Today I'm going to show you how to warp vocals in Ableton Live.
Hey, it's Will from EDM Tips, where every week I give you music production tips to seriously up
your electronic dance music production game! Today we are going to be warping vocals in Ableton Live.
So, why might you want to warp vocals? Well, if you've taken in vocals from another track and
they're in a different tempo, you'll want to get that synced to the tempo of your track or
if you've got vocals that are in a different key and they sound wrong, you obviously want to tune
them to your track as well. Well, today I'm going to show you how to do both of those things and,
without further ado, let's hop into the DAW and get it done. Oh, and if you want to learn
how to mix absolutely badass vocals, then click the link on this video, wherever it is, and I'll
show you how to get your vocal sounding truly professional. Okay, let's do it! First thing I'm
going to show you is how to get your vocals in time with the track that you're working on,
and then we're going to go on to the tuning thing afterwards. So, if you look here we've
got... Just imagine this track here is all of our different tracks that we're working on, I've just
composed them into one file to make things easier. So, we've got this and it's at 126 bpm,
and we want to get some vocals that match with that. Now, the vocals that we've got are in the same
key, this key happens to be in B flat minor. And I've just loaded these in from Splice but you can
see here in the title, it actually says that it's 140 bpm. This makes things easier for us because
if we already know the bpm of the vocals and the bpm of our track, it's much simpler.
So, let's listen to them together and we'll just hear what it sounds like before doing anything.
So, we can hear they're in tune but they're not in the right time. You'll notice I unwarped this.
It's because I've got Ableton set up to warp long samples automatically in my
preferences but, if that's the case, you have to unwarp it and then as simple as
clicking warp, again then writing in the correct tempo of the vocal that you've brought in, which
in this case is 140 bpm, choosing Complex Pro because it's the nicest, uh, smoothest algorithm
in Ableton for warping vocals, and now we're all in time, lovely.
But sometimes you'll see that the vocal won't start exactly where you want it to, so then
it's a simple case of dragging back the clip to where you want the first transient to be, like so,
Perfectly in time!
Now, the other way you can pull that back into time is to do it within the clip itself, and that can
be useful for the next thing I'm going to show you, which is how to adjust certain parts of the vocals,
if you just want one syllable moved or something like that. So, if we go into the clip itself, zoom in
here, we can just adjust the beginning marker here, and you'll see it drags the vocal back. So, again, we
can hold command and that's going to give us a bit more control, so it's not stuck to the grid.
Okay, so I'm going to pull it a bit further.
That sounds in time to me. And if you want the beginning part of the vocal before
the first transient, you can just pull that clip and back.
Now, once you pull that back into place, if you right click on where you've moved the
beginning of the clip to start playing, right click and then set 1-1-1 here. And this is
because now, if you pull back the beginning of the clip, so you can hear that first transient,
when we want to start pulling stuff into time, you can see it's all lined up pretty much to
the grid, which is exactly what we want. If we hadn't set 1-1-1 to be in that new place,
then it would be harder to do what we're about to do next. So,
let's see if we find something that's slightly out of time how can we tweak that.
So, I want that to be a bit tighter. You can see here the transients aren't quite hitting
on the grid, so the way you do that is roll over this transient marker here,
hold command (I think you hold probably Control if you're using Windows),
and then if you double click on that, you'll ... Well, if you roll over it and hold command, you'll notice
these two grey ones popping up the transients either side of it. So, now, if we double click,
we've now made them into proper warp markers, and we can just drag that back to be on the
grid... And with this one as well we'll do the same thing: drag that to me back on the grid, this one
we can drag slightly right to be on the grid, and now this vocal is going to be perfectly in time.
Perfectly in time! And it's as simple as that! Just make sure that you are creating a warp
marker either side of the vocal that you want to move, like that, otherwise if you don't then you'll
see all of the vocals will move and you'll screw everything up. Okay, on to the next part, which is
if you have got a vocal, which is in a different key, what do you do then? So, let's try that. Now,
the key here, no pun intended, is that you have a vocal that's in the same quality of key. Now, what
does that mean? If your track is written in a major key, if you pull in a vocal in a minor key, and you
want to make that match your track, it's going to be really hard and really messy, so it's best to
match like for like. This track, for instance, as we've already discussed is in the key of B flat
minor but if we've got a vocal in a completely different minor key, we can still make it work.
So, let's just get another vocal. We are going to do this in
E minor. Just find a random vocal. I'm using Splice, which you can grab below this video.
Okay, we're going to use that, so we'll just download it, drag it into our track. First, we're
going to set the tempo to be correct as we've already discussed, so we can see here it's 120 bpm.
So, I'm going to unwarp that, re-warp it, press 120 bpm in there, and now it's perfectly in time but
if you listen it's now out of tune because this is in the key of E minor and our track's in the key of B flat minor.
Okay, well, that's very unpleasant. So, this is how you do it. If you look on
a keyboard, so I'm just going to open up a piano roll editor to show you, E is here on the keyboard
so that's where the scale of E minor starts from. Now, our track is in B minor natural, which is here.
So, all we need to do is count up in semitones to where our key is. So, this is E, which is where the
vocals are recorded. Go one, two, three, four, five, six up to B flat or A sharp, which is the same thing.
So, if we know it's six semitones up - one, two, three, four, five, six - all we need to do is
go into our vocals, make sure that we've got Complex Pro selected,
then up it by six semitones, and now it's going to be perfectly in key with our track.
Now, if going up makes it too high, you can also count down,
to whichever note that your key is in. So, if we count down,
we start at E, which is where the vocals were. One, two, three, four, five, six... Oh, and it's six down
to B flat or A sharp as well, so either way you're either going up six or down six in this
example.
And you can actually play with the formants as well, which can change the sound. Sounds pretty cool,
but i think going up sounds better.
Okay, so what if you don't know the tempo of the vocals that you're working with?
This is where things get a bit trickier but this is how you do it. So, we're in some more
vocals. We'll bring them in in the correct key just to make things easier. Okay, so let's just
pretend that we don't know what tempo these vocals are. I mean we do because we can see
it's that it's got it written in Splice but let's just pretend we don't.
Right, so what do you do in that instance? Well, what I suggest doing is first turning off your music,
so you've just got the vocal, finding the first transient of that vocal, which would be that "way",
and, again, just shifting over so that's the first part of the clip.
We can work out what that tempo is. Now, this is where
you just change the tempo in Ableton, put the metronome on so we can hear it,
and then just find the right tempo by starting it and stopping it and listening to it,
like you're mixing two tracks like a dj. You can also
use this as a visual cue. So, I can see here that now this looks pretty much in tempo.
So, I know this is in about 100 bpm. So, once you've worked out what bpm that your vocals are, again,
you can just press warp, choose the right algorithm, make sure you write in the right bpm, which is 100,
and then you can go back to the tempo of your track, which was 126,
that's what we were writing it in, and now it's going to be the right tempo.
And then you can shift it round to the best place to start those vocals. So, I think it would be here.
Yeah, and then let's drag it back so we've got the pre transients.
And there you have it, guys, that's how you walk vocals in Ableton, how you tweak them to your needs,
how you match them to the right key and the right tempo. If you want to know how to mix vocals like a
professional click on the video that's popping up around the place right now, I'll show you
exactly how to do that, every step of the process to mix really full sounding, professional sounding
vocals. And if you want to download my mixing guide for free, you can do so below this video.
So, I hope you enjoyed that, guys, let me know in the comments if you're going to use this
technique and let me know what you want me to cover on this channel this Friday. We are going
to be doing a huge in the style of video, as I like to do each Friday. So, please don't forget to
subscribe to the channel if you haven't already, and hit that notification bell to make sure
that you never miss a video. Thanks for watching and until next time, cheers and happy producing!