Ableton Forum

Hello All,

I'm in the process of working up the skils and nerve to take live out on the road and DJ at some partys. I'm Currently Using a G5 Powermac w/ a M-Audio 410 (i keep hearing this is a problematic interface, but I've had no bugs at all), w/ an Alesis Photon x25 as my controller.

But thats all backstory. I have 2 questions relating to tempo changing.

1) During my sets, i periodically up the tempo to accomodate faster songs (maybe 1/2 bpm at a time). I usually do this by clicking in the Tempo Box on the top left of the window, and typing in the new tempo. Typically this works fine, except that more often then i'd like, i type a wrong number (or an extra one) and I end up with a tempo of 20.0 or 999.0--both of which tend to kill the vibe of the set, needless to say. I'm wondering if there are any tricks out there to more safely change the tempo. I always set up a knob on the Photon x25 to control the bpm, but the tempo always seems to jump in increments of at least 1.25 bpm. Ideally i'd love to make all my tempo changes w/ the knob, but I cant figure out a way to change the resolution of the knob. Anyone got any ideas?

2) I'm looking for a way to transition between different styles of music (lets say for argument's sake, from hip hop to house). Hip hop typically being in the 90s and house in the 120s in terms of beats per minute. If djing on Vinyl or CD decks, I might fade in a song with a no-beat intro, or bring in a song during a no-beat outro. However, to do this in live, It would seem that I have to unclick the warp for the new track to get it to play underneath the old track that was ending w/o it being sped up or slowed down as per the old track's tempo. I hope i'm making sense here. Essentially is there a way to adjust tempos for individual tracks w/o changing the global tempo? Or, is there a way to unclick the warp on the 2nd (new) track [which for argument's sake is 125 bpm) while the global tempo is at 95, then adjust the global tempo to 125 and reactivate warp in stride, w/o it sounding awful. I have a feeling I've just confused a lot of people, so I hope that some of you can make sense of this.

Sorry for the long-winded post. I appreciate any help or advice (or techniques) you can share.

Ethan

Hi,

To answer question #1, you should narrow the range of tempo that you are using. By default Live is set up to do 60bpm - 200bpm. In your case narrowing the range to say 85bpm to 130bpm would probably do the trick.

To change it:

1. Open live in Arragement view
2. The click the arrow to the left of "master" in the bottom most track.
3. In the drop down that says "none" change it to mixer
4. In the drop down that is enabled below, set it to "Song Tempo"
5. Change the range to what you want

You can now use the knob on your controller. Enjoy!

There may be an easier way, but this works.

MW

On question #2, I think you already answered your question. But just in case say you have three tracks a, b, c with b being the transition track. Play a through at 90 bpm till you want to bring track b in, start track b (with Warp turned off like you said). Wait for track a to finish. Bring the tempo up to 125 and then start track c.

Going from hip hop to house is likely to get you killed, but have fun!

vinkalmann,

Thats a great tip. It works fairly well. I'm curious to see if i can change those settings on the fly w/o any audible artifacts (I noticed a bit of a jump the first time i turned the knob after setting the tempo range on the master). Either way, its certainly a useful workaround. I still would love to change the resolution of the knob, but that might not be possible, or might be within the controller's menus. Regardless, thanks, thats a great tip.

e.

vinkalmann,

In regards to that second answer, I suppose i can seperate the intro from the main part of the track. I was hoping there might be a way to do it a bit more seamlessly, but I guess thats the breaks.

Oh yeah, hip hop to house might be a rough one. However i was thinking more in terms of dropping down to a grindy-er track out of a bouncier one--Ginuwine's "Pony" comes to mind as one i've been dieing to drop in a set, but there's not a whole lot of songs at 70 bpm in my arsenal that can get a party going like that one.

e.

I'm sure I read somewhere that in Live 4 there was a bug which prevented you from using a MIDI controller to set BPM's with decimal points. IE 165.25 or 176.75 etc.

It recommended setting the bpm range between 73 and 200 or equivalent so each of the 128 MIDI positions had a non decimal BPM value.

Has this been fixed in Live 5 ?

I'm using a different technique which great simplifies things, especially with tempo changes. Also, I find Live's crossfading curve very hard to use.

I basically don't crossfade, but simply cut from one track to the next. Obviously, the incoming track needs to start on a downbeat. Some tracks follow better than others, so it does take a bit of practice and skill.

I do still crossfade some tracks, but only using tracks with similar tempos, so when the incoming track is launched, the outgoing track's tempo doesn't change radically.

/gripe ON

This would be perfect for what I've been asking for for a long time over in Feature Wishlist - a formula controller, similar to the one found in FL Studio. If Live had one, you could easily limit the range of the project tempo by entering a mathematical formula. Easy.

/gripe OFF

A few suggestions.

If you can program your controller to do this, limit the midi values. Instead of the regular sweep of 0-127, try 30-100… or something like that. I may be talking out my ass here… just a thought.

An easier way would would be for you to click on the tempo field, and instead of typing the numbers in, use the up/down arrow keys to increase/decrease the tempo. Super Easy.