Ableton Forum

hi, i'd like to use ableton mainly to produce studio mixes of electronic music. i wondered if ableton does any kind of automatic beatmatching/crossfading smilar to what can be achieved with MixMeister?

can you drag all the tracks you want to mix into place and set volume fade markers so the application will automatically mix between tracks or does all this have to be done on the fly?

thanks

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quick question...can the crossfader manipulation be ecorded in the arrangement view and manually manipulated afterwards?

say you mess up a crossfade and dont want to record the whole process again?

maximum01 wrote:quick question...can the crossfader manipulation be ecorded in the arrangement view and manually manipulated afterwards?

say you mess up a crossfade and dont want to record the whole process again?

Yes, you can create your own automation, record it on the fly, and edit it in whatever way you want during or after the fact.

Ableton is the best tool on the market for this job.

First, learn all about warping. When I import tracks and set up the beat grid, I always do it up against the metronome, to make sure it sounds tight, as well as looks like it on the display. If importing from CD, you can usually just set beat 1, then fine tune the bmp. If you've sampled in from vinyl, you'll probably have to set warp markers every 32/64 bars to keep things tight. Depends on how stable your decks are.

I would recommend using 3 audio tracks in the arrangement view, with the first 2 representing your 2 decks and a third to overlay additional samples.

some further tips.

set up a high pass and a low pass filter on each track, automate them - it's fun.

set up interesting delay lines on the FX sends, then draw in short spikes into the FX send automation on tracks to echo off small fragments of tune/vox/samples.

here's a great lazymans tip for using DBlue glitch (best free plugin in existence) leave it on random, and set it at 0%. Whenever you want a weird break, turn glitch up to 100% for that bar/segment. If you don't like what comes out, change the seed value for that bar. repeat until it does something that sounds great.

I have a tutorial on the way filled with more tips and tricks, but in the meantime, if you'd like to hear some results surf to:

http://www.chelfyn.com/Psychelfyn_1_Astral_Raveling.mp3
http://www.chelfyn.com/Psychelfyn_2_Show_Dont_Tell.mp3
http://www.chelfyn.com/Psychelfyn_3_Dream_It_Up.mp3

All of these are psytrance/breaksy/harddancey mixes done in ableton, with liberal over-use of long voice samples from films. Ableton makes it easy to pitch match everything, and also to make the voice samples time out perfectly over long breakdowns.