A newbie lesson in Ableton

I learned something in Ableton this past week. I noticed that several audio projects I was tinkering with have had a weird “clipping” sound throughout, and it didn’t make sense. It was happening NOT when I was recording directly in Ableton, but when I was dragging audio clips from elsewhere into my Ableton live sets … I wasn’t aware that Ableton was “auto-warping” the clips I was dragging in to have them match my live sets’ tempo. More on auto-warp from Ableton’s website. After a few searches, I was able to learn how to turn auto-warp off (easily adjusted in Ableton’s preferences).

I’ll definitely pick Alex’s brain soon for his thoughts on auto-warp and how that could potentially be used for music tracks we want to work on. It’s a very cool feature.

Worth highlighting that most of my audio-making / recording experimentation up until now has been done in a different DAW – Adobe Audition. I love Audition, and until AAEAA, it’s been my defacto tool for making my microcast audio recordings. (In 2020, I was tinkering with audio content on another blog called microcast.net – if you visit that site you can see a glimpse of some of the microcasts I was making using Audition.) Adobe Audition is quite different than Ableton Live. As I look to get better at using Ableton Live for making music, I want to use every opportunity I can to use it as my main DAW, even for crafting my microcast recordings. Having hit the stumbling block of Ableton’s auto-warp and having learned how to turn it off is one of my first light-bulb moments using Ableton, experiencing what others have told me: “Ableton Live as a DAW is geared towards making music”.

Auto-warp. <– Noted.

Clipping out the voiceover audio clips I’ve been importing is one thing, but being unaware, it’s also been butchering some of my other audio too! I’ve noticed that any time I was importing musical clips I’d recorded in the past, Ableton Live was attempting to warp the tempo! I’ll include below a corrected version of the audio clip from my post last week, A touch of cello — it has a “clipping” sound that resulted from auto-warp happening when I imported the original sound clip without realizing that the tempo / bpm set in Ableton was attempting to adjust my audio. Fixed: