With Warp engaged, however, the doors are opened for comprehensive manipulation of your sounds. Auto-warping can be switched off in Ableton’s preferences, and this is a useful option when you don’t need control over pitch or tempo re-mapping, when dropping in stems for mixing, for example. So, how do you Warp? Well, by default, whenever you drag an audio file into the Ableton timeline or into a clip, the Warp function is automatically activated. It allows you to completely re-map a sample’s tempo, rhythm, groove, and pitch, and is useful for everything from gentle quantization and transposition tasks to full-blown audio manipulation and sound design. But Ableton’s control set is very simple and versatile. This kind of functionality isn’t unique to Ableton - other DAWs offer their own tools to speed up, slow down and re-pitch audio. Warping is Ableton’s word for granular re-synthesis granular because the Warping algorithm reduces samples into tiny pieces (‘grains’) and then reconstitutes them in a completely new form by replaying or skipping the grains in different ways, dependent on how the Warp Markers are set, and which Warp Mode you’re in. This is the concept behind Ableton Live’s Warping feature. Rather than slowing down the playback of the entire stream of audio, software developers wrote algorithms that sliced it into a sequence of small snippets, then re-played that sequence in the same order at a different speed, all the while maintaining its tonal and transient content. It wasn’t until the 2000s that audio software started to offer a different approach to the digital time-shifting degradation problem. (Look up Nyquist Theory to discover more.) The number of these samples recorded is determined by the sampling rate, but when recording at 44.1kHz - as was the norm in the early days of digital recording - you can barely slow down the audio at all before audible artifacts come into play.

Each digital ‘word’ contains all the information for a sample, and it varies in size depending on the word length of the recording system (commonly 16- or 24-bit).

Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a great example of this.) But when digital audio started to gain dominance, it became more difficult to manipulate the speed of audio while maintaining its integrity.ĭigital audio is sequence of samples represented by a long string of binary digits. But creative artists would get around this by recording at a different tempo and key, then playing back at a speed to compensate for the changes. The main downside is that pitch and tempo increases and decreases in relation to the playback speed. With analogue audio, time-stretching is fairly straightforward.

Reverse sampler clips ableton