Warping in Live
One of the things that makes Live so musically empowering is the transparent and userfriendly approach it takes to timestretching audio, or ‘warping’ in Ableton parlance. Timestretching revolutionised music production back in the late 80s. Before it came along, a sample’s pitch and speed were intrinsically linked – if you sped a sample up, its pitch would increase to match, and if you slowed it down, the pitch would drop accordingly. Timestretching effectively severed that link, allowing untold levels of creative freedom for a new generation of producers and programmers. Way back in 1988, Akai’s S950 hardware sampler was one of the very first widely available devices to offer timestretching. It allowed sampled sounds to be tuned up and down while retaining their tempo, or sped up and slowed down without changing their pitch. This was incredibly useful both as a tool for melding together beats and loops of different tempos, and as an extreme effect for vocal samples and suchlike, as heard in many DnB and UK garage tracks in the early 90s. However, dialling in the right percentage involved quite a bit of mental arithmetic to achieve the desired effect. Today, the algorithms built into Live and other DAWs are far more sophisticated and easier to use than those early efforts. Now, the software can automatically detect the tempo of a piece of audio and warp it so that it plays at the original pitch, but also perfectly in time with everything else in your project.
Live 10 features several different algorithms for warping. The default Beats setting works well for drum and perc loops, Tones works better for pitched material, and the Complex modes (Complex and Complex Pro) are more suitable for full-mix material and full songs.