Ableton Forum

Hi, so I was trying to create a remix. I brought in vocal clips and then I brought in some drum clips from ableton. When I played them together, they did not play at the same tempo like I thought they were automatically supposed to. What am I doing wrong? Is there any way to sync all clips together (audio and midi) other than warping the audio manually? Thank you

there is nothing magic or automatic. Auto warping will be very difficult with a vocal clip.

Auto-warp is always a starting point, never then ending point. You'll need to make adjustments manually to get things synched the way you want.

If you're interested I have a warping guide at www.vinkalmann.com.

What Live does is essentially like taking two chessgames and mix them on the same board at once... if the chessboards are different sizes, you can't just measure the distance in inches inbetween each chess piece ... instead you divide up the chessboards into 8x8 squares, decide which squares get which pieces, then its easy to move all the pieces from a large board over to a smaller board.

Your drumbeat is like a chessboard, its easy to decide where to split it into 8 equal pieces.

Live's "BPM" box is essentially where you define the "new chessbaord box size", so when you slice up a drumbeat and select a new size, Live does a good job of making one fit to the other.

Your vocal track, however, is more like a game of Candyland. Suddenly its not divided into equal squares... what's more, there might be some blank space on the edges of the board-- do you factor that blank area into your 8x8 cutout, or not? And the board is rectangular now... do you cut it into 8 equal rectangles, or maybe into 8x12 squares? Live will just assume SQUARES WITH NO EXTRA SPACE... even though dividing into rectangles and ignoring the white border would have been the best solution.


If you know the bpm the vocals were recorded in, then type that number into Live's BPM setting up in the upper right of the screen.
Otherwsie, you will have to become friends with setting warp markers manually.

^^ Nice analogy!

Vocal are hard to warp, since they don't necessarily start on a beat. Easiest is probably to listen to the original song and try to figure out how a vocal part lines upp with the beat, or at leat to figure out the original tempo. You could also try to listen to accented syllables and try to line up those.