[MUSIC]
One of the main reasons people gravitate towards live,
is because this flexibility that we can have with audio.
So what we're going to be doing is referred to as warping audio.
What we have to do, is basically give
the software some information about this audio file,
which will allow us to change its time and its pitch independently of each other.
So there was a time when pitch and time were married.
When people were matching records together and say,
if you're a DJ and you have one record that's at one BPM,
and then another that a slightly different BPM,
you're either going to have to slow down or speed up one of them,
so that they begin to match.
Through that process, you're also either raising the pitch or lowering the pitch.
As you speed something up, the pitch raises,
and as you slow something down, the pitch lowers.
So with digital tools like live and warping,
we're able to do those things completely independently.
So we can completely change the tempo of
something without changing its pitch, whatsoever.
Conversely, we can very dramatically change
the pitch without actually changing the timing of the file.
Really powerful and it's really fun,
and it's very, very creative as well.
So here in this new audio track,
I have a Breakbeats.
I'm just going to play this,
so you can hear it.
[MUSIC] So as this is happening,
I'm also going to launch this High Hat pattern,
and it should feel dramatically off from each other.
[MUSIC] That's because this Breakbeat file isn't warped yet.
We haven't set it to a grid,
so we can't really stretch,
or compress, or do anything to this file until we go ahead and warp it.
So let's begin that process here.
To start off with, we need to identify what the original tempo of this file is.
So this was recorded in the '60s or the '70s,
so they probably weren't playing to a metronome.
So it's going to have some natural human looseness to it,
but we can get really close.
So I'm going to press play here.
Then, as that's happening,
I'm going to start tapping out the tempo just by hovering over
this Tap icon here and tapping on my trackpad.
It's going to interpolate through all of these taps what
is the BPM of this file. So here I go.
[MUSIC]
It says I'm at 95.28,
so I'm just going to round down to 95, press Enter.
Now, I've identified the original tempo or the general tempo of this file.
Next thing I need to do is turn the warp function on.
So it's down here in the Sample properties box, just hit warp.
Then, immediately you see a grid pop-up.
So I'm going to turn the metronome on and press Play.
[MUSIC] Still very off.
So we need to give the software a little bit more information where are the downbeats,
where is beat 2, where is beat 3, so on and so forth.
So then we can do this manipulation with it.
Quickly, I'm going to turn the metronome off.
So the first order of business,
is to identify the first downbeat,
going to press play.
I have a strong suspicion that it's this first transients here.
[MUSIC] One, two, three,
four, one, two, three, four,
one, two, three, four.
So you can count it until you decide,
okay, this is the downbeat.
So I'm going to zoom in here.
So I used to work transients before,
so let's just talk about what that means.
As I zoom in, you can see there are
these tiny little white triangles above the peaks of the waveform.
If I hover over them,
I get this gray tab that becomes visible to me.
So what these are, are transient workers.
The transient is the definitive beginning of any sound.
So if it's a drum, it's a stick hitting the skin.
If it's a vocalist,
it's the beginning of a syllable coming out of their mouth.
These are extremely useful places to know where they are in this audio file,
because it saying here is what we think is a transient.
I also listened to with my ears and I know that this is the downbeat.
I'm going to place what is referred to as a warp marker.
I like to think of them as anchors,
saying I'm anchoring this in a very specific place.
So if I hover over it,
I'm getting this temporary warp marker.
If I double-click on it,
it turns yellow, and it becomes a permanent warp marker.
So I'm going to zoom out.
But according to this grid,
this downbeat is happening sometime after the second beat of measure 1,
but my ears and my brain tell me that it's actually the first beat of measure 1.
So while hovering over this permanent warp marker,
I'm going to right-click on my computer and I get this menu.
So this is what we are looking for.
We want to set 1.1.1 here,
meaning that I want to set measure 1,
beat 1, tick 1.
This is the beginning of this file, I choose this.
Then you can see the grid immediately moves over,
and now this is lined up.
So let's press Play with the metronome on again and see where we're at.
[MUSIC] So they're now starting at the same point,
but they're not synced up.
So we have to do a little bit more work here.
If I right-click on this again,
the menu will give me a number of options.
I can warp it from here, I can work from here,
starting at 95 BPM,
which is the tempo that I dictated.
I can do this straight.
There's a number of options when it comes to warping.
Each of these behaves a little bit differently.
But for the purposes of our course,
we're going to work from here,
starting at the temple that we have dictated.
So I'm going to select start at 95.5.
Here we go. Let's try again and see where we're at.
[MUSIC]
We're very, very close to being lined up.
I can see that the end of this file is moving into
the first half of bar 5 and I just want it to loop immediately.
So I'm going to take the stop markers,
move them over to the end of measure 4,
beginning of measure 5 here.
I'm going to turn loop on and move the start marker over here.
So when I play this,
I should get a four-bar loop that loops and is in time with the metronome.
[MUSIC]
We're very, very close now.
So initially, I had told you that this file
probably wasn't recorded to a metronome in the first place.
So me trying to superimpose a metronome on top of
it is getting really close, but it's not perfect.
So I'm going to just move some of these events that need a little bit more attention,
maybe some snares that are not hitting right on beat 2 and move them directly to beat 2.
So I know that it was measures 3 and 4,
so I'm going to zoom in here on measure 3.
So here's the snare,
here's the beginning of measure 3,
here's beat 1, and here's beat 2.
So you can see as I zoom in here,
this transient marker is not lined up with beat 2,
which is where it optimally should be.
So I'm going to create a permanent warp marker here.
So just watch me do this.
As I pull this around,
this entire file is moving,
which is not what I want.
I just want to move this one event.
So I just did Apple Z to undo what I just did.
So in order to make sure that only this moves,
I need to create anchors on either side.
So I'm going to create permanent warp markers on the nearest transients,
and then I'll grab this one.
You can see I'm now independently moving
this in between those other anchors that I've created.
Let's go ahead and do that in a few other places here.
I keep this one,
moving beat 4 of measure 3.
So what I'm seeing is that a lot of these are just slightly delayed.
So perhaps if I grab this one and move it all over,
that we're lined up a bit more.
It looks like that is the case.
So this is slightly more of a surgical way
to get into warping and make sure everything's lined up.
Some files will be very easy to warp and others will be more challenging,
will be a little bit more attention depending on where they came from.
So let's listen one more time, and hear what's going on.
[MUSIC]
I'm feeling really good about that.
So I could go further.
I could do more, I could do less.
It's really up to you, just follow your ears there.
Let's move back over to the sample property box here and talk about warping algorithms.
So if I click on this icon here,
I get a drop-down menu that's giving me a number of options.
So the algorithm is how live analyses and processes this file.
Not all the files are the same,
so there's a number of warping algorithms.
Percussive files are dealt in one way.
Textural files, like chords or guitar accompaniment would be processed in another way.
So in order for Ableton do it's very best job at warping and processing your audio,
you need to identify the proper algorithm for your file.
So you can see I have a number of options.
I have Beats, Tones,
Textures, Re-pitch, Complex, and Complex Pro.
Beats would be for a rhythmic file,
and this is not just restricted to drums.
Let's say you have some very percussive singing or scattering,
or beat boxing, you're going to want to choose
beats regardless of the fact that it's coming out of somebody's mouth.
Tone is going to be for
a monophonic file or something that's just having one note play at a time,
perhaps this is like a saxophone,
or really anything that's just one note playing.
Textures is going to be for polyphony,
which is more than one note playing at a single time.
So cord accompaniments, pads,
something that has a little bit more going on.
Re-pitch is going to remarry pitch and time.
So as we adjust pitch,
time will also be adjusted.
Then, we have complex and complex pro.
These are for files that maybe aren't just so straightforward.
There are a little bit more taxing on your CPU,
and Pro is the more taxing of the two.
But really, they're just variations of the same thing.
So sometimes you can just switch between the two,
and see which one sounds better.
That's really what matters,
is what sounds the best.
So I could go through and choose beats,
give it a listen.
If it's not really up to snuff,
I can always try complex or perhaps some of these other algorithms.
There's much more under the surface that we're not addressing right now,
which I really encourage you to investigate.
Because warping can be as super creative process as well, if you want it to be.
So now, I've set this to beats and I've got all
of my audio warped and snapped to the grid,
and it's playing in time.
So let's add some chords to some of
these audio ideas and just make sure that we're all lined up.
[MUSIC]
Feeling really good about this.
So before I move on,
I just want to show you a really creative approach to messing with warping.
So I'm just nailing down these downbeats,
and I'm actually going to remove the other warp markers.
So now, I only have them on the beginning of measures 1,
2, 3, and 4.
So I'm going to add the one before here,
and then just pull back.
So that I've smashed all of the audio into the beginning part of this measure,
and then it's going to sound very odd and digitized as well.
But this would be a creative application of the tool.
[MUSIC]
So it's strange,
but it's actually really cool.
Don't think of this as a utility purpose,
it absolutely can be,
but it can also be very, very creative.
Now you have the basic fundamental tools of how to work in Ableton.
You need to identify the original BPM of the file.
You need to pin certain places,
like a downbeat to a grid.
Truncate the file, so that it's matching a certain amount of measures,
and then, you're off to the races.
From here, we can do a lot like transposition.
I'm going to now transpose this file down,
[MUSIC] transpose it up,
[MUSIC] and we're staying right in time there.
[MUSIC]