multiple programs to access it.... if not you could use midi yoke to forward the messages to the other instance of live...

The obvious problem here is the audio driver.... you should be able to run both of them in dx mode with no problem at all... the problem being they'd be going to two channels and you couldn't cue....

You could also run two seperate audio interfaces which would be the best option for this....

Best of luck, it's not possible out of the box but you can get it to work in a bit of an awkward way and it will work.

Launching two instances of Live to beat match. Clever.

Ableton should make this easier. I'm sure they are holding out for the whole serato merge.

[birthday boy]

The answer is YES, and you don't have to launch two instances of live. You need to have multiple physical outs (channels) so you can cue what you're mixing in (external sound-card). Turn warping off and set launch quantization to NONE. Now your clip's pitch parameter and most importantly the DETUNE parameter serve the same purpose as that on a turn table + your hand. Set your clip's start point somewhere (like first bass drum on a record for instance). With launch quantization disabled you can manually start it on beat, and slow it down / speed it up accordingly via pitch control - though if songs are within 5 bpm or so of each other the difference is rarely more than a semitone speed-wise - so really get in there with DETUNE to lock the blend down. This is just as difficult as matching records - possibly moreso. Practice practice practice. Its a lot of fun actually - way moreso than playing warped stuff, but of course harmonizing two things becomes difficult when you can't change the pitch w/ out messing up the blend (just like w/ records!). The ability to do this is handy in case your gigging and realize you want to play something that you haven't previously mapped. One obvious advantage to doing things the hard way is that you don't get that crappy warped sound, but that can be avoided by setting the warp mode to PITCH (as opposed to BEAT or COMPLEX, which sound like crap NO MATTER WHAT), if thats where your intent to do this is coming from.

Note: midi-map the detune to a knob/rotary!

[birthday boy]

This might help

http://www.ableton.com/pages/tips/2004_04

[Slightlydelic]

i dont understand why peple would want to spend the time beat matching when ableton gives a whole new bag of tricks to play with.

[mbird21]

lol...I thought the same as the above tbh too, of cours if you like the challenge, why not right?.

but after spending 4 years with vinyl matching, im quite happy to be digital now and not have to worry about beatmatching every 30 secs, but wont do any harm to learn the old ways suppose