The Overview part 2 of the AbletonLive6 tutorial includes a demonstration of altering a pre-recorded clip of speech. It stretches out the work "optimism", and alters pitch etc , all in real time. I very much want to do this type of alteration to various 'found sound' clips I have recorded. My computer is packed up due to remodelling so I can't try it yet. But my questions are: 1) are any VSTs or add-ons required to do this? or will live6 be able to do this "out of the box" ? 2) can syllables be 'sustained' or stretched out without sounding granular? In the demo, sometimes it sounded granular, other times it sounded pretty much like the original . I want to do both.

Hi...let's answer those questions: - NO PLUG-INS required; that's all part of the regular Live 6 experience! - Sound 'quality' depends on the source material, the warping algorithms, and how far you stretch it. The further you go, the grainier it gets...it doesn't worry me too much if I'm working in the way seen in the movie, although it can make things sound 'samey' if you do it too much. Hope that helps!

Hi Martin, thanks for the reply. Looking foward to trying this. If I want to stretch out the sounds farther with less or no graininess, are there VSTs or effects that I can look for to use with Ableton to achieve this? Things that have been suggested are "phase vocoder" , and "granular synthesis", but I've never tried them. -Qua

Qua, You could download the Melodyne demo...that can do some amazing things with vocals...it's not so real-time oriented, as far as I know, but that's the trade-off! Get it from www.celemony.com

Hi again, For what I currently have in mind, 10sec of clean sounding stretch is probably enough. That might be a lot for AbletonLive. Do you have an idea of how long you could stretch a sound in Melodyne? seems that I recall reading about it, and that the limit was perhaps as much as ~30sec Also, maybe this should be a separate topic, but do you know of any good Forums where I could learn more about "sound design" ? thanks! -Qua

BTW - when I refer to stretching a sound , I mean stretching a particular syllable within a sentence, not stretching the entire sentence to fill a longer time frame. E.g. I may want to create something like this: "How now brown cow" -->> "How now-w-w-w-w, br-r-r-rown, cow". -Qua

Forums...I don't know these personally, but try www.osxaudio.com, www.futureproducers.com, www.audioforums.com. As far as stretching goes, I posted something online which I just did with (first example) warp markers, and (second example) the Melodyne plug-in demo. Second one sounds more 'realistic'. Here's the link to the 1.6mb aif: http://homepage.mac.com/mindlobster/hownowstretch.aif On the first one I was fiddling with a gate to try hiding some of the giveaway warping artifacts.

Hey Martin, thanks! that .aif was very helpful ! The Melodyne plug-in definitely produced a cleaner result - which is what I'd want for what I have in mind. I look forward to your Live7 tutorial , which I'm sure I'll get when its available .