Hi all,

I'm just starting to reconnect with music since my childhood, and struggling to remember some of the basic concepts. In my youth I played piano and trumpet to about grade 5, but then lost interest with these instruments in my teenage years when I discovered heavy metal, and later on dance/electronic ( among other genres, etc).

Anyway back the point of my post.....I've recently installed Ableton with the idea of exploring EDM as a hobby. Just for clarification, do the samples I'm using for my tracks need to have the same bmp and in the same key - my gut feeling is that they should match within the same track.

Further to this, if they should match, can samples/loops of different bmp/key be manipulated/transposed in Ableton into the right key/bmp of my match what I need in my arrangement?

Thank you for any guidance on this.

 

Your loops do not need to be the same BPM to get them working together, but there is a caveat to this that I will cover later on down the post.

Let's say your project is 120BPM. You have some loops which are different BPM. You want all those loops to be changed so they retain their musical information with the same timing. This could be done by pitching samples up or down, and that will make them play faster or slower. But there is audible change in the pitch, obviously.

So a new feature in samplers and audio programs developed sometime in the 90s, a new option to pitching was created. Pitch and BPM of the music became unlinked. People often call this "timestretching", because the length of the sample/loop can be "resized" in time without changing the pitch up or down. A more accurate term for this is really Time Compression and Expansion. Make the loop smaller, and it plays faster. There should be no change in pitch or loss in fidelity, but your loop is altered in what BPM it is going to play at. The timing of the played notes will remain the same within the others in the same loop.

So that is the old stuff background information. Fast forward to today, and our DAW's can now do this to files as they are being imported into your session. You have to setup some import rules as it relates to your projects tempo. So if my DAW session BPM is 120, anything loaded into it can be automatically altered so the loop will now match your project's BPM.

In Ableton, they refer to this as Warping. In Logic, it is done via Smart Tempo project rules. But it is all the same kettle of fish. Every loop loaded in will become your 120 project BPM.

The caveat, is that depending on the "timestretch" algorithm of the DAW or sampler instrument; and the percentage of change in length, can possibly degrade the audio file which was imported. You can find and select different algorithms, or you can disable Warping; because that way you manually make all the changes. Some people claim they can hear these changes and differences. I will leave that up to you.

Also, when the DAW brings in a file with "Warping" enabled, it is looking at the number of samples and how long the loop is within time. It can also possibly be looking at any available metadata in that file. If there is anything "incorrect" about the information the DAW/sampler is using to calculate the duration in time, the number of beats, etc. against the files original tempo, that is how it does it's decision making. And it can, and usually will; be wrong.

 

Last edited: Mar 23, 2024

@clone replied while I was replying. He covered what I was going to say and I can't add much to it.

Ableton's ability to "warp" and match tempos of various loops is top-notch, from what I remember. I personally think it's equal to or maybe even better than my DAW, Logic.