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8. Warping an acapella for remixing

1

Getting an acapella in time with Live’s grid can be trickier than warping a drum loop, as it’s harder for the software to auto-detect the rhythm of a vocal. Start by importing the file, either by dragging it in from Windows or macOS’s Finder, or clicking Add Folder in the browser’s Places section and browsing to the file’s location on your system.

2

Double-click the resulting audio clip to open the Clip View Sample box and click the Warp button to enable warping. Listen to the audio file to assess how the rhythm of the vocal works against the beat. Locate the first word that you think might fall on a prominent downbeat – ideally the first beat of a bar. Here, this phrase – ‘Take some time’ – fits the bill.

3

Zoom right in and place the playhead at the point where the word’s waveform crosses the zero-crossing point, and double-click to create a warp marker at that point. Zoom out and hit Play to check that you’ve captured the whole front of the word – to adjust the marker’s placement, hold Shift and click it, then drag the audio to the correct position.

4

Right-click the warp marker and choose Set 1.1.1 Here from the dropdown menu. This sets the warp marker as the point from which warping will start, effectively putting a pin into the acapella where we know that the beats definitely line up. Most acapellas are at a steady tempo, so we should only need this one warp marker

5

In the Clip View’s Seg. BPM field (short for Segment BPM), Live shows its best guess as to the tempo of the audio file. It’s simply filled in our session tempo of 120bpm, since the audio hasn’t been warped yet. Next, we need to pinpoint where the next obvious downbeat in the audio would fall, usually two or four bars further on from our first marker.

6

The most likely candidate for this is the word ‘tell’ from ‘Tell me’, four bars later. We can stretch the audio around using that first warp marker as an anchor point by grabbing the transient marker for the ’t’ of ‘tell’ and dragging it so that it snaps to the required beat – the downbeat of bar 5. The rest of the audio will stretch by the same ratio.

7

Check the results against the metronome to see if it worked, or visually by scanning the waveform peaks against the grid to see if the transient markers line up correctly with the beat. If things start to drift off-tempo later in the song, drag more transient markers to the correct positions on the grid. The rest of the audio should tighten up as you do this.

8

The Seg. BPM field should now display a value closer to the file’s original tempo. Select a Warp Mode by clicking the menu and choosing the appropriate option. For best results with vocals, use either the Complex or Complex Pro modes. These are more CPU-intensive, but tend to produce more accurate results with fewer artefacts.

9

Lastly, move the clip’s start marker back to accommodate the beginning of the file, so that clip starts from the beginning when launched. Click the Save button to save the current warp settings along with the clip. With your acapella fixed to the grid, you can set whatever tempo you like and the audio will move accordingly. Time to get remixing!