[BILL PLAYING AN ABLETON LIVE PROJECT]

BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. My name is Bill Holland, and we are looking at the BCR2000 with Ableton Live and how to DJ using Ableton Live with the BCR2000.

Now something I didn't discuss in the first video that I really should have is a lot of people have asked me, "How do you set your markers so that your timing is accurate in Ableton Live?" Now obviously, in this new version they have what's called nudge where I can do one of two things. I can use the global quantization, which is up here, to set how far I can nudge the clip forward and backward. So, for example, if I'm playing this DJ solo remix, [BILL PLAYS TRACK], say I can skip forward a bar , [BILL SKIPS FORWARD] but then I set it to a 16th, I'll go forward to 16th or backwards to 16th [BILL STOPS TRACK]. And this can be assigned to any control you have, so if I go into my MIDI edit mode, Ctrl-M, I can go in here and hit this, select any button I want. I mean a lot of times I'll throw it on the fourth encoder group and throw in these two guys and just put one there and one there, and now when I go back in, it'll just be like play back [BILL PLAYS TRACK], and again you can make this even smaller just for fine, fine adjustments on the fly when you're DJing and your tracks come out of place.

Now, this shouldn't happen but I have had this happen before. I recently was playing an Audion track, and Matthew Dear has kind of a funky timing that's really, really cool but sometimes minimal, I've had problems where the snares were hitting the wrong place. At least how Ableton works, it all has to readjust these using this tool. Again, it's just a really good thing to have set up in case something goes wrong during a set. You never know. Sometimes, I'll just set up the markers wrong it'll go out of whack. There was another track, a Lindstrom track I had that got set up the same way, and all I did was just bring it back to the place and it was fine. The really cool thing about computers is it does allow producers to make tracks that don't use normal timings and have strange breakdowns that you wouldn't have seen 10 years. In songs, these people were so concerned with the DJ. Now, it's all about making songs and DJing with the songs, which is kind of cool. It's kind of like -- it's a lot like spinning records, with new wave records where there on quantize and you might not expect a sudden change that'll happen.

Another thing to keep in mind is there's also the tempo nudge up, which is pretty cool. Ctrl-M; again, I'll just overwrite my old controls to show you this, put one here and one here. What this does is it temporarily speeds up your tempo so you can catch up. So if I place it back, hold it down [BILL PERFORMS CONTROLLER REASSIGNMENT AND ADJUSTMENT] or slow it down.

Something to note: Did you notice how this locked in? So this turns it on and off. You want to keep pay careful, careful attention to that [BILL SPEEDS UP TRACK] then you bring it back down [BILL SLOWS DOWN TRACK].

Again, a little bit clunkier than Serato or Traktor, but really in Ableton Live if you set up your warp markers correctly, this shouldn't even be an issue. The way to do that, I have my clip open here, go to the first bass kick, or in this case there's a bass sound effect, and I can hit right click>warp from here. You have different options too: warp 120 BPM from here or warp from here straight. Notice when it's warp 120 BPM, it's completely off. The reason for that is this track was not recorded in 120 BPM. If it had been, that would be a great option to use but we don't, and you'll see if I do warp from here straight, go over here, it says sequence BPM 134.99. Now some times it will, if you're doing drum 'n bass for example, it'll read it at 134.99 when it's really more like it's a higher number. The way we adjust for that is the 1/2 or times two button. See it go up to 269 [BILL PLAYS TRACK] but now it's assuming the original speed was 269 which it's not; it's 134.

You might have also had a slower track like a hip hop track, and it might have read it too fast to be playing at a drum 'n bass type speed, so you can slow it down to make it catch up [BILL PLAYS TRACK].

Another thing you can do is reverse sections of loops. So if I wanted the opening loop to be reversed, I could open it with reverse loop and wait for it to process. [BILL DEMONSTRATES REVERSE PLAYBACK]

Another really cool effect you can do is by hitting Ctrl-M and hitting transpose then select a new controller, twiddle it a little bit, get out of here, play back your file [BILL PLAYS BACK ABLETON LIVE PROJECT AND TRANSPOSES TRACKS]. Notice how it keeps the time while I transpose.

Now, one more question I've had a lot of people ask me is, "Sends and returns: How do I set these up?" Very simple. A is your return and B is your other return. Right now on channel 1, you'll see I have A and B set up here on my mixer, and I usually use these for things that you want to send like a dry and wet signal to and you want control over the dry and wetness of it, so think of this in terms of the wetness of the signal that you're bringing in. What I usually do is I have a reverb and a delay, so I'll get like a ping pong delay for example and throw it on A and then a reverb on B. So what I can do now is as it plays [BILL PLAYS ABLETON LIVE PROJECT], unmute the signal [BILL UNMUTES TRACKS ON PROJECT], put my reverb [BILL APPLIES REVERB], and again I can put this up however I want it [BILL CONTINUES MAKING ADJUSTMENTS], then you bring the feed down a little bit [BILL CONTINUES MANIPULATING TRACKS], and then there are a variety of other things you can do with this. You could assign a chorus, you can assign an auto-pan, auto-filters, a variety of ways you can set this up.

Now in the next video, I'm going to show you how to set up your effects, how to not rely on the DJ mixer for everything you want to do to your audio and cut up your audio live on the fly. Also, I'll get into a little bit of looping and how to do really cool intros to your mixes in ways that other people might not normally do, but for now I'm Bill Holland and you are watching Gearwire.Com the BCR2000 and Ableton Live.