Ableton Live 2: Composing Via Loop Manipulation
Ableton Live 2 is perhaps best known for its ability to play multiple audio loops of different source tempos so that they play at the same tempo. This actually just scratches the surface of this incredible program’s capabilities. It’s elastic audio capabilities mean that you can easily manipulate loops as a means of composition.

Double-clicking on a clip in a track opens it in the Clip Editor window. For starters, you can drag the left or right arrow in the top bar of that window to shorten the clip. You can also drag the Loop Offset marker so that the loop begins playing back somewhere other than on 1/1. The following illustration shows the loop markers set to play only the first measure, with playback starting on the second beat.



Using these techniques alone on multiple clips looping against each other provides tremendous flexibility in creating interesting rhythms and musical passages. You could even easily create polyrhythms like 7 looping against 5!

If you want to get more adventurous, you can work with dragging the Warp markers. Let’s say that you have a two-bar loop. For the sake of example, double-click on the marker at the beginning of measure 2 to establish an anchor point.



Now double-click the marker at 1.2 to make it the active Warp Marker.



Drag the Warp Marker from 1.2 to the beginning of the spike in the waveform display where 1.3 was originally.



The result is that all of the content that was originally in the first two beats now plays over the course of one beat of the master tempo—while the content that was originally in the second and third beat now takes three beats of the master tempo to play. Everything in measure 2 plays back unaltered. By the way, this technique allows you to create a lot of different variations even if you don’t have many loops at your disposal.

Moving Warp Markers can sometimes result in unwanted sonic artifacts. One solution is to export the resulting audio files to an audio editor and simply remove unwanted passages. Another is to apply Live’s built-in effects such as Auto Filter. You could, for example, record the closing of the filter at the time of the unwanted sound to minimize its presence—while simultaneously creating a special effect. As with everything about Live 2, the real juice lies in experimentation.