One of the main reasons people gravitate towards live is because there's flexibility that we can have with audio. So what we're going to be doing is referred to as warping audio, and what we have to do is basically give the software some information about this audio file which will allow us to change its time and its pitch independently of each other. So there was a time when pitch and time were married, when people were matching records together and say, if you're a DJ and you have one record that's at one BPM and then another that sort of slightly different BPM, you either going to have to slow down or speed up one of them so that they begin to match, and through that process you're also either raising the pitch or lowering the pitch. As you speed something up, the pitch raises and as you saw something down, the pitch lowers. So with digital tools like live and warping, we're able to do those things completely independently. So we could completely change the tempo of something without changing its pitch whatsoever, and conversely we can vary dramatically changed the pitch without actually changing the timing of the file. Really powerful and it's really fun and it's very creative as well. So here in this new audio track, I have a break beat. I Just going to play this so you can hear it. So as this is happening, I'm also going to launch this hi-harp pattern and it should build dramatically off from each other. That's because this break beat file isn't warped yet. We haven't set it to a grid so we can't really stretch or compress or do anything to this file until we go ahead and warp it. So let's begin that process here. To start off with, we need to identify with the original tempo of this file is. So this was recorded in the '60's or the '70's, so they probably weren't playing to a metronome. So it's going to have some natural human looseness to it. But we can get really close. So I'm going to press play here and then as that's happening, I'm going to start tapping out the tempo just by hovering over this tap icon here and tapping on my track pad, and it's going to interpolate through all of these taps. What is the BPM of this file? So here I go. It says I'm at 95.28, so I'm just going to round down to 95, press enter and now I've identified the original tempo or the general tempo of this file. Next thing I need to do is turn the warp function on. So it's down here in the sample properties box, just hit warp and then immediately you see a grid pop-up. So I'm going to turn the metronome on and press play, still very off. So we need to give the software a little bit more information where the downbeats, whereas B2, where's B3 so on and so forth so then we can do this manipulation with it. Quickly I'm going to turn the metronome off. So the first order of business is to identify the first downbeat. I'm going to press play and I have a strong suspicion that it's this first transients here. One, two, three, four, until you count it until you decide, this is the downbeat, right? So I'm going to zoom in here. So I used to word transients before, so let's just talk about what that means. As I zoom, and you can see there are these tiny little white triangles above the peaks of the waveform, and if I hover over them I get this gray tab that becomes visible to me. So what these are, are transient markers, and the transient is the definitive beginning of any sound. So if it's a drum, it's a stick hitting the skin, if it's a vocalist at the beginning of a syllable coming out of their mouth, and these are extremely useful places to know where they are in this audio file because it saying here is what we think is a transient. I also listened to with my ears and I know that this is the downbeat. I'm going to place what is referred to as a warp marker, and I like to think of them as anchors, saying I'm anchoring this in a very specific place. So if I hover over it I'm getting this temporary warp marker and if I double-click on it, it turns yellow and it becomes a permanent warp marker. So I'm going to zoom out, but according to this grid, this downbeat is happening sometime after the second beat of measure 1, but my ears and my brain tells me that it's actually the first beat of measure 1. So while hovering over this permanent warp marker, I'm going to right-click on my computer and I get this menu. So this is what we are looking for. We want to set 1.1.1 here, meaning that I want to set measure 1, beat 1, tick 1, this is the beginning of this file. I choose this and then you can see the grid immediately moves over and now this is lined up. So let's press play with the metronome on again and see where we're at. So they're now starting at the same point but they're not synced up. So we have to do a little bit more work here. If I right-click on this again, the menu will give me a number of options. I can warp it from here. I can work from here starting at 95 BPM which is the tempo that I dictated. I can do this straight. There's a number of options when it comes to warping and each of these behaves a little bit differently, but for the purposes of our course, we're going to warp from here, starting at the tempo that we have dictated. So I'm going to select start at 95.5 and here we go, let's try again and see what will warp. We're very close to being lined up. I can see that the end of this file is moving into the first half of bar 5 and I just want it to loop immediately. So I'm going to take this stop markers, move them over to the end of measure 4 beginning of measure 5 here. I'm going to turn loop on and move the start marker over here. So when I play this I should get a four-bar loop that loops and isn't time with the metronome. All right, we're very close now. So initially, I had told you that this file probably wasn't recorded to a metronome in the first place. So me trying to superimpose a metronome on top of it is getting really close but it's not perfect. So I'm going to just move some of these events that need a little bit more attention, maybe some snares that are not hitting right on B2 and move them directly to B2. So I know that it was measure 3 and 4, so I'm going to zoom in here on measure 3. So here's the snare, here's the beginning of measure 3, here's B1 and here's B2. So you can see as I zoom in here, this transient marker is not lined up with B2 which is where it optimally should be. So I'm going to create a permanent warp marker here. So just watch me do this as I pull this around, this entire file is moving which is not what I want I just want to move this one event. So I just did ableton Z to undo what I just did. So in order to make sure that only this moves, I need to create anchors on either side. So I'm going to create permanent warp markers on the nearest transients, and then I'll grab this one and you can see I'm now independently moving this in-between those other anchors that I've created. Let's go ahead and do that in a few other places here. Keeps this one moving beat 4 of measure 3, and so what I'm seeing is a lot of these are just slightly delayed. So perhaps if I grab this one and move it all over that were lined up a bit more, it looks like that is the case. So this is slightly more of a surgical way to get into warping and make sure everything's lined up, and some files will be very easy to warp and others will be more challenging, will be a little bit more attention depending on where they came from. So let's listen one more time in here what's going on. I'm feeling really good about that. So I can go further, I can do more I, can do less it's really up to you, you just follow your ears there. Let's move back over to the sample property box here and talk about warping algorithms. So if I click on this icon here, I get a drop-down menu that's giving me a number of options. So the algorithm is how live analyses and processes this file, and not all the files are the same so there's a number of warping algorithms. Percussive files are dealt in one way, textual files like codes or guitar accompaniment would be processed in another way. So in order for ableton to do it's very best job at warping and processing your audio, you need to identify the proper algorithm for your file. So you can see I have a number of options. I have beats, tones, textures, re-pitch, complex and complex pro. Beats would be for a rhythmic file, and this is not just restricted to drums. Let's say you have some very percussive singing or scattering or beat-boxing, you're going to choose beats regardless of the fact that it's coming out of somebody's mouth. Tones is going to be for a monophonic file or something that's just having one note play at a time, processes like a saxophone or really anything that's just one note play. Textures is going to be for polyphony, which is more than one note playing at a single time. So cord accompaniments, pads, something that has a little bit more going on. Re-pitch is going to re-marry pitch and time. So as we adjust pitch, time will also be adjusted, and then we have complex and complex Pro. These are profiles that maybe aren't just so straightforward. There are a little bit more tasking on your CPU and Pro is the more tasking of the two, but really they're just variations of the same thing. So sometimes you can just switch between the two and see which one sounds better, and that's really what matters is what sounds the best. So I can go through and choose beats, give a list in. If it's not really up to snuff, I can always try complex or perhaps some of these other algorithms, and there's much more under the surface that we're not addressing right now, which I really encourage you to investigate because warping can be as super creative process as well if you want it to be. So now I've said this to beats and I've got all of my audio warped and snapped to the grid and it's playing in time. So it's at some chords this reads audio ideas and just make sure that we're all lined up. Feel really good about this. So before I move on, I just want to show you a really creative approach to messing with warping. So I'm just nailing down these downbeats and I'm actually going to remove the other warp markers. So now I only have them on the beginning of measures 1, 2, 3, and 4. So I'm going to add them on B4 here, and then just pull back. So that I've smashed all of the audio into the beginning part of this measure and then it's going to sound very odd and digitized as well. But this will be a creative application of the tool. So it's strange but it's actually really cool. Don't think of this as a utility purpose, it absolutely can be, but it can also be very creative, and now you have the basic fundamental tools of how to warp in ableton, you need to identify the original BPM of the file, you need to pin certain places like a downbeat to a grid, truncate the file so that it's matching a certain amount of measures, and then you're off to the races. From here, we can do a lot transposition. I mean now transpose this file down, transpose it up and we're staying right at time there.
