Beatmatching and beat mixing is exhausting with Live...WHY?

[Perfectsounds]

So...I write this out of total frustration. My Biz partner and I have owned Ableton Live 8 with the APC 40 and Axiom 49 midi for about 90 days we worked with the trial 60 days prior to that. We have been mobile and broadcast DJ's for 27 years. We were looking for a studio remix tool and mixing tool we could use for live performance. I make radio and TV commercials for a live along with radio station imaging and voiceover for many national and regional clients. I am no stranger to DAW's and work daily with Audition and Pro Tools mostly.
We use Virtual DJ for our "mobile DJ gig rig". We run a tweaked out HP Touch PC with 6 gigs of ram, Vista 64 and every other upgrade option you can put on it! Here is the rubwe have both been "beat mixing" since the 70's disco days with vinyl. We can drop songs into Virtual DJ...hit the sync button and be "dead nuts" accurate with our mixes. I have never...since the dawn of digital production had such a challenge matching beats than with Ableton. I posted a few day's back that I was making progress...and I was. I got a couple of songs pretty well warpped after going through them measure by measure. But I just tried to get an old disco song with heavy beats (Love in C-minor)to sync with (Daft Punk-around the worl)and had no luck and their pretty close to begin with. I could not get them to stay synced with the metronome for more than 4 measures.
At first I defended Ableton to my partner because I told him that "Live" was a professional software tool compared to a standard "DJ software". But he has a great point...if Live is built so well for the professional DJ/Producer why can't we simply drop songs into it like Virtual DJ and have it easily be quantized and synced? Frankly...I don't know why. Why do I have to spend upwards of 15 minutes warpping a track to get it in-sync? Traktor Pro, Virtual DJ, PCDJ...all handle beat matching effortlessly. I want to use live as a re-mix and production tool I love its midi capabilities and beat making. We own the whole setup...but why is it such a challenge?

Not sure what to do....Does anyone have a solid method to warpping and beatmatching that can help us use this software better?

thanks for anything...
Perfect Sounds

[outershpongolia]

you're right.. you load a song into M-Audio torq and it matches perfectly (if you use the auto sync).. why can't ableton detect this and make warp markers for you? Oh yeah it does. Auto Warp, and it DOESN't WORK!

[chaircrusher]

What I do:

1. Find a good unambiguous downbeat. Right click on it, and select 'set 1.1.1 here' It doesn't have to be the beginning of the song.
2. Right click and set 'warp from here (straight)' which removes all of the automatic warp markers.
3. Turn on loop. Set loop region to one bar starting at 1.1.1
4. Listen to the one bar loop, to see if it sounds like it's looping right. Usually Live is pretty good about guessing tempo.
5. Use the right arrow to move the loop to 2.1.1. Zoom in on the start of the loop and drag the nearest transient marker to 2.1.1
6. Advance loop to 3.1.1, and double loop length with up arrow. If downbeat is a little off, drag the downbeat transient to 3.1.1
7. Advance with left arrow, to put you at 5.1.1 -- again check the downbeat, drag to 5.1.1 if necessary.
8. After that, I just skip the loop forward to 17.1.1, and align the downbeat again if necessary. Repeatedly I push the loop region forward and check for the alignement of the downbeat.

In general, modern computer-produced tracks will not need any warp markers after 1.1.1 -- you just find the tempo and it's aligned, pretty much. There are exceptions -- sometimes people do sloppy digital edits, or slave clock to a jittery source -- like a TR909. But you should double click to set warp markers only in cases where there are tempo fluctuations.

If you're dealing with a song using a live drummer, then you pretty much have to go through, and align every other downbeat -- or even every downbeat -- and double click it to set a warp marker. It pays to listen to the track with the metronome on -- even if there are tempo fluctuations measure to measure, you can see fluctuations you really can't hear, and it's sufficient to pin the downbeat every 4 or even 8 measures. The fewer warp markers you drop the more natural the track will sound.

The general method, then is really to only look at corrections in the largest possible intervals. And once you get 1.1.1 set and it looks like you're pretty tight on the downbeats 16 or 32 bars later after dragging a few downbeats to measure boundaries, you can click on any downbeat and choose 'warp from here' and let Ableton try again.

The thing is, the automatic warping, even in Live 8 just isn't able to cope with arbitrary input. But if you choose a good solid downbeat, and get things pretty much on tempo using the technique above, using 'warp from here' can work pretty well.

Oh, and at step #1, I said to set 1.1.1 to any good unambiguous downbeat. Once you have the track warped forward from there you can drag the 'track start' flag back BEFORE 1.1.1 to your desired starting place. If the intro doesn't seem to be aligned properly to the beat, go out near the end of the track and pin a warp marker. Then you can go back into the intro and pin the downbeats. If you don't have any warp markers set after 1.1.1, dragging the transients around before 1.1.1 will louse up the tempo.

There's no track that can't be warped, if you're patient enough and have a good ear/eye for where the beats fall in the waveform. On the other hand some tracks -- "Don Quixote" by Magazine 60 comes to mind -- have scary shit in them. That track has a 2 beat bar stuck in with what sounds like a super-sloppy tape edit, so you are pretty much screwed. I ended up putting it in the arrangement view, chopping it before and after the 2 beat measure, and dragging the rest of the track 2 beats forward to the downbeat. Then I duplicated the 2 beat measure to fill the hole.

Stick with it though, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to get things syncing up perfectly!

[chaircrusher]

you're right.. you load a song into M-Audio torq and it matches perfectly (if you use the auto sync).. why can't ableton detect this and make warp markers for you? Oh yeah it does. Auto Warp, and it DOESN't WORK!

Umm... it can work very well for the right program material; but if there are no clear transients, or complex beats, or no steady tempo, Live can kinda miss the boat. But with a little help -- see my other reply in this thread -- it can do all right.

I don't think that Torq is any better than Live at this -- every DJ app I've ever used has problems once you move away from simple house and techno. Live does OK but often needs some human intervention, to find the first beat of tracks. And you can always nuke the markers Live puts in and do it yourself. It's just not that hard. I've done hundreds of tracks in both Live 7 and Live 8. Some tracks are harder than other, but most can be done in less time than it takes to play them through.

Tempo detection and correction is a fundamentally difficult computational task. As a human being you can hear where the beats go even if the drums drop out, or if the drummer skips playing on a beat, or if there are no big transients to mark them. The computer has transient analysis and a few other heuristic tricks, but it just doesn't have a human sense of rhythm. You can confuse it with audio material that every 4 year old can clap in time to.

So don't blame Ableton on this one. No one has gotten it 100% right yet.

[adventurepants_]

TBH I think youd be better off using Torq, or Traktor. I find both those programs better if you just want to do Vinyl style set mixing, and Live much better as a DAW, or for LivePA type performance. The fact that you cant see more than one waveform at once in session view in Live spells out its main aim very clearly for me.

Im not saying Live isnt an excellent live performance tool, but youd have to change your style quite considerably to get to the good stuff, and there is more preparation required beforehand than just throwing a new track into the set and beatmatching it in.

[SubFunk]

The thing with live is that it has never ever been 'designed' for DJ-ing, someone once explored that there is a way to 'dj' with it, however. the word was spread around and then ableton implemented that in their marketing but never into the product itself (adjusting all the necessary things for better DJ possibilities)

[cacti]

The thing with live is that it has never ever been 'designed' for DJ-ing, someone once explored that there is a way to 'dj' with it, however. the word was spread around and then ableton implemented that in their marketing but never into the product itself (adjusting all the necessary things for better DJ possibilities)

why would they have and A and B selection and a cross fader if it wasn't at least a little meant for DJing?

[UnCL0NED]

Why do you think Ableton has a collaboration thing going on with Serato!
... When is that coming out, anyway?

[anachroschism]

Ive found that any problem i come across in Live is my fault, not its.

Cant say i wouldnt enjoy better beatmatching, but its good how it is and im doing way more than matching 2 files, so the extra time is well worth it tradeoff.

[djod]

The thing with live is that it has never ever been 'designed' for DJ-ing, someone once explored that there is a way to 'dj' with it, however. the word was spread around and then ableton implemented that in their marketing but never into the product itself (adjusting all the necessary things for better DJ possibilities)

why would they have and A and B selection and a cross fader if it wasn't at least a little meant for DJing?

Its a very nice feature if you have a multi-track livePA set going on doing some quick cross fades / breaks between selected "instrument/audio-tracks"
It has a different effect then muting, I use it with a the pitchbend stick of the novation remote, so it snaps to the middle when your done and your in the full mix again. At the left there are the beats to the right are the melody's etc. add some delays, filters and other send effect and you can have great fun!

So there it is that a nice why to use teh corssfader in a non dj manner.

[silveriofunk]

IMHO

i would run traktor and live if i really needed the djing without the warping nightmare and leave live to do all the things it is good at.

Unfortunately, for djs that play from disco to death metal and everything in between, live is NOT the best tool, because you have to be warping and unwarping songs and it is just not a particulary user friendly thing to do.

For those gigs i use traktor

for 4 on the floor or experimental gigs or when performing live my tracks i use ableton because it rocks at it!

so my friend, either wait for the serato collab (is that really true?) or keep on using your virtual dj alonside live.

peace

[SubFunk]

Ive found that any problem i come across in Live is my fault, not its.

Cant say i wouldnt enjoy better beatmatching, but its good how it is and im doing way more than matching 2 files, so the extra time is well worth it tradeoff.

fair enough, i only said live is not from ground off designed as a dj app, the xrossfader came later and is an extremely primitive function (super easy to implement) that applies to non dj use as well, but things like individuel nudge per track (actually the topic of the OP), visuality of more then one waveform at the time and being able to play a track immediately once it's dropped, to name but a few, are vital functions missing for dj-ing, playing with live is without doubt possible but leads to a hybrid between dj-ing and a live set. It's not 100% dj-ing as i look at it, but ableton is aware that is why they collab with serato, at least they claim, i am convinced they can do it all without serato as well, but that leads to another discussion.

In short all i say is that live oposed to other dj apps has not been designed for it and that you feel, from the start but they try to get there... that's all.

[AntzInYourPantz]

I'm an old school DJ too. I used vinyl but started in 1995 with the Pioneer CDJ-500.
Have been using Traktor for 3 years on the road and I use Ableton since version 6 now.

The main reason for moving from Traktor to Ableton was the beatgrid for "old or vinyl" songs.
Ableton was and still is the best program for this.

With 8 the system of beatmarking has somewhat changed but it has been improved. Big Time.
There are a lot of good tutorials on the web.

But the system couldn't be much simpler or more effective.
1 / Find the first down beat (zoom in!) / set 1.1.
2 / Warp from here (Or warp straight with "real" digital songs) (It is a suggestion to set the master tempo on the songs tempo)
3 / Use metronome or a loop to check the beatmatching
4 / adjust the markers (I usually check the last one first)

And this method has opened up my old record boxes!
Record boxes that where pretty hard to open up with CD's or other DJ s/w.
And now I can mix 3 songs ( including the "drunken drummer" ones )plus a loop at the same time!
And people come and ask what remix was that?

The system could be improved. Ableton has a hard time finding the first downbeat.
But after that it starts to become fun!

[cacti]

Deckadance is like traktor but you can use it in a host program like Ableton.

[SubFunk]

All true!

The OP asks why beatmatching is a pain, well because of missing nudge per track, i think the same.
Of course you can prepare tracks in live to 'mix' but for me and apparently the OP that has nothing to do with DJ-ing, but i guess that goes into a phylosophical disscussion not into a technical. i shut up now.