WARPING 101: TAP OR TYPE TEMPO

Before you actually get the warping process going, its a good idea to get Live’s master tempo set close to the tempo of the song you’re warping. Why? A couple of reasons. First off, when using Auto-Warp (which you may do later on) Live can use the current tempo as a hint. Second, when you […]

WARPING 101: ZOOM RIGHT

OK, this might seem obvious, but if you don’t have mad skills when it comes to zooming in/out of the waveform display (aka the Sample Editor), you’re going to have a hellish time warping audio. I’m making this observation because it’s one of the #1 things I’ve seen slow people down in Intro level classes. We’ve […]

WARPING 101: NAIL DOWN THE DOWNBEAT

There’s a way in which learning to warp is a little like learning to read music: you need to relate something you’re seeing to something you’re hearing. In the case of warping, you’re learning to identify important rhythmic elements in a waveform and aligning them with a tempo grid. Before you even turn the Warp […]

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 […]

MANY MINI SETS

I just can’t say enough positive about Live’s ability to export sets using drag and drop. My approach to live performance is to continually add material, so my sets have a tendency to get very large over time. The beauty of this is that your sets can get extremely dynamic as the material gets more […]

EXPAND THE MIXER

When finishing a track, I’m working almost entirely in the Arrangement view, but there’s one reason I regularly return to the Session view: to check levels in the mix. Float your mouse over the top boundary of the Session view’s Mixer section. It will turn into a splitter tool. Click and drag upwards to expand […]

DJ EQ: TAREKITH’S TAKE

So, today I downloaded Tarekith’s DJ racks. He’s been at this a good long while, and gives out all sorts of good information on the Ableton forums, but I had never checked out his racks. Well, lo and behold there is a DJ EQ in there, conceptually very similar to what I’ve been talking about […]

DJ EQ: ADDING KILL SWITCHES

Another modification I’ve made to my DJ EQ is high and low kill switches. Let’s take a look at how it’s done. To get started, name two macros Lo Kill and Hi Kill: …and setup an unused filter on both EQ 8 devices like this: The frequency is the same as the Filters 1 & […]

DJ EQ: LESS BOOSTY, DIFFERENT

OK, I’m gonna do it: show you a different way to do the same thing I did in the last tip. I know it might seem gratuitous, but I think it’s useful from a process perspective – the better you get about thinking through this sort of problem, the cooler stuff you’ll make. Also, this […]

DJ EQ: LESS BOOSTY

So, I’ve got a few more things on my mind about Analog that I want to share, but I’m interrupting that stream of consciousness to bring you the latest update to my DJ EQ. (You’ll definitely want to read those tips and get the basic EQ rack put together before digging into this one.) My […]