What a joy to rock a dancefloor, but oh yeah beatmatching. On a good night, it's effortless, but when you're struggling, and worse, when you fail, it's really a drag, especially on a big system, total vibe killer, oh just crush my soul. Or, maybe beatmatching is no biggie for you, but you want to remix stuff live, open up the tracks your own way, cut loose. Now, with such juicy little bits of joy like Ableton Live, once you get your tracks prepared well, it's all automatic; you can just click and go, and bounce around to different parts of the track effortlessly, and it's always locked, all the time. Of course with this you lose a lot of the ability to finesse weird polyrhythms, and the serendippity magic that only comes from two or three skewed pieces of vinyl waltzing along like old friends, but you gain a huge amount of spontaneity (and confidence). With just a laptop (and maybe an external MIDI controller), you have thousands of tracks in your backpack, ready to mingle. Right here before we crashed and burned the planet, technology sure got really sexy.

Ableton Live can nudge audio data around, like a rubber band (chopping and re-assorting is also possible, but that's a different box than we're covering here). This can be used to tighten up the rhythm of tracks so they lock to a beat, or loosen things in creative ways. For DJing, we care first about the locking to beat; once tracks are properly prepared, they all pop right into the common song tempo, but without changing the pitch, like would happen with a record or CD. This is mad fun. Live does it with "warp markers", slideable indicators of sub-beats; wherever on the audio each drops, that is what plays when that beat/song position comes around. Live will analyze your file automatically for you, and once in a while does a fantastic job, but generally you want to massage your songs' warping so things will lock together nice and clean. Below is my contribution as to how to best do that. It's a lot of jabber, but with practice it all becomes transparent; a lot of it you just get visually. Suggestions greatly appreciated, especially for key commands, which seem pretty spare in Ableton (unlike in After Effects, where you can do a lot and hardly touch the mouse) (btw, Uh. RTFM: there's a list at the end).

NOTE: this tutorial is only for versions 7 and earlier. Ableton 8 changed it all around, now you move the audio to the marker, the opposite of here. For an excellent video tutorial on the new method, please go here.

A big part of warping is consistency; a track may seem warped right by itself, but played off other tracks the beats are way out of sync. So, the trick: a metronome with some beef. Make a new MIDI track and add an Impulse, and drop in a kick drum sample. You want to use a crisp one with some punch, edited so it's trimmed right at the in of the attack, i.e. no soft mushy ones. Make a new MIDI clip in that track, and drop in a simple 4/4 pattern on the kick. You can drag this drum machine back into your Impulse's presets folder, retitle it, and use it every single time you warp. If your tracks work with it, then they should generally work with each other.

So, let's assume you have a basic familiarity with Live; if not, go to View > Lessons and get yourself up to speed. In Session View, import a track from the browser and let Live do its initial analysis. This will create an .asd file with the name of the track/file as its root (you won't see the .asd files from Live's browser); if you change the name of the track, be sure to update the .asd file's name as well, and keep them together. Note that you can rename files on the hard drive from Live's browser (command-R); hit Return to accept your edit.

Double-clicking on the numbers makes a new warp marker, or deletes an existing one. Intuitively, you'd think you'd want a visual display that allows you to move the music to the beats, rather than slide the beats around, but after some practice you get it, and it becomes obvious that's the way to build it.

Select your track, and zoom into the first hit in the clip window. Some tracks have long beatless intros that you can disregard for now; just go to where the kick comes in and start there; you can go back and deal with the intro after you get the rest warped, or just move the Start marker to effectively trim it off. At the lower right of the Clip Window is a little overview window; drag your cursor down and to the left until you're zoomed way in, enough to see the bass waveform open up a little, with only a few default markers showing to the right. Drag the first marker to the attack point of the kick (with experience you'll learn better where this is; disregard any little buzzy stuff, but anything with a high amplitude, i.e. tall spikes, is probably relevant. If there's a lot of other noise happening around it that conceal the spikes, look for a change in texture where the more widely-spaced bass waves begin), and right click to "set 1.1 here". Then, right click "warp from here", and adjust your song tempo to match the bpm of the clip as shown in the clip window.

Then launch both your track and the MIDI clip. Listen and see if the kicks seem strongly in sync, with no phasing or whuffling, no bdddump bdddump (it helps to watch the kick's level indicator; sometimes you can resolve sync issues visually).

Zoom out and see what Live did with the warping. Sometimes you won't see another marker for the rest of the track; sometimes you'll see tons. Oddly, for tracks obviously made digitally, sometimes Live's warping will drift out of sync slightly over the length of the track, so if you zoom into one of the last measures, and align a marker on the kick, that's all it takes for that track, two markers. You'll want to check inbetween anyway. Set a marker about halway, then zoom into it and be sure it's aligned. If it is, check at a quarter and at the three-quarters of the way through the track, and if everything looks good, you might be done.

Important: click the Save button down in the clip window, at the left under the title, or your warping will only live on the clips in this project, not in the .asd file on the drive.

Most likely you'll have a lot more tweaking to do. Generally, for dance tracks, there's very little need to bother with anything but whole-number markers; most of the ones in between will be nuanced well off the grid. If there are any breakdowns, check the alignment of the beats on either side of them. If Live left tons of markers, and you want to delete a group of them, select the first one, and then shift-select the last, and delete. You can also do command-A to select them all, and slide them as a group. One by one, zoom in and check all that remain, and then visually check in between them to see if any tweaking is needed. Finally, just click/launch through various parts of the track until the kick is strongly sync'ed everywhere, with lots of punch when played with the kick-metronome.

Some techno tracks are strongly syncopated, and don't always have their first kick right on the ones. Try to figure out where you'd be tapping your foot for equivalent four-four time, and align it that way.

Warping non-electronic tracks can be a real chore, but with practice it gets easier. Sometimes Live totally nails it, and you're done. Sometimes it's just not even close, and for live or acoustic performances, you often have to go bar by bar. Figure out where the first obvious place to put a kick is, where does the measure begin, then set a marker; no need to be super zoomed-in at this point. Then play from there, and tap your foot to a basic 4/4 beat, and see where the next bar starts. Once you get a couple of these, you'll need to adjust the song tempo to fit. If you move markers without double-clicking to set a warp marker (and there are no further warp markers to the right to anchor), the whole grid of markers will scale. Try to adjust the grid so it seems to hit the next bar's kick/in, then set a marker; then move down a few bars further and try to scale the grid visually to align to all the peaks to there. Work your way from left to right, and don't skip ahead too far or you may inadvertently skip a measure and have to delete most of your work to there and start again. Watch for any breakdowns that add a half measure or whatever; set the marker where it starts square again, and "warp from here". Once you have the rough placement, launch the track with the MIDI kick and see how you did. You'll still want to go in tight and adjust every marker precisely, and even go back and nudge individual beats.

Once you have gotten an analog track locked to the grid, you can then export it as an audio track, and then burn that to a CD. This makes them much easier to work into DJ sets, as you are freed up from having to ride herd on their wandering.

Using the mouse is clunky, using the keyboard is uniform, easy, and much more efficient. Command-(right/left arrows) will take you to the next warp marker, and +/- on the keypad (on the right side of the keyboard) zooms in. You can set a few major markers pretty close, and then double-click to set (but not adjust) a marker on every bar in between, then select the first marker, zoom in tight, adjust it with the arrow keys, command-arrow to next marker, nudge w/arrow keys, and just go right down the line: keep one finger on the command key, and one on the arrow keys, and you're done.

Yes, extremely tedious, but if you like mashing up weird shit (try a capellas and solo guitar), once they're warped, they become very fun toys. Conveniently, warping tracks is a fine procrastination, and leaves a nice result.