I had to make a post about this since it drove me nuts for weeks and didn’t find any info about it until I dug deep in Ableton’s forums.

Short story – setting your songs to complex pro warp mode will totally fuck up your live sets.

Long story: I still had barely scratched the surface with what I can do with Ableton 7 LE, but one limitation that really stood out was the warp modes. For warping entire songs for live DJ sets, none of the ones available in 7 LE worked for me. I suppose ‘pitch’ would have been the best but I wanted my songs at their original pitch even when I drastically changed the BPM. Beats mode caused too many stutters. Tones didn’t sound right. Texture seemed a happy medium but that can give you nasty phase effects even when you barely adjust the BPMs.

So I upgrade to Live 8 – the full version and first I started setting everything to Complex. I was worried that Complex Pro would be too much for the processor on this old laptop. Complex seemed cool at first, until I started to listen to it closely. I was warping a simple drum track I recorded from vinyl and there was so much squeaky artifact noise in it that I thought there must have been interference when I recorded it. No, it was just Complex mode doing it’s thing. Listen for yourself (sorry – they are short clips but they are WAVs – for this little demo, I didn’t want to degrade them in the slightest by making them MP3s.)

Original – not warped.

Same track using Complex warp mode

So then I tried Complex Pro. Oh yeah – it sounded perfect. No stutters, no phase effects, no artifacts. The songs sounded great even when you totally jacked around with the BPMs. And my processor meter was sitting pretty at 15-20 percent. So I changed all my tracks to Complex Pro and used that for my sets on Infinity Tunes. And every week, 15-20 minutes into the set – disaster. I’d start a new song and all audio would stop for about a quarter of a second. And it would do that every time I started or stopped a track. And every time, the delay would get just a little longer. Yeah, it’s 2011 and I’m getting full second gaps in my live DJ sets. Not fucking cool.

So why was this happening? Complex Pro. I haven’t found a good technical explanation (besides the obvious – it’s a huge bug!) of why this happens but even though two or three tracks playing at once only uses up 20 percent or so of processor power, starting (or even stopping) a track warped with Complex Pro will cause your processor usage to spike – to such a great degree that all audio needs to stop for a bit to allow the CPU to catch up.

I would cut the Ableton devs some slack and say – ok, Complex Pro needs a lot of CPU power, I need to deal with it. But then it should do that from the very first track – and it doesn’t. My sets would be fine for at least 10 minutes – then things would collapse.

So I’m back to Texture mode for playing live. I can record the sets and change everything to Complex Pro later and export the audio then. It’s a crappy solution but it’s the best one I have right now. So if you’re listening to me live and it sounds good, but not great – wait for the download. It will sound much better.

Back in 85/86, I would make mixes and record them on 90 minute cassettes. I didn’t have a lot of records yet then so my mixes would use the same songs over and over. They were repetitive and sometimes just damn strange – I would throw in some song that just didn’t fit just to try something different. Sometimes it would work, usually it wouldn’t. But that experimentation was cool, even when it didn’t work.

And that 1985 vibe is what I’m feeling now when I play with Ableton mixes. I’ve been mixing live with Ableton on my Infinity Tunes set for a few weeks now. I’m slowly adding songs to Ableton one at a time but not quite fast enough. So not only are my Ableton mixes sometimes sloppy since I’m still new at it, but they can get repetitive too since I’m using a lot of the same songs week after week.

But hey, that’s cool. It’s all part of the learning process. And just like now, when I listen to those 1985 mixes and cringe at the bad parts and pat myself on the back for the good parts, I can’t wait for perfection to put stuff out there. So I’ll be trying to remember to upload my Infinity Tunes live mixes, warts and all, so months/years from now, other people can hear that timeline from just average to (hopefully) something pretty damn cool.

Here’s a mix from Oct 30, 2010.

(Update – December 2011. House-mixes ate this mix. It’s ok. You’re not missing much.)

Tracklist:
Justice – Phantom
A Skills & Beatvandals – Simply Playing
Tobias Tinker – Tiga
The Blue Nile – She Saw The World
The Field Mice – Missing The Moon
Prefab Sprout – If You Don’t Love Me
Dirty Vegas – Home Again
Madonna – Future Lovers
Mr V – Da Bump
The Rapture – Don Gon Do It
New Order – Fine Time
Kylie Minogue – Come Into My World
Jean Paul Bondy – Cold Reformer
Fluke – Absurd
Covenant – Tension
Iris – Annie, Would I Lie To You
Tears For Fears – Change
Luxxury – Drunk
Daft Punk – Around The World / Harder Better Faster Stronger
Texas – Summer Son
Reggie and The Full Effect – Laura’s Australian Dance Party
Chemical Brothers – Let Forever Be
Sally Shapiro – Find My Soul
Caged Baby – 16 Lovers
Boyfriendgirlfriend – Infatuation Dot Com
Nick Rhodes – Come Alive (Tiga Remix)
Abigail – Constant Craving
Prodigy – Spitfire (Future Funk Remix)
Mea – Red Light Go
Andy Hunter – The Wonders Of You
Armand Van Helden – Three Girl Rhumba
Timo Mass – Pictures (Evil Nine Remix)
Primal Scream – Swastika Eyes (Jagz Kooner Mix)
Uberzone – Seville (General Midi Mix)
Hyper – We Control
The Alpha Conspiracy – Close
System22 – Halfway To There
Hybrid – Out Of The Dark
Paul Van Dyk – Spellbound
Oxide & Neutrino – Garage Beat
Playradioplay! – Even Fairy Tale Characters Would Be Jealous
Dogzilla – Without You
Lucia – We Are Angels
Sunna – I’m Not Trading