[Ableton 9] Issue with sample lenght.

A

Ash_Grey

New member
Hello everyone.
I have an issue with Ableton 9 where I want to sample parts of a song and make some of them them loop.
I started off with chopping the parts I want to use and made sure that the parts that are going to loop, actually loop correctly.
That's where the problem started.
In the end, I want the pitch of the whole song to be either lower or higher, I haven't decided yet.
The problem is that my chopped samples aren't in the lenght I want them to be. As you can see in this screenshot, my "intro" is 7 1/2 bars long, when I want it to be 8, and my "verse" loop is barely 3 1/2 bars long, when I want it to be either 2 or 4 (so I can end up with a 16 bars verse).

ttest.PNG

So here's what I actually did:
  • I uploaded the whole song to Ableton 9.
  • I chopped off the beginning part of the intro since there was no actual sound to play.
  • I cut the intro off the rest of the song.
  • I cut the verse loop off the rest of the song and made sure it looped correctly.

And here I am, with my intro and verse loop.
The matter is that I want to round them up to 8 and 2-4 bars like I said earlier, and if I warp the intro with the "beats" setting to 8 bars like intended, it becomes very stuttery and thus have an overall shitty quality. If I warp with a "re-pitch" setting, the overall quality is great and I have the numbers of bars I've been looking for, but since the intro and the verse aren't of the same lenght, the pitch of both of them doesn't match.

Thank you for taking the time to help me figure this out, I'm rather new to Ableton and I'll provide you with as many informations as I can.
 
Ok after thinking this out with a friend of mine, I don't think there's really a way to adjust several sample lenght and save both the quality and the pitch.

But we found a better solution :
I can just layout my samples the way I want to, like I want the whole song to be, apply some audio effects as I see fit and consolidate the whole track.
Then I can just re-pitch everything the way I like and play the drums live on top of that. Just because my chorus isn't 16 bars in ableton doesn't mean it's not 16 bars to the ears.

Sometimes the best answer to a problem is the most obvious one, you just need to see it.
Thanks to those who took the time to read.
 
Did you actually warp it so the rhythm is right at even bar loops even if it's stuttery? The stutter is because warping with beats means it's actually cutting the sample at each beat, then putting it somewhere else. Switch to Complex Pro, turn the envelope setting all the way up and you'll get a timestretch instead of the stuttery sound. If you stretch it too far you'll hear the grains but it works well within reason.

Definitely look up a tutorial on warping and just take it in. If I'm understanding correctly you just cut your sample so it sounds like it's looping right if you CTRL+L. That's not the approach you should take to cut out a loop. You should find the first note, set the first warp marker and 1:1 there, find the first note of the next bar, put a warp marker at the start and drag that to 2:1 and so on and so on. What you did by dragging it out to fit 8 bars is actually a fix for your initial mistake but you can't keep doing that and maintain any sort of workflow. Doing it basically like I said will let you keep working in your arrangement while maintaining the right time, so when you add more clips you can do it in context instead of cutting something that's playing completely out of sync. Do check out the extensive warping stuff though. It's actually not all that hard and you'll need to get really precise with it when you start layering things. It's intimidating at first but when it comes to the fine tweaks that get your sound perfect you can warp without ever worrying you're going to damage anything.

As for warping by beats that's really only good for drum sounds because they get weird when they're timestretched. I don't know why they make that the default. Probably lowest CPU. Anyway, almost everyone does what you did going crazy with the choppy samples at first. I know I didn't know what the hell was going on.
 
One more tip that seems obvious now but I wish I'd realized early on. When you stretch sounds out you may find notes get this weird quality where the attack seems way too long. Put a warp marker right at very start of the note, like the first sound it actually makes, then put one at the peak. Move the one at the peak back to get a natural sounding attack. You can do the same with the sustain and release. As long as your next warp marker is right at the beginning of the next note you'll end up with a good sound, just don't get any of the next slice in there or you'll stretch that out and get a weird click that throws the rhythm off.
 
If you turn the warp function of the clips off and change the tempo of the song you should be able to get it to match up.
 
Warp with complex pro as the parameter in hi res mode. Or (to add onto Lucky Bum) if you don't want to time stretch, turn off warp and adjust the master tempo to get it where you want it, then turn warp back on it to fine-tune the sample.
 
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