If you ever need to loop something which isn't at the same tempo as Live, or in any fixed tempo then you need to know this.
Example situations might be: ambient loops, avant garde weirdo noise, African drumming, theatrical soundscapes (battle noise, street scenes, etc) there are many occasions.
As you probably know, Live turns the loop controls off for unwarped samples, but it is actually possible to loop 'unwarped' without resorting to the annoyance of typing values in to the follow actions.
It seems that about 99.9 % of people don't realize a certain method of 'tricking' Live to do this. Well, it's not really a trick, but you need to understand what Live is really doing when it 'warps your clip - how it presents that information to you and then think backwards!
There are two things you need to know, and understand about how this works
two things to understand.
Thing 1 :
As mentioned often Beats mode will not 'warp' if it thinks the clip tempo is the same as the master tempo. You will not hear any artifacts, the audio will not judder or sound grainy, this is 100% true and proven by many tests in fact I will present one at the end of this article.
So, for god's sake don't let some newb clutching a copy of computer music, or a 'pro' with his cracked protools tell you any different.
The truth is : In Beats mode, If song tempo = clip tempo then warping is effectively off.
Thing 2
So, If the clip tempo and the song tempo match then warp is effectively 'inactive', but here's the crucial thing 2 ...
the clip tempo does not have to actually be the real clip tempo for this to work. That is crucial to this tip
In Live there is the little box for each clip which says " Seg. BPM" that is the clip tempo. Now we know that Warp is 'off' as long as those two values (clip and song tempo) are the same. So I suggest you simply type a bogus value in there .. such as the Master Song tempo. Make the two values the same and turn off warping !
why does this work ?
technical stuff
there are two techincal reasons,
1 : Beats mode is a time windowing timestretcher, meaning it takes crossfading slices of audio in the time domain. the reason it is 'beats' mode is because it is 'hinted' by time cues, where most time windowing stretchers have the windows cycling unrelated to the bar and beat , 'hinted' stretchers restart the window at an update point. You can see this in Live referenced as "transients" in the box right underneath where it says beats. So by virtue of that the artifacts are minimal when song tempo = clip tempo.
2: But in addition to that, the Abletons reduced artifacts further by putting a specific 'warp off' code in sometime during the betas of Live 6. So If clip tempo = song tempo then 'warp off'.
Anyway ... back to the real world
How to actually do it !
So,
load in something you want to loop, something with varying tempo, lets say .. a piece of African drumming.
Drop that in a clip, make sure "autowarping" is off, or select all the hit points that appear (click one , ctrl&a then hit delete)
Now, assuming your Song tempo (in the top left corner) is set at the default of 120 bpm , and there's no real need to change it because you are ignoring the BPM.
Set the clip tempo you just dropped in to 120bpm, in the little box for each clip which says " Seg. BPM"
Play the audio - you should hear that it is not 'warped' or juddery, it is just playing back. At least it should be, if it is not then you are doing something wrong.
Now to do the loop,
Select the clip waveform view, press ctrl&4 this turns off the 'snap to grid' function. You should now be able to move the loop braces freely and align your loop.
If you want a smooth sounding loop you ought to open a wave editor and do a little crossfade on your wave at the loop point (as live can't do a long crossfade on a loop)
There are a lot of people who are unfamiliar with the application who have weird thoughts about this process so to clarify:
You can loop 'unwarped',
the sound is not affected at all
Some proof of audio quality
Here's a little proof that this trick does not adversely effect sound quality
- drop some audio into Session, put it on two tracks
- in one track do the trick (beats mode on, clip tempo = song tempo)
- in the other track turn warp off.
- make sure the start points are at the start (!)
- drop a utility on track 2, the unwarped track
- press both phase buttons
- now play that scene and the audio will be silent.
here's a n image showing the two tracks, notice that the master volume level is showing 0, as the tricky 'warped' track and the unwarped track cancel each other out exactly
Why does no-one seem to know this trick?
The reason it is relatively unknown is because it is a bit counter intuitive. The 'original tempo' box doesn't exactly imply 'turn off warping'. But that is effectively what it does by setting the two values to the same figure.
Limitations & Caveats
DO NOT ALTER THE MASTER TEMPO
if you alter the master tempo at any point it will all sound like shit, because of course, teh two values will no longer match.
DO NOT USE OTHER MODES
complex mode is not 'better', complex mode is simply different and in this case different means "will not work" . Please, unless you actually want artifacts, don't use complex mode. I could offer technical reasons but I am now bored
