I’ve you’ve been digging in and trying out the tempo change macro, you may have bumped into the problem of getting the tempo exactly right. In other words, you may find that instead of the tempo landing at 95bpm, it ends up at 95.31.
From a strict tempo perspective, this isn’t usually a huge deal. The problem is more one of sound quality – remember that Live’s basic warp modes are all completely neutral at original tempo, and there are some cases where even a change of .3bpm causes sound quality problems. Therefore, there are some situations where you really want to land on the exact bpm.
The problem is one of simple mathematics – the clip envelope is a standard MIDI CC with a range of 0-127, therefore if you’re moving across any range of tempos that doesn’t divide 127 evenly (or is a multiple of it), you’re going to end up with fractional values.
If you give your tempo a range of 63.5bpm, say 80 to 143.5…
…then each step in the envelope is .5 bpm. To change the tempo from 80 to 82bpm, you would create an envelope from 0 to 4.
If steps of .5bpm aren’t gradual enough for what you’re trying to accomplish, limiting the tempo range to 32.25 bpm will result in each step being .25bpm, etc.
The obvious problem here is the limitation being put on the tempo range of a set. What if you want to go from 65 to 140?
We’ll do one more tip on this tempo change business, and I’ll show you just how deep this rabbit hole goes.
