1. Set up Live’s session view.
2. Pick the tracks you’re going to play.
3. Time warp all the tracks.
2. Pick the tracks you’re going to play.
3. Time warp all the tracks.
Open up a new Live Set by going to File > New Live Set. Create three Audio tracks in the session view. To do this, delete the default Midi track by clicking on 2 Midi and hitting the delete key. Then, hit Cmd+T twice to add two new tracks. Also, let’s get rid of the Sends and Return tracks. On Live 5, you can do this by clicking the “S” and “R” buttons on the very right. One that’s done, your Session View should look like this:
2. Pick the Tracks
Perhaps the most important job of the DJ is playing good music! That’s where it all started, anyway. Just like spinning on turntables, DJing with Live requires that you pick a bunch of music that you’re going to play. For a two and a half hour set, I will play about 45 tracks, plus a bunch of short samples to throw in the mix.
From your Finder window, drag each of the three tracks onto the first line of each track. When you drag the file, you will see a progress indicator on each track as Live analyses the clip and tries to auto-warp it.
Once Live finishes its sample analysis, your Session View should look like this:
Now we’re ready to get these things warped.
3. Time Warp the Samples (Beat match readying)
The next most important thing about mixing music is making sure that you can mix one track into another without it sounding like nails on a chalkboard.
When you import an audio file, whether it’s one second or one hour long, Live treats it as a sample. Samples can be manipulated in all sorts of ways, including (luckily for us) time-warping to match up the beats of your song with the tempo you set in the upper-left corner of Live. This way, no matter what BPM you’re using, the sample will be in time. When you do this warping on all the tracks you’re going to use, you can essentially start any sample at any time and it will always be beat-matched properly.
Let’s go through this process on our first track, & Down. Double click on the sample to bring up the sample analysis view at the bottom.
Sometimes, Live does a brilliant job and time-warps your track for you. You can import a file, hit play, and drink champagne. But sometimes, Live just messes it all up completely, and you get something that looks like this:
In this example, Live has somehow determined that the song starts at about 3:40, and there are four tempo changes. When this happens, I delete it all and start over. I click on the green 1 marker, and hit delete a bunch until all the other markers are deleted, too. That gives us this, which is actually a little more messed up:
From that point, I drag the 1 marker all the way to the left, and then drag the End marker back to the right. Now we have a slightly more logical starting point
Now we need to time-warp the track. Where I start is by zooming in on the first five seconds or so, and aligning the 1 marker (and Start marker) with the first beat of the song.
After we do so, we get this:
So far, all we’ve done is told Live where we want the track to start when we hit play on the sample. Odds are, it’s not actually time-warped at all.
To test this out, set the tempo that you want to use for your mix in the top-left corner. Then, hit the metronome icon two icons to the right of the BPM indicator. This way, when you hit play, you’ll get a metronome count that you can use to beat-match your track.
You may find when you hit play on your track (once you’ve lined up the first beat), it may sound in-time for a couple seconds. But click on the sample in the analysis pane further down along the track, and you’ll probably find that you’ve come out of synch.
This is the most important part of the whole warping process. You need to ensure that your entire track is perfectly in-time. With most electronic songs, you can be pretty sure that the track was originally recorded at a steady beat and probably a whole number (ie. not 135.67 bpm, but 136).
There are a couple ways that I do this:
1. If Live has determined a fairly close BPM (in my case, 122.xx), I try the closest BPM (122) and see if it works.
2. If it doesn’t, I’ll move forward about 30 seconds and find an obvious beat that a marker should be at. In my case, I know that Marker 13 should probably be moved the left a little bit, like so:
To make that change, I just double-click on the 13 marker to activate it, and then drag it to the left.
After doing that, I hit play and listen. Sounds good!
The resulting BPM is 122.99.
3. So once I’ve figured that at least the first 25 seconds are pretty damn close to 122.99, I delete the marker I made at 13, and set the BPM of the entire track to 122.99 and give it a listen.
4. The track loses time a bit near the end, so I try the obvious BPM of 123 and whammy, I’ve got the track time-warped.
These steps may sound complicated because I’m not always too good with words, but once you practice warping a couple tracks like this, it will become second nature, and you’ll be able to figure out some tracks quicker than others.
Now that & Down is ready to go, I move on to track #2, Oh!. Upon inspection, it seems as though Live has properly guess the track’s BPM, but has put the start of the track in the wrong place:
This one is easy! Just drag the 1 marker to the start of the first beat, and you’re done.
Continue the process for your third track and so on.
Tutorial Aid: www.harvitronix.com
2. Pick the Tracks
Perhaps the most important job of the DJ is playing good music! That’s where it all started, anyway. Just like spinning on turntables, DJing with Live requires that you pick a bunch of music that you’re going to play. For a two and a half hour set, I will play about 45 tracks, plus a bunch of short samples to throw in the mix.
From your Finder window, drag each of the three tracks onto the first line of each track. When you drag the file, you will see a progress indicator on each track as Live analyses the clip and tries to auto-warp it.
Once Live finishes its sample analysis, your Session View should look like this:
Now we’re ready to get these things warped.
3. Time Warp the Samples (Beat match readying)
The next most important thing about mixing music is making sure that you can mix one track into another without it sounding like nails on a chalkboard.
When you import an audio file, whether it’s one second or one hour long, Live treats it as a sample. Samples can be manipulated in all sorts of ways, including (luckily for us) time-warping to match up the beats of your song with the tempo you set in the upper-left corner of Live. This way, no matter what BPM you’re using, the sample will be in time. When you do this warping on all the tracks you’re going to use, you can essentially start any sample at any time and it will always be beat-matched properly.
Let’s go through this process on our first track, & Down. Double click on the sample to bring up the sample analysis view at the bottom.
Sometimes, Live does a brilliant job and time-warps your track for you. You can import a file, hit play, and drink champagne. But sometimes, Live just messes it all up completely, and you get something that looks like this:
In this example, Live has somehow determined that the song starts at about 3:40, and there are four tempo changes. When this happens, I delete it all and start over. I click on the green 1 marker, and hit delete a bunch until all the other markers are deleted, too. That gives us this, which is actually a little more messed up:
From that point, I drag the 1 marker all the way to the left, and then drag the End marker back to the right. Now we have a slightly more logical starting point
Now we need to time-warp the track. Where I start is by zooming in on the first five seconds or so, and aligning the 1 marker (and Start marker) with the first beat of the song.
After we do so, we get this:
So far, all we’ve done is told Live where we want the track to start when we hit play on the sample. Odds are, it’s not actually time-warped at all.
To test this out, set the tempo that you want to use for your mix in the top-left corner. Then, hit the metronome icon two icons to the right of the BPM indicator. This way, when you hit play, you’ll get a metronome count that you can use to beat-match your track.
You may find when you hit play on your track (once you’ve lined up the first beat), it may sound in-time for a couple seconds. But click on the sample in the analysis pane further down along the track, and you’ll probably find that you’ve come out of synch.
This is the most important part of the whole warping process. You need to ensure that your entire track is perfectly in-time. With most electronic songs, you can be pretty sure that the track was originally recorded at a steady beat and probably a whole number (ie. not 135.67 bpm, but 136).
There are a couple ways that I do this:
1. If Live has determined a fairly close BPM (in my case, 122.xx), I try the closest BPM (122) and see if it works.
2. If it doesn’t, I’ll move forward about 30 seconds and find an obvious beat that a marker should be at. In my case, I know that Marker 13 should probably be moved the left a little bit, like so:
To make that change, I just double-click on the 13 marker to activate it, and then drag it to the left.
After doing that, I hit play and listen. Sounds good!
The resulting BPM is 122.99.
3. So once I’ve figured that at least the first 25 seconds are pretty damn close to 122.99, I delete the marker I made at 13, and set the BPM of the entire track to 122.99 and give it a listen.
4. The track loses time a bit near the end, so I try the obvious BPM of 123 and whammy, I’ve got the track time-warped.
These steps may sound complicated because I’m not always too good with words, but once you practice warping a couple tracks like this, it will become second nature, and you’ll be able to figure out some tracks quicker than others.
Now that & Down is ready to go, I move on to track #2, Oh!. Upon inspection, it seems as though Live has properly guess the track’s BPM, but has put the start of the track in the wrong place:
This one is easy! Just drag the 1 marker to the start of the first beat, and you’re done.
Continue the process for your third track and so on.
Tutorial Aid: www.harvitronix.com
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