If I said Ableton Live were like a Swiss Army Knife you might expect this article to be a laundry list of features.  So, I’m not going to say that.  A plethora of features doesn’t win the day.  Functionality and usability do.  Live is an elegantly designed audio program, built in such a clever way that it does a number of things well. Digital DJing is one of them.

I will run through the basics of what Live is and how it works.  Then I will describe two different setups for playing out with Live on a laptop.

Live: What It Is, What It Does

Live builds on the concept of musical "Clips" and provides a rich and original environment in which you can have your way with them.  A clip can be any sound stored in a Live-readable file. In my examples each clip will be a complete song.

Live provides two different views of its current project or “Set.”  The linear Arrangement view provides a relatively conventional left to right timeline while the Session view is more immediate and provides instant access to all of the set’s clips.  Although there is nothing stopping you from DJing with the Arrangement view, my examples will use Session.

In terms of gear and additional software, the sky is the limit for an Ableton Live DJ kit.  There are all kinds of MIDI controllers, mixers, audio interfaces and control surfaces you can use with it.  It supports popular plug formats so you can have myriad effects on board or external as well.  These things are all optional.  If you have sound files, a laptop and a working copy of Live, you are ready to plug in and play.

Set Up #1   Simple/Less Expensive

Less is more.  Actually, it isn't.  By definition, it is, in fact, less, but that doesn't mean it's without its advantages.  Ableton Live Lite 4, the feature limited version of Live I got with my Korg keyboard, won't do many of the cool things Live 6 (the current version, as of this writing) will but is a perfectly viable option for digital DJing.

Here is the gear line up for the first system:

• Laptop (a modest one is fine)
  
• Ableton Live Lite 4
• Stereo mini-plug to stereo RCA Y-cable
• Two RCA to 1/4" female-male adapters

The laptop fits in your backpack.  The software came with your keyboard.  You got the Y-cable at Target.  Total cost: $1300, including the keyboard—assuming you took my advice and didn’t drop a ton of cash for a fancy laptop.  Life is good.

Did you notice anything missing?  I didn’t list headphones.  That is because digital DJing frees you from cueing.  When you import your tracks into Live they will each get tagged with a tempo.  When you play your set Live will adjust each track to the set’s master tempo.  Live calls this process Warping.  I will return to this subject later.

The beauty of this system, besides the price, is that it is simple.  There are no compatibility issues to speak of.  I/O couldn't be simpler.  Assuming you know your way around a computer you have a grand total of one piece of software to learn.  Let's take a look at it step by step and then move on to the more complicated kit.

Assuming you have Live Lite 4 set up and ready for you a screen like this will greet you when it is launched.

I will import my tracks’ files through Live's file browser on the left of the window.  Here I will grab some AIFF versions of tracks I want to work with and drag them into slots in either audio track.  Keeping things very simple for this demo I have two techno songs on Track 1 and a hip-hop song on Track 2. 

Live Lite 4 for does not support MP3s or drag and drop from outside of the application.  These songs are purchased MP3s.  To use them in Live Lite 4 I converted them to AIFF.  In the second example, where I use Live 6, this step is not necessary.

Each of these songs is now a Clip.  To check the settings for any clip in Live, click on it.  A wave representation of the clip and a run-down of its properties and settings will appear in the bottom pane of the window.

To keep the window clean and minimize distraction (I have ADD) I am going to delete my MIDI tracks.  I'm only DJing complete songs so I have no use for them.  I could run software samplers or any other MIDI instruments in these tracks, but that’s for another day.

As with other “lite” audio software, Live Lite 4 limits your track count, which in turn limits your options for organizing your material.  If I can’t divide up my tracks by artist, sub-genre, what effects I want to apply to them or by some other whim, I might as well set up the two default audio tracks like decks. Taking this approach I can put my songs in slots on each track in the order I intend to play them, from top to bottom, with the intention of switching back and forth between the tracks.  This is fine so long as I never want to play more than two songs at once, since only one clip can be active in each track.  Keep in mind that I can re-order clips within a track, move clips between tracks or add a third audio track (Live Lite 4 allows up to six audio and two MIDI tracks) at any time, before or after I start playing.

Warp! Warp! Warp!

Live's time stretching scheme is called "warping."  The meta data tags Live uses to manage the relationship between time and beats within the track are called “warp markers.”  The Dec. 2006 issue of Sound On Sound has a workshop article about warping in Ableton Live that covers the subject nicely.  Among other things, it addresses how warping works with kinds of clips I don’t touch on in this article.  I am only writing about one rather narrow way of using Live and one of many possible scenarios for warping.

Without getting into all of the intricacies, let me say that warping works really well.  At it’s simplest, you can have one warp marker at the beginning of a track and drag beat markers onto the beat later in the track to correctly set the tempo.  Once this is done Live makes syncing two tracks easier than falling off a bike.  The BPM number in the upper right of the window is the master tempo all warped clips must follow.  When you activate a clip the moment it begins to play is delayed based on a global quantization setting.  The default setting is one bar. 

In the case of DJ’ing, this combination of warping and quantization means that without changing any settings, properly warped tracks will play in time and new tracks you start will enter the mix at the beginning of a bar.  No headphones.  No dragging your thumb on the platter.  No counting to four over and over in your head.  For punks like me who never actually learned to beat match vinyl properly this is either a godsend or an extremely lazy way out of developing skills, depending on your point of view.

Set Up #2   More Powerful/Flexible/Expensive

Here is the gear line up for the more involved system:

• Laptop
• Ableton Live 6
• Turntable
• Presonus Inspire 1394
• 6-pin to 4-pin (PC) or 6-pin to 6-pin (Mac) FireWire cable
• Headphones
• 2 stereo RCA cables
• Two RCA to 1/4" female-male adapters

A little longer, isn’t it?  Still, it isn’t particularly burdensome, considering what you can do with it.  Know any acoustic bass players?  They’ll still think you’re lazy.  I included headphones this time because of the turntable and the fact that Live and the Inspire 1394 support a traditional cue mix. 

What did we gain with the increased cost and complexity of this setup?

First, we are running the full version of Live 6.  This provides unlimited track count, Racks (a powerful effect and instrument grouping feature), extended drag and drop, MP3 support, and support for dual core CPUs and Intel CPU Macs, to name a few.  Currently, Live 6 costs $120 to $600, depending on upgrade eligibility and whether you purchase the boxed version or the download.

Because of the added variables I’m not going to estimate a total price for this setup.  The centerpiece is still the laptop and I still suggest a modest one.  Of course, a bigger-better-faster laptop is bigger, better and faster but you probably don’t need it. Playing back audio files (even several at once) isn't particularly hard work for a modern computer. 

In my mind, the most important hardware upgrade from the "minimal" system is the FireWire audio interface.  Compared to the audio hardware built into a typical laptop it provides much more and better I/O, allowing for a cue mix, etc. and better sound quality.  Almost any outboard interface will provide better D-A conversion and a cleaner analog signal that the headphone jacks on a laptop.

I left out the option of a USB and FireWire mixer that includes an audio interface.  These include the pricey Allen and Heath Xone3D, which is specifically designed for use with Live, right down to having a huge Ableton logo on the face.  The comparatively conventional and simple Mackie d.2 can be fitted with an optional FireWire card for a final price of about $1000.  These devices allow you to “have it all” in that you can go as far as you want with integrating digital DJing with conventional mixing and decks. 

If you are happy doing a lot of your work inside Live it makes more sense to invest in a basic audio interface.  This route does not mean leaving the analog world behind.  Presonus, Digedesign and others make interfaces with phono level inputs, including the Inspire 1394 listed above.  You also have the option of plugging an analog DJ mixer into the audio interface.  This means more cords and another device to wrangle, but it’s an option. 

Live 6, AutoWarp And As Many Audio Tracks As You Can Stand

For the Live 6 example I dropped some Enduser, DJ Reversive and other tracks straight into audio track slots from the Finder of my Mac.  All of the songs were MP3s.  All of them were automatically warped when I dragged them in.

Autowarp is a natural extension of the basic warping described previously.  Live does it’s best to detect both the beat of the song and changes in tempo and have the track ready for you to use.  In reality, it is prudent to look the track over and make adjustments.  As you can see, Live wasn’t entirely sure what to do with Broken Target. 

My limited experience bears out what others have said about auto-warping.  It works pretty well with house and other music with very regular beats that drive the amplitude of the audio signal.  It has more trouble with breaks, which makes sense.  What makes a break a break is syncopation, which messes with your perception of the down-beat which, in turn, tells you when a new bar starts.

Live 6 also ignores audio below a certain volume when auto-warping.  Very quiet recordings (perhaps home-made ones—professionally mastered audio tends to be relatively loud) may need to be normalized or otherwise gained-up if you want Live to process them for you.

The Delta 9 song I imported was tagged at 110 bpm.  In reality, this is a 220 bpm hardcore track.  The beat and bar markers are all on beats and bars, but everything is doubled.  Mixing with the other songs it sounded fine without me adjusting anything, but technically it was wrong.

In this article I have scratched the surface of what a DJ can do with Ableton Live.  I’m probably the only person who ever purchased Live with the intention of ReWiring its samplers (Simpler and Impulse) to another DAW, giving relatively little thought to clips and warping.  As counter-intuitive as that decision may seem, it did allow the DJ side of my musical personality to lead the way when I did start pulling longer files into Live and warping them.  Now that I have it and am becoming familiar with the process I understand why people get excited about Live.  It’s way, way better than any Swiss Army Knife, even the one with 38 different tools and a crosscut saw.