Here’s another technique I’ve used when not being sure where to place fixed Ableton Live warp markers. In this case it is Janet Jackson’s What Have You Done To Me Lately. First time I heard this track was at a huge club in London when I visited the place while taking company courses in Birmingham… That track over a huge and good PA system made a big impression, indeed.

Anyway, the actual warping of this track should be very straight-forward, as there’s a very definite beat and Jimmy Jam&Terry Lewis as producers definitely has the beat locked down.

There are, however sections, where’s this big reverse cymbal at the end of the fourth beat, and it will make the waveform look very muddy and unclear concerning where the border beat for the fixed warp marker should really reside.

What I’m doing in such cases is just to make sure that the previous line, here 118.4 in the image, is aligned to a visible transient. By the help of that the next section, 119, will naturally align at the right position.

Remember that the warp markers in Ableton Live are like rubber band knots, if you move something around, the rest between the fixed warp markers will stretch and re-align, so you could always see how it all fits together looking at all the transients. Some of them will make visible blocks of audio, and if those block fit well into  the lines, then the warping should be OK.

Old tracks have very different problems concerning warping with Ableton Live. To take a test case; Chic’s Everybody dance is a very famous disco/dance track. I purchased the 12″ extended version (from Amazon’s MP3 download site) and thought that this would be a 10 minute job concerning warping.

After two hours or work spanning two evenings I think I got it nailed down, for the time being. There were many issues.

To start with the rhythm section, the drum and bass,was tight but not so tight concerning the beat. When you listen to the track it sounds tight, but when analyzing it all with Ableton Live you start to see all kinds of misses and hits here and there. This was especially true at the end of the track. I assume the rhythm section got tired after playing the patterns for over six minutes.

The other interesting thing I learned an evening later is that the downbeat for specifying warp points was masked by a early triggering clap sound. I put warp markers on the kick sections, and usually the kick and snare/or clap aligns nicely. However in this case the clap was far too early (see the image). Even more, the early clip triggering variated across the track.

I could finally figure out where the kick was happening, there was this very thin peak that repeated itself in all these problematic sections, so I placed the fixed warp marker on this spot and got it all under control.

Warping electro house tracks and techno is easy. It takes a lot of effort to warp old tracks, indeed.

So yes, I’m really interested in classic dance music today, all the way to tracks I listened to as a kid on Radio Luxemburg, that radio station that covered covering most of Europe on the AM band until 1992 (1440 AM to be precise). I wonder who listens to AM radio today, you got these strange amplitude bumps now and then and the Hi-Fi quality was not there, but hey you heard a lot of interesting music. Especially in the 1972-78 range when I sometimes listened to the service until 6am in the morning and the station faded away, they played a lot of post disco dance music, Jackson 5, Ohio Players and so on.

Anyway, there’s something special about dance music performed by musicians, drummers, bass players, guitar players, keyboard players and so on. They have a nice groove that is tough to reproduce as a one-person loop producer.

As dance music today is more and more stereo-type due to the ease of producing it, old style musician-centric dance music is for me now very refreshing and interesting. It pops out from the mass of dance music out there. Plus there’s something human about it.

So this is the reason I’m mostly focused on putting together set lists using older, band-focused dance music. But, if there are contemporary tracks also done by musicians, that’s fine as well.

Recently I’ve been purchasing and warping a lot of dance tracks from the late seventies and early eighties, Chic, Jackson 5, Sister Sledge and so on. Why is another story. Anyway, I tested with the latest version of Ableton Live (7.0.7) in case auto-warping has improved since the last time. The test case was Jackson Five’s Can You Feel It.

The initial check using the built-in metronome actually sounded like auto-warping did a proper job, to my positive surprise. The second taste case was another Jackson 5 track, however after three minutes the auto-warping got out of whack.

Going back and listening to the first track critically I noticed that the alignment of drums was not that perfect, after all. So we are back on the same state as before, Ableton should really focus more on auto-warping and make it more robust. I do believe that it’s possible to design a proper auto-warping algorithm as it’s not rocket science to analyze various bandwidths and figure out where the drums align. It might be one of those cases where before it took too much CPU power, but with Intel cores sitting idle with the new chips this should not be an issue.

Anyway, when doing warping by hand it was really interesting to see how things were aligned. The track Get on the Good Foot by James Brown was super-tight, his background band was so on the pocket it was incredible.

When warping a special 12″ version of Chic’s Good Times, the drummer and bass player at the end part, after seven minutes, kind of collapsed and the beats were not aligned at all. Now, this was in the age of no copy/paste of loops, rather having musicians play the same thing for up to nine minutes, so it’s understandable but interesting to notice now afterwards.

When I warp old tracks, there’s the issue of swing taken into account or not. A lot of old songs are performed with a lot of swing. However, personally I think for DJ performances it’s good to warp the tracks to be very tight, makes it possible to mix the track with any other track that is also warped in a tight matter, as well as introducing other contemporary loops and so on.

Next more about my new DJ musical direction concerning dance music.

I just realized this while doing programming, but it should also be applicable for any other documentation, such as documentation for audio software and so on. The best documentation is documentation that anticipates what the end user needs, and presents this at the right moment.

In my case I needed a quick answer how to transform mouse down coordinates from a window context to a view context (Cocoa programming). The NSEvent documentation mentioned this in the right position. This as I suspect anyone dealing with this issue needs the answer.

So, concerning other audio tools, such as Ableton Live documentation, if most common operations are discussed, that’s a good thing. I think this is something that I have not seen in basic documentation. Sometimes you have how-to sections, but it would indeed be handy to include common issues in the actual base documentation.

So anyone working on DAW documentation, please listen. The more common answers you reply to in the documentation, the better.

Tunecore just announced that they will distribute one single song, or a single, to all of their distribution channels (iTunes, AmazonMP3 and so on) for a flat fee of $9.99 per each year.

This is indeed a good pricing for anyone who knows that they want to just sell one entity and expect to get more than that cost in revenue. Or at least dip the toes into distributing a song and see what happens.

I personally think that the whole concept of albums in this age of digital download will become a lesser issue. Long time ago — and we all know that — many songs on LPs were fillers just to get the necessary 20 minutes per side in place. Especially the other side, end part, used to have miserable music.

This is one of those classic concepts of musicianship. If you are in a situation where you don’t find bands or artists that play the kind of music you would like to do, then make it happen by creating it youself.Today it should not be so hard to put together music productions using Logic, Live and similar tools, even if you are not a drummer or guitar player you could get very far along by using loops and similar means.

Even singing today is not so critical, many singers do not have perfect voices; rather they have individual styles that sound different from others.If you put together tracks you could control the outcome. Now, to find like-minded musicians in case you want to play live, that’s another issue. I’ve used an iPod to play the backing tracks for some of my recent compositions. It’s doable, I wish I could have more live musicians but again it depends on patience and getting into the musician circle where you could start getting help from others from time to time — provided you also help out.