I played around with it a couple times on my friend's computer. Basically you play song A, que up song B by dragging it in from the file location on your computer, and the software does the beatmatching automatically. There's a simulated crossfader that you drag left or right, left channel to right channel. Of course, there's more to mixing than beatmatching, but still. It felt strange seeing the computer beatmatch perfectly in a quarter second when it took me weeks to learn how to do it poorly.

quote:

Originally posted by CleverName I played around with it a couple times on my friend's computer. Basically you play song A, que up song B by dragging it in from the file location on your computer, and the software does the beatmatching automatically. There's a simulated crossfader that you drag left or right, left channel to right channel. Of course, there's more to mixing than beatmatching, but still. It felt strange seeing the computer beatmatch perfectly in a quarter second when it took me weeks to learn how to do it poorly.

Well that's the extra easy one

I honestly dont believe Sasha or any bigger known djs out there plays a song straight off when using Ableton. They split up the different elements ( bassline drums etc etc ) and play them loop them various ways ... at least that's what the theory is.

Well yeah, you can tear the song apart layer by layer and all that crazy shit, but essentially that's how the matching works (at least in the version I used).

If you dont cut up (tear down) the track beforehand, you wont be able to do what Sasha is intending to do. By just playing the tracks in full, it is just like spinning, but without the beatmatching as mentioned before. By cutting up the tracks, you are able to loop portions of the tracks and mix in ways that is either not entirely possible to do with a standard setup.. or possible but with much more effort. Pioneer cdjs could probabaly do this with saved cue/loop points and just looping portions of the track as you mix in other portions of the track or other tracks.

Once the tracks have been "warped" in the Ableton software, you can drag and drop then as you wish and they will automatically be beatmatched.

So, yes, at a basic level you do not have to beatmatch in Ableton Live and you could in theory just mix from one track to the next like a standard DJ set. However (IMO) this is not the point of the software and barely touches on the power of the software.

But what you can do is drag and drop and arrange on the fly 18 different tracks (read: 18 different parts from an infinite number of actual songs, vocals from one, bass from another, guitar riff from another, etc.) into the mix resulting in some unique and interesting output. That is where I see the true power of the software coming through.

In essence, this allows us as DJs to move past the concern of programming a set from the perspective of BPMs since Ableton automatically time stretches/compresses everything on the fly. To me, it affords a greater creative element to DJing, one that I and I think most users of the software are just learning to harness. The possibilities are undefined at this point - time to think outside the box.

Regards,
JM-8

quote:

Originally posted by JM-8 Once the tracks have been "warped" in the Ableton software, you can drag and drop then as you wish and they will automatically be beatmatched. So, yes, at a basic level you do not have to beatmatch in Ableton Live and you could in theory just mix from one track to the next like a standard DJ set. However (IMO) this is not the point of the software and barely touches on the power of the software. But what you can do is drag and drop and arrange on the fly 18 different tracks (read: 18 different parts from an infinite number of actual songs, vocals from one, bass from another, guitar riff from another, etc.) into the mix resulting in some unique and interesting output. That is where I see the true power of the software coming through. In essence, this allows us as DJs to move past the concern of programming a set from the perspective of BPMs since Ableton automatically time stretches/compresses everything on the fly. To me, it affords a greater creative element to DJing, one that I and I think most users of the software are just learning to harness. The possibilities are undefined at this point - time to think outside the box. Regards, JM-8

Interesting indeed.

Cheers
Nem

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