Ableton allows you to incorporate sections of any track you want to use in your composition. To do this you make your selection into a loop and then load it into Ableton. You then have to get it in tune and in time with other selections you make. For instance, I have found a nice piano intro which is relatively slow but which sets a mellow pace/base for my piece. Later, I will look for drum clips and other instruments and I will have to slow them down to make them fit along with the original tempo.
First of all I need drag and drop the piano sample into an audio track, double click to make the wave form show up in the clip view and find where it stops and starts to make it loop correctly.
You can see where the markers have to go on the wave form by the yellow line. The 1st flag, is placed on the first beat and by counting the beats you can find beat two and place flag two by clicking on it which turns it yellow. This needs to be done in the whole loop to bring the whole thing into perfect time.
Then you can select the loop by dragging the loop handles along. (Grey double lines with end ‘flags’ at the top of the numbered selection)
You can change the warp mode from beats to textures, which I needed to do for the piano sample or -2 (faster) x2 (slower) and you can also change the grain size to alter the way the stretching sounds though I didn’t need to on this particular clip.
February 10, 2008 at 12:23 am |
A clear and concise introduction to how you have used warping. As usual your work is well described and you have got to grips with many of the technical issues such as finding the “one”, fixing warp markers, and the use of different Warp Modes. It also helps that you have referred to a specific example from your project.
On the whole, the post needs very little improvement, but you could address the following areas (especially the first):
- Why did you need to change from Beats to Texture mode – what benefit did this give?
- Where you say “This needs to be done in the whole loop to bring the whole thing into perfect time.” it may be worth mentioning that it is not always neccessary to warp each individual beat, especially if the original loop was made using a computer. In this case you can set one marker at the very start (i.e. bar one), then one for (i.e. bar two) and the whole thing should fall into time.