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:

1. Go to Preferences > Record/Warp/Launch and set “Default Warp Mode” to “Complex”. If you don’t, your music will sound kludgy.
2. Read the amazing Ableton Live Manual section on “Live Concepts” and “Tempo Control and Warping”
3. Mess around warping and playing some random audio tracks until you get a feel for it.
4. 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).
5. 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

1. 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).
2. Unlike the audio you’ve been playing with, you’ll have to click the “Warp” button (Live doesn’t warp videos by default)
3. 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.
4. Once you’ve got that starting point, click “warp from here”
5. 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:

1. Copy the clips into “arrangement view” so that they are both starting at the exact same point, in different tracks.
2. 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.
3. 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.   

1. 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?).
2. 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.
3. Open the video in Quicktime (or drag it back into Live…wooooahh) to make sure it came out okay.

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)

One of my visions is to see somebody DJ a karaoke night off turntables, mixing and scratching with synced video. It’s possible, I looked it up! The simplest way is with Serato Scratch and a $1500 Rane mixer. Ouch. But some clubs have these, so if I ever get a karaoke night at a clubby club… hmm…

Then there’s a $100 solution that doesn’t require any special hardware… Ms. Pinky / Max MSP.

Then there’s the free software / linux route: xwax. Which you can also use with Puredata using this thing. I fully expect to be in the company of tons of linux VJ nerds when I get to brazil. Maybe they can help me set it up. Woo!

xwax

Here’s how–for Mac, Windows, and Linux;

With kJams (Mac): Right click on videos, click “Export QuickTime” and choose a destination folder. You need to register ($40) to convert more than 10 videos at a time. Video quality is great.

With Power CD+G to Video Converter (Windows): Also costs $40 to register; not useful in trial mode.

With cdg2video (linux): you’ve got to build it yourself, no Ubuntu packages, only Gentoo ebuild. Free as in freedom, baby.

With PyKaraoke (Windows and Linux): There’s a “convert to mpg” option. Haven’t tested it, but if it’s broken they’ll fix it.

Now, there should be a way to do this for free on all platforms with VLC. VLC is supposed to be able to transcode any format it can play into a range of formats (including Quicktime, h264, etc). Plus it’s scriptable, so if you can convert one file, you can convert a whole library.

But I tried all the options I could think of and couldn’t get it to work. The resulting videos would play in VLC, but with errors in iTunes. Ableton Live must’ve picked up on those errors in its pre-analysis and wouldn’t even try to import them.

Right now I’m happy with kJams, so if anyone finds the magic parameters, let me know.

The problem is, part of me gets bored with it really quickly (beers, bars, kids, songs) and I want to fuck everything up a bit and take it to the next level. One thing leads to another, and we get progressions like…

Karaoke mashups…

Sing like glue for contest, win contest, learn like glue like really, really well and combine with other buy out riddim songs (like red red wine or two princes / nuttin no go so) into a sort of mainstream buy out medley. Start learning other dancehall verses for karaoke mashup purposes (like soul survivor / gun session or cham’s ghetto story over what happened to that boy or stupid stuff like Stay Fly over Ghostbusters). Then I worked out a super fun solo performance and was on the verge of going on tour with it.

Ableton Live – driven karaoke dance party…

Started with karaoke night in a fun bar. Songs like We’re in Heaven spur short, violent dance parties but there’s no way to cue or mix songs. So, I convert a bunch of CDG’s into videos and make a megamix in Ableton Live. Then you can do a fun DJ set that is built around people in the crowd singing, and maybe even rock Autotune.

KaraokeCrime will be an umbrella for exploring these threads and others, with videos and howtos. Hopefully I’ll be able to involve some other karaoke explorers, and it’ll never stop. Uau!