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: 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: 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: SET THE ONE
Once you’ve followed the previous few steps, it’s time to turn on the Warp switch. In most cases, your clip will now look something like this: We could just jump to the step where we focus on tempo and set the grid & warp markers, but that would be jumping ahead. First, we need to […]
WARPING 101: WHAT’S WARPING ANYWAY?
If you’ve followed all the steps up until this point, you’re now ready to actually get down to warping. You’ll notice that I’ve placed quite a few steps before getting into warp markers or transients or anything that people think of as actual warping technology. That’s because, for many types of music, that’s the easy […]
WARPING 101: THE PLIGHT OF THE ALMOST WARPED
It probably seems like I’m never going to get to the part where we do the actual warping. Well, this tip is no exception. One more piece of background info. It’s all worthwhile. Promise. Once you’ve tapped the tempo, turned on the Warp switch, and placed the one, you’ll probably have something that looks like […]
WARPING 101: USING AUTO WARP
Up until this point, I’ve been presenting what amounts to a step-by-step method for preparing audio to be used in Live. Now we’ve reached a point where there are different paths you can follow depending on the type of material you’re working with, what you’re doing with it, and your own personal preference. As we […]
WARPING 101: BASIC MANUAL WARPING
Let’s look at basic manual warping for the track we’ve been looking at so far. As you’ll recall, we could see the beat getting pretty out of line with the grid by the beginning of bar 4: Take a closer look at the end of bar 3. The grey markers above the waveform display are […]
WARPING 101: CHECK YOUR WORK BY EAR
Whether you use Auto Warp or one of the other techniques for getting your audio warped, the most important part of the process is knowing how to check your work. In my opinion, the most important method is…by ear. This involves listening to your newly warped audio with Live’s metronome turned on: To check by […]
WARPING 101: INTERMEDIATE MANUAL WARPING
Sometimes you’ll encounter a song which has a steady tempo with occasional tempo fluctuations. Songs like this require multiple warp markers. Once you’ve gotten the tempo close by tapping it in, you’ll need to drop a warp marker periodically to keep the song lined up with the beat time ruler. How many warp markers you’ll […]
