So you’ve figured out how to pull your CDG tracks into Ableton. Now it’s time to do something awesome. And even if you have no interest in karaoke mashups as such, this is a great intro exercise to some basics of being a DJ or KJ in Live.
We’ve already gone over how to import CDG tracks into Live. It’s just drag-and-drop (or better for video playback continuity, copy/paste). But before we can do anything interesting with clips in Live, we have to make sure they’re warped right. Warping is a way of telling Live where the beats fall in the song, so that it can automatically sync it with other songs.
Before we get started:
- Go to Preferences > Record/Warp/Launch and set “Default Warp Mode” to “Complex”. If you don’t, your music will sound kludgy.
- Read the amazing Ableton Live Manual section on “Live Concepts” and “Tempo Control and Warping”
- Mess around warping and playing some random audio tracks until you get a feel for it.
- Start with simple, straightbeat techno-y songs, then try some rock songs, then try some new hip hop songs with weird beats (those are usually the trickiest).
- If you really want to wrap your head around warping, download some acapellas and try matching those to instrumentals.
Now, time to warp your tracks
- Drag two tracks into the “Session View” (the view where clips appear in columns with their own play buttons, you can hit “TAB” to switch views).
- Unlike the audio you’ve been playing with, you’ll have to click the “Warp” button (Live doesn’t warp videos by default)
- You’ll also have to choose the start point by hand. Just drag the start marker close, then zoom in and find the spot where the song starts. Conveniently, lots of karaoke songs have those four metronome ticks at the beginning, which are easy to see. They also are almost always recorded to a perfect rhythm.
- Once you’ve got that starting point, click “warp from here”
- Double check and make sure it’s good. Depending on the song, skip straight to the first verse.
TIP: if you do warping in the arrangement view dragging the start marker will scrub through the video so you can look at the words on the screen to see where the video starts. This is handy during performances too, but it will confuse the singers, since they’ll see the lyrics of the song you’re queueing up.
Now line your clips up over each other:
- Copy the clips into “arrangement view” so that they are both starting at the exact same point, in different tracks.
- The video playing (i.e. the lyrics) is always the “lowest” clip in the arrangement view (in the example below, Stay Fly is the video that’s playing). You probably want to mute this track.
- Play the video to see how it comes out. The lyrics should be in some kind of sync with the music, though you may need to tweak where each song starts. Just drag the start markers around until it looks right.
Exporting your video (to Youtube, etc)
You’ll need Ableton Live 7 or later to export video, and the free demo version doesn’t let you save or export anything.
- You need to select the region you want to export first. This is an annoying thing about Live that stumps many people, who export their work only to find two bars of nothing. Drag the start and end points of those black brackets sitting above your clips so that they fit around the range you want to export. (see how the brackets are encompasing just a small section in the screenshot above but the whole thing in the screenshot below?).
- Go to File > Export Audio/VIdeo, make sure “Create Video File” is turned on, select “Quicktime Movie” as the output, and click OK. This will make both a video file and a WAV file of the selection.
- Open the video in Quicktime (or drag it back into Live…wooooahh) to make sure it came out okay.
Ableton Live does not have built in CDG support. But since Live 6 it lets you import Quicktime videos and play/manipulate them. There are some big limitations, but you can do the basics of KJ’ing no problem. The hard part is converting your CDG tracks to a video format Live can work with.
Here’s a quick guide on how to do that: How to covert karaoke files to video (Mac, Windows, Linux)
Pick one of the methods above (the one I can vouch for is kJams, see:Best Karaoke software for Mac) and try a test video. Once you’ve converted the video, import to Ableton Live by dragging it into the main window, where it says “Drop Files and Devices Here”.
If the file appears in the list of clips, you’re good. Now hit the “TAB” key to switch to Live’s “arrangement” video (more on this later) and drag the video into the main middle space (in this view, it isn’t marked “Drag Files… etc”).
The video should appear as another colored rectangle, and if you hit “Spacebar” in Live (or press play in the top row of buttons) a video window should appear and the track should start playing.
If you can’t drag the file into Live. Or if the video is garbled, that means the file is in a format that Live can’t work with. Go back and try one of the other tools in the guide above, or try tweaking that tool’s options. (The goal is a an h.264 video file in an .m4v wrapper. If the video plays in iTunes, it should work in Live.)
Note: Live 6 lets you work with video, but only Live 7 and later let you export your work. So you can perform with Live 6 but you will need Live 7 for making Youtube videos, etc. Since Live 6 was the last version with a stable crack for Mac (at the time of this writing) this is important to remember.
And Live is not a KJ application, it’s a universal music swiss army knife. So lots of basic features for queueing singers are not things you’ll find in Live, or you won’t find them in the obvious place.
Here are some tips that will let you run a karaoke night using (exclusively) Ableton Live:
- To keep track of requests: Create a track in the session view called “playlist” and list your requests there, searching and copying them from your bookmarked folder of karaoke videos using CTRL/CMD-C and CTRL/CMD-V for copy and paste respectively.
- To queue a song: Copy it to the arrangement view. Use the “CTRL/CMD-F” key (”Follow”) to skip ahead to where the playback position is.
- Don’t always use Warp: If warp doesn’t work, or if the song is a dramatically different tempo, don’t bother using it. But remember, if you don’t use it you won’t be able to segue to the next song.
- Don’t worry about mixing everything. Lots of times end-to-end is totally okay.
- To minimize stuttering in the video: See this post on Dealing with large libraries in Ableton Live
- To change the key of a song: Find the “transpose” knob in the “Sample” section of “Clip View” and tweak it!
Live gets even more useful when you run your microphones through Live. Keep reading: Running mics through live for compression and live recording.
There are lots of good tutorials, some of the best come with Ableton (the manual, and the included tutorial files that demonstrate basic concepts in the app itself with instructions).
Definitely read the manual, particularly sections on Concepts, Session View, Arrangement View, Clip View, and Tempo Control and Warping. And here are some tutorial’s I found with a quick look around:
They’re both pretty basic, so have a look, try some stuff out, and then dive into Ableton’s own tutorials. The things you’ll need to get a handle on are:
- warping
- crossfade
- zooming / moving around in the clips and the arrangement.
- adding effects
- moving between clips in session and arrangement views
- recording
(this is part of a my upcoming tutorial on KJ’ing in Ableton)
Once you have a video playing in Live, you can start converting your whole library (it will take a while). If you just want to make mashups and megamixes for performance later, I would recommend converting the videos as you need them.
But there’s no practical way to convert videos on the fly during a set, because Ableton’s video window disappears when you change focus (by far the most annoying limitation for people using video in Ableton). So if you want to run your karaoke night out of Ableton Live, or have your whole library available for use in a live performance, you’ll need to convert the whole thing.
Some tips:
- The best tool for this is kJams for Mac, but you’ll have to register it to convert more than 3 files at a time.
- Annoyingly (due to the disappearing video window constraint) you’ll have to browse your karaoke collection within Live, and Live will only see the video file names. So make sure all your filenames are consistently “Artist – Title – Album”. kJams is a good tool for this.
- Test songs as you’re going, since it’s possible your converter tool will have better success on some songs than others.
- Time how long each track takes to make sure conversion is practical. If it takes about 1 minute per track, 60,000 tracks is 1000 hours! If too slow, try a different tool or find a faster computer.
- Check the average size of each video to make sure you have enough space. Videos are about the same size as the unzipped CDG and mp3 file.
Once you’ve got your whole karaoke collection converted to video, it’s time to tweak Live so that your collection is easy to access. First, for a basic primer, read the section “Managing Files and Sets” in the Ableton Live Manual (no seriously, read the manual, it’s one of the best ones I’ve ever seen and not the least bit intimidating).
To see your karaoke library:
- Click on one of the 3 numbered folder icons in the upper half of the left sidebar.
- Browse to the directory where your karaoke tracks are
- Click the down arrow next to the directory name, and select “Bookmark Current Folder” from the dropdown menu.
- Click the “search” icon to the right of the folder name
- Start typing a search term, and hit enter. On your first search, it will take a while as it indexes the folder. After that it will be faster.
- Drag a track into your “set” (Ableton’s name for your working document) and you’re good to go.
Important: One of the drawbacks in working with video in Ableton Live is that, while Ableton is super-optimized to never interrupt audio playback, video is not a priority. So sometimes when displaying or searching through very large lists of files (like a karaoke collection) or when adding a new file to the set, the video playback window will temporarily lock up. This sucks for karaoke situations, because 99% of singers will just pause and look dumb–even when they know all the words to a song by heart. In my experience, this problem is worse in Windows XP than on a Mac, and Ableton 8 seems better than in 6 and 7.
Here are some tips to avoid video playback lockup in Ableton:
- When adding tracks to your set, use your copy/paste keys rather than dragging. When dragging, the video playback problems happen as soon as you start hovering over your set with the file you’re going to add.
- When Ableton displays a huge list of files (50,000 karaoke tracks, say) video will lock up. Avoid this by bookmarking one directory and putting karaoke files in a subdirectory. That way, if you accidentally close the search window, it won’t display the full list and lock up video playback.
- In the preferences, under “File Folder”, make sure “Automatic rescan on each search” is turned off. Only rescan when you add new songs, since scanning/indexing is one of the things that locks up video playback.
- Try using a later version of Live, or a different OS. Mac is better than Windows on this stuff, and I would guess that Vista is better than XP.
The first official karaokecrime.com show happened in Providence last Thursday at Matthewson Street. The Dance Troupe raised a ton of money for their tour, and the danceparty / performance was awesome.
I’m posting the karaoke megamix exactly as I ran it last night. Ableton crapped out on me yesterday before the show, so I didn’t even have time to mix it. But whatever, I’m posting as is while I’m excited. My favorite part is the “Go DJ” verse over “Love is Gone”.
Makes me teary. Still lookin for a good way to post 10 minute plus videos that are fair-use heavy. In the meantime:
KaraokeCrime Megamix 1 (Quicktime)
Published on
January 5, 2009 in
Dance Party, Karaoke Setup, Karaoke Software and Mashups.
Tags: ableton, ableton live, abletonkj, cdg, cdg2video, karaoke, Karaoke Software, kjams, Mashups, powercdgtovideo, pykaraoke, video, vj.
Mp3g is a funny combination of music file and anigif. If you want to play karaoke on your iPod / iPhone, or if you want to use DJ/VJ software to run your karaoke set (more on that later) the first step is to convert your collection to normal video files.
Here’s how–for Mac, Windows, and Linux;
Continue reading ‘How to covert karaoke files to video (Mac, Windows, Linux)’
Published on
January 1, 2009 in
GETTING STARTED!, Karaoke Setup and Karaoke Software.
Tags: ableton live, abletonkj, Karaoke Software, kj, kj as vj, live, mashup, vj, vocal effects.
Coming soon… oh god, it’s so good.
