*** Edit ***
Riotschool noticed that in the last image, ive left the track at 250bpm… Ive no idea how this happened.
I think i must have hit the ‘:2 / *2′ buttons by mistake before taking the screen shot… oh well!

Just to get things going on the site, i thought id start off with a basic tutorial on warping tracks inside ableton.

If your new to ableton / warping, it basically means that if you are mixing two songs together they will beatmatch perfectly and be in sync with each other no matter what tempo your at.

This means you will be able to concentrate on being more creative with your mixes instead of focusing on beatmatching.

On with the tutorial.

Open Ableton and load a track into an audio channel in session view. You can do this by using the file browser on the left hand side of the screen ( One of the 3 folder icons ) or alternatively just drag and drop a track from itunes.

Once the track is loaded into a channel, double click on it. This will bring up the sample display as shown below.

Ive loaded in ‘Simian Mobile Disco - Its The Beat‘ and as you can see ableton has tried to warp the song automatically and failed ( i think ableton has only ever got this correct once for me ). The start and end of the song have been trimmed and if you turn the metronome on and play the song you can hear that its slightly off beat.

Which brings us on to warping the track manually.

Click and drag down on the top half of the ’sample display’ to zoom in on the beginning of the track so you can see the waveform a bit better. Make sure the metronome is turned on and then play the beginning of the track to find the first down beat ( usually a kick ).

Once you have found the first downbeat, drag the 1st warp marker to it like so:

Zoom in further to make sure you get it right at the start of the beat.

Once you have done this ‘right / control click’ on the 1st warp marker and select ‘Warp from here ( Straight )’.
Now zoom back out again and you will notice all the messy warp markers are gone..

If the track you are warping has a beatless intro, like the one i have loaded, then you will have to drag the ‘Start Marker’ back to get the intro to play, like so:

Now all you have to do is play through the track with the metronome on and listen out for any parts that are not ‘in time’ and make adjustments by dragging markers back or forward to match up with the beat.

For this track i had to adjust a few markers slightly at around the 2 minute mark and that pretty much done it.

Now for the most important part.
HIT SAVE!!
If you forget to hit save you will have to warp the track again when you re-load it into a channel.

There are other methods out there for warping tracks, but this is the method that works for me 100% of the time!
Ive warped loads of tracks with this method and while ive had tracks that need some work to get them right, i can usually warp a track in around a minute or so.

So once you get warping down, you will be able to fire through your collection in no time!!
Hope this tutorial helps.
Happy Warping!