Ableton Live is, quite possibly, my favorite DAW for creating music (Pro Tools being my favorite for editing and recording). Ableton is so fluid and, in my opinion, has untouchable MIDI editing. It’s no wonder why this DAW has become the darling of the electronic music scene as well as a favorite by tons of people.

Live is meant to be a production center: you can editi MIDI, record parts into it, and loop it all seemlessly. Funny thing is, with the Warping feature built into Live, it became a pretty powerful DJ tool which is what I’m going to discuss in this article.

Please note that this will NOT be a discussion as to whether or not DJing in Live is “cheating” like some people think it is. This is just meant to be a tutorial to help those interested in either a) DJing in Live or b) warping tracks for other uses.

So first, you’ll have to find a track to warp. For this tutorial, I’m using Deadmau5′s remix of Calvin Harris’ “I’m Not Alone.” A damn fine production.

Why This Song? I love House music and this one proved to be a pretty simple song to warp. Needless to say, some tracks will give you a massive headache and some will be a complete joy to work with. House music (like most forms of dance music) is pretty easy to mix due to its four-on-the-floor nature and its general structure. That being said, if you’re working on something with more rigid/less-structured nature (like Venetian Snares), you may have to work harder than if you were doing your typical Trance or House track.

I have Live open and I’ve loaded up the track. First thing you will do is double-click the audio track to view it’s waveform.

 

See that little yellow “1?” That’s supposed to be the first beat of the song, but we’ll come back for that in a second. For now, we want to focus on the box to the left of the waveform: the “Sample” window.

 

The sample window gives you all types of control: you can select “Warp” to turn warping on/off; it’ll tell you what it thinks the BPM is (in this case its pretty close); it’ll give you different methods of warping (Beats, Complex, Re-Pitch, etc); it gives you the option to select the first and last bar as well as a pretty awesome looping feature. 

When you’re trying to mix, its general the best to make sure your Warp method is on Beats instead of something like Complex. Leave the transients at 1/16 and we can really begin warping.

Go back to the big yellow “1″ and zoom in. You might see something like this:

As you can see, this isn’t right. Drag the “1″ to where the first transient begins (where the 1.1.2 market is now).

So now you have the first beat (of course you could set the begining of the 4th bar as the first beat). But I like to keep it simple, so the first beat in the song is set as 1. 

Disclaimer: This is how I learned and how I still warp songs for mixing purposes. This is by no means the end-all method for doing this in Live, but for me it works the best and is the quickest and fastest way to do it.

Next, go to the 5 marker. If you’re lucky, it’ll look like this:

But it probably won’t (and that’s okay). Just drag the 5 marker to the start of the beat if its a little off. Next, double click the 5 marker. This will lock markers 1-5 making them unable to be moved unless you unlock them.

Why Should I Do This? Because if you don’t, everytime you move a marker your entire song will shift. Locking sections of your song allows you to have what you KNOW sounds good stay put while still being able to experiment with other parts of the song.

Now that markers 1-5 are locked, this is what you should see if you zoom out:

What you’ll see to the left, now, is that the Sample window is trying to tell you what it thinks the BPM of the song is. In this case, 128.02. We’ll call it 128. Set your session’s master BPM to 128.

What you need to do next is go to the 5 marker and right click it. Select the highlighted passage in this screenshot:

What this will do is warp the rest of the song to fit your 128BPM master.

The downside to this is all your tracks will play at 128BPM (one tempo can be kind of boring). The upside is, if you warp all your songs correctly, everything will play well together. This way you can focus less on beat-matching and more on creatively mixing (the major argument for using Live as a CDJ/turntable replacement).

Now here’s the fun part: do this for the rest of the song! What I do personally (and might be slightly obsessive) is I go through the song and check every 5 markers. So after 5, I go down to 10 and play it to make sure it sounds alright. Theoretically, you should be able to play the track and bounce around and have it loop/play without and clicks, pops, or other types of audio interference. 

The best way I’ve found to check to see if your warping is being done correctly is to play the song and jump around to different sections. If it sounds cohessive and there’s no obvious glitches in audio, then you’re probably alright. Be careful, however. Just because a song might be perfectly algined between markers 1 and 95 doesn’t mean that it’s perfect: check your tracks our thoroughly, you’d be surprised how often songs may stray towards the end.

Also, consider finding a track or creating a drum loop that is EXACTLY the BPM you want to mix at (128 in this tutorial). Play that against the track you’ve warped and see if they match or not. If they don’t, you may have to check the track again.

So, in the end, this is what my warped version of “I’m Not Alone” looks like:

So, like I said, this is not the only way to do this. It’s how I like to do it however. Try some of the other methods out and then try this one. I think you’ll see why I love it so much.

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