Initial experiments

Well, it's looking good - I started out last night trying to do a simple beat-match & cross-fade in Ableton, and I chose for my experiment two tracks from a past set that I'd played one after the other. The first was a track called Cold Shoulder, the second a drum & bass track called Eternal Optimist. Initially Ableton thought that Cold Shoulder was 120BPM & Eternal Optimist was 127, and when I played them together it was a crazy cacophony. I read & re-read the tutorials, thinking, is there something I've missed? But no - the basic tutorials don't seem to be aimed at drum & bass tracks - the speed & variation in the drumming obviously threw off the warp's guesstimate of the tempo. So. Eventually I worked out you could alter the track tempo either by typing into the field or by clicking & dragging up & down. I left the master tempo at 120, which was the default, and altered the drum & bass track, dragging it *up* to 180. Bizarrely this seemed to slow it down, but I put the metronome click on & persevered, matching the beat to the click of the metronome. Then, when I had the track tempo at 180, I brought the master tempo up to 180 & found it was able to play Eternal Optimist at normal speed - BUT when I switched in Cold Shoulder it played it way, way too quickly, like a happy hardcore version.

I read up further on this. It seems DJs deliberately choose tracks that are within 10BPM of each other so that they don't sound too weird when you crossfade. With a wide discrepancy like that - Cold Shoulder was actually 124BPM & Eternal Optimist 170ish, you could either play the master tempo as the slower of the two & then when you get to the quicker track it sounds like wading through knee-deep marmite - horribly slow - or you can set it to the fast track speed & the slower track gets speeded up. Or you could find a happy medium & then neither track sounds right!

One option would be to use a short interlude of music or drums to link the two tracks, & do the fade during that, whilst adjusting tempo at the same time - either stepping it up for the new track, or trying to increment it gradually over a longer period, or as I did at the time, having beat-matched the two, I got the master tempo to come up as I did the gradual cross-fade from one to the other.

It's not quite a performance piece yet, more a demonstration of principles so I know I'm getting stuff right, but it's a step towards what I want to do.