Ableton Forum

I have some questions about warping.

I'm trying to put a DJ set of songs together. However, most of the time, when Ableton auto warps the song, it's all over the place and the songs skips and generally sounds like crap even when I set the tempo to it original. Is there a way I can manually correct the warp points in a song quickly easily? It's put warp point right throughout the songs.

The other question is in regards to tempo relativity. When I drag a clip in Ableton, it always plays a lot faster than the original by default. But, when look at the clip, it is saying that the song is at like 160bpm which is ridiculous because all the songs I've loaded are downtempo tunes. Do I just have to work out what the tempo should be by listening to it?

Any general tips would be great. I'm going to do a four set tomorrow night at a friend's place and I've never DJ'd before in my life let alone in Ableton. I've got to get about 50 songs in Ableton and warped well enough to not sound like crap.

1. Try setting your global tempo to around 80. Then Live will warp, looking to keep the most natural relative tempo to your original material.

2. Less markers is more. Especially with downtempo. You want to preserve the interactions between percussive elements that have been given so much breathing room. Imagine telephone lines. And warp markers being telephone poles. The more poles you add to the equation, the more jumbly the lines will appear. Soon they are zig zagging all over the place. You want smooth graceful lines strung through those beats. I tend to hit ctrl+a (select all), delete. Deletes all markers except the first. Live should still have a general attempted tempo. Next, listen. Let it play until you've discerned a clearly markable downbeat. The transient markers help a little. Make a marker there, right-click and make 1.1.1 there. Then warp the rest of the track with maybe 6 more markers. You may require less, or more. But that is a decent number. Lastly, play with the clip's start and end times. Or loop if necessary

3. The choppiness could also be due to the warp mode you've selected. If in beats mode, I personally am not a fan of Transient mode. Many people like the RePitch mode (acts like vinyl in relation to tempo), many others prefer complex pro .

Best of luck!

Thanks for the tips! That makes sense.

Yeah I was using beats last night and it was all over the place. When I switched to Complex, it was a lot better. What's the difference between Complex and Complex Pro?

Everything went smoothly last night. The tip was to go to the preferences and switch the warping to "Complex". It worked well, but I wanted to try "Complex Pro". The problem is that when you switch the samples to "Complex Pro", it doesn't re-analyse the file; it just gives you a couple of extra options. What is the realy significance on Complex Pro as opposed to Complex?

Anyway, all in all I think Ableton is OK for DJ'ing with the exception of a few things. There's probably 3 things they could add to make it more user friendly (perhaps some stuff can already be done)

1) You can't view both playing samples at once. You have to flick between them. This is very annoying and you can't see the BPM for the second track while looking at the first track.

2) Cueing a spot in a sample. I don't this is possible. I wanted to preset a spot in the sample to start from so that when I start the cross-fade I could start the clip with the APC40 and it would start at the right place. It doesn't look like this is possible.

3) There's no macro view of the different sample BPMs. This is really essential to working out how a set should run.

I think I'll probably post this somewhere else but the basic point is that Ableton will DJ ok. But, it's not a real DJ tool. Something like Traktor would have been a lot better for what I was trying to achieve I think. I might paste this thread somewhere else in future.

You can always put the bpm in the name of the clip, but everything ends up playing at the speed of the master tempo anyway.

To cue a spot, learn how to use the 'start' and 'end' points in clip properties. Then hit 'save'

To cue a spot, learn how to use the 'start' and 'end' points in clip properties. Then hit 'save'

Yes. I suppose that would have done it. It's funny the things you don't think of when you're working a different mode than normal. Thanks.

You can always put the bpm in the name of the clip

What I mean is that it would be good if Ableton had a tool where you could line up all your clips and it would show you the BMP of all the clips at a macro level. This is standard DJ'ing functionality. That way you can rearrange your clips to best suite the BPMS of the songs you are going to mix.

Kruddler wrote: I think I'll probably post this somewhere else but the basic point is that Ableton will DJ ok. But, it's not a real DJ tool. Something like Traktor would have been a lot better for what I was trying to achieve I think. I might paste this thread somewhere else in future.

I use Beat. Set marker on first set as 1.1 warp from straight. I usually put a warp marker anytime there is a veriation at least for the first 33. Then i set a marker in the middle of the track just to make sure the track stays on point through out the whole track. Then i set markers to represent the count out like this.

Ableton is great for DJ'ing/mixing. It's just a completely different beast a completely different world. Especially compared to the classic method I.e. Vinyl, CDs, Tracktor etc.etc. It's actually taken me quit some time to break myself of the old DJ'ing habits that i've developed over the last 15 years of DJ'ing. It takes time to adapt to these change. At times it even seams boring. You just have to get around the old mind set of beat matching via.. pitch slider, platter, cue in, cue out. Even all that wasted time you had to spend monitoring is now gone. You now get to spend that time on true inspiration and creations. A lot of people mostly closed minded ones think Ableton is "easy or cheating". Truth is...anyone can learn to match a beat that's a fact, but no body can copy your imagination. You really can't compare Ableton to the old method.