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.