Need help making edits in Ableton: Creating acapella sections in tracks

[rdej47]

Hey guys so in the past i've come across edits where the track has an acapella intro and then cuts into the main track. I've been wanting to do this with some tracks I have and having them warped so that when I put them in Traktor I can sync them up easily.

I've been trying to do this in Ableton but I have such a hard time with warping normal tracks let alone acapellas. Would it be easier to do it without warping and just make sure I have them lined up pretty accurately?

[deevey]

How I normally warp with a vocal or instrumental intro is to go to the downbeat "set 1.1.1 here" right click "warp from here straight" - 99% of the time the track will sync from here fine.

Now to get the vocal intro in time I go to the "start" area in the track where it shows the three boxes with 1 1 1 inside and set the first box to -8 -16 -32 -64 depending on how long the vocal or instrumental is. again - works 99% of the time.

[rdej47]

Deevey, your method is primarily for modern tracks right?

[MisterMoleyMole]

Sorry to get involved on your thread, but I've always wondered this to. I have loads of acapellas that I would love to warp/beatgrid but i just don't know where to start. Being pure accapellas with no beats at all i have no starting point.

I've seen a lot of people mentioning lining them up with the original in ableton, beat gridding the original and then copying that grid to the acapella, but i couldn't get this to work, especially when the acapella track is no where near the sme length as the actual track.

Am I missing something, or does it take a lot of time and effort to get this right?

[deevey]

Sorry to get involved on your thread, but I've always wondered this to. I have loads of acapellas that I would love to warp/beatgrid but i just don't know where to start. Being pure accapellas with no beats at all i have no starting point.

I've seen a lot of people mentioning lining them up with the original in ableton, beat gridding the original and then copying that grid to the acapella, but i couldn't get this to work, especially when the acapella track is no where near the sme length as the actual track.

Am I missing something, or does it take a lot of time and effort to get this right?

@ rdej47 - Yes primarily, but can apply to pretty much any track thats a pretty regular timing.

@ MisterMoleyMole

If there's no musical reference for the acappella .. I find the easiest method is to manually mix the vocal in time over a beat using DJ software like Traktor using my ears and record the beat/vocal tracks separately using external mixing / midi sync and routing the external audio tracks separately into Ableton using Jack/Soundflower, that way you have both a BPM and beat reference guide in Ableton on separate channels and will need to do minimal warping to get the vocal warped correctly.

Hope that helps somewhat.

[MisterMoleyMole]

Thanks very much deevey, i will give this a whirl and see how i get on

[rdej47]

Hey Deevey, how do you handle converting the files. I don't like the idea of Ableton converting my mp3 to wav and then back to mp3. Is there anyway to convert without any loss in information.

[deevey]

Hey Deevey, how do you handle converting the files. I don't like the idea of Ableton converting my mp3 to wav and then back to mp3. Is there anyway to convert without any loss in information.

Don't think there's any way to avoid that, but shouldn't cause any real reduction in quality, timestetching the track in the first place will cause a ton more quality loss than the (negligible) quality loss with the transcode to 320kbps MP3.

You could always leave it as WAV if you are really bothered?

[MisterMoleyMole]

Will ableton ever change to work with mp3s or with its primary function being a production studio type affair, is this something that will never happen?

[Patch]

Ableton handles .mp3's fine (trust me).

Until you start loading up mega-sets with .mp3's that total more in size than your Ableton .mp3 decoding cache size.