START IN THE ARRANGEMENT VIEW`

Today I’m working on a couple of remixes so I’m dealing with a bunch of stems (individual parts from another song). Since these files are each the full length of the song, getting them ready to work with in Live requires a different approach then starting off with loops – namely, starting off in the […]

TRANSIENT ENVELOPE: WICKED GATE

One of my favorite features introduced in Live 8 has been the revamped warp engine, and the introduction of Transients mode for warping Beats. This mode has some great creative potential, so it’s well worth taking some time to understand and explore it. Live used to always use a straight division of the beat to […]

TRANSIENT LOOP MODE: WICKED GLITCHA

Hopefully yesterday’s tip inspired you to experiment a bit with the Transient Envelope. Today we’ll take it a little further by digging into the Transient Loop Modes. With some material, switching between the various Transient Loop Modes may not seem to have much effect. In particular, when you play a drum loop back at it’s […]

PITCH UP TO GLITCH UP

So, now that I’ve gotten myself going on the transient loops and envelopes, I can’t stop myself…if you’re just tuning in, I’d suggest reading the last two days tips first. Yesterday I suggested that you slow down the playback of a loop in order to hear what the various Transient Loop Modes do, but in […]

AFTER THE GLITCH

So, you’ve gotten the Warp Engine to do some wacky stuff, but you’re now left with a loop that’s either at a tempo that’s completely wrong, or perhaps you’ve pitched the thing up so far that it now sounds like the percussion section for a munchkin opera. The trick here is to take your mangled […]

SELECTING THE RIGHT WARP MODE

People sometimes ask me what warp mode I use for warping entire songs. My answer: all of them. A little bit frustrating if you’re looking for an easy answer, but over time I’ve found it to be the only right one. The problem with answering this question is that there are, of course, many different […]

SELECTING THE RIGHT WARP MODE, pt 2

When you’re changing the tempo of a song and you need to keep the pitch the same, your best bet is to pick the warp mode on a case by case basis. If you’re going to be both slowing down and speeding up a song, make sure to listen to it faster and slower. In […]

UNWARPED TRANSITION CLIP

Live’s ability to match the tempo of all clips to the master tempo is obviously a wonderful thing that enables us to do all sorts of things that weren’t possible before. But conversely, it makes some things that are really simple with a traditional DJ setup slightly more complicated. I’m speaking here of big tempo […]

DROP THE WARP

Another way to make tempo jumps is to simply turn off the Warp switch on a clip that is currently playing back. For example, bars 89-105 in the song below are a perfect place to jump to a new tempo because the song drops down to an ambient interlude. So, when the song gets to […]

WARPING 101: TURN OFF AUTO WARP

Hey folks! There have been a number of requests for some warping tips. Well, here they be. First off, let me say that (like most things) there is no one “right way” to warp your audio files. There are different methods, many good ones, and the best one is usually determined by the type of […]