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The "transpose" knob in Ableton Live 9 only allows transposing down 48 semitones, which is 4 octaves.

In order to best approximate what a bat hears, I'd like to transpose down 6 octaves, which is 72 semitones. I could record one track into another, and then transpose that one down again. But I'd prefer to find a way to do it, you know, live. That way I can see how different songs sound with it.

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  • You could route it through an audiotrack and use a pitchshifter I guess.
    – user7616
    Commented Mar 1, 2014 at 23:27
  • If anyone knows how to do this, it is gbsr.
    – ObscureRobot
    Commented Mar 1, 2014 at 23:46
  • Is that a joke, @ObscureRobot? This answer gives me basically nothing to go on. There are no pitchshifter effects built in. Where would I get them? This was the first thing I thought to do, but how to accomplish it is not clear to me.
    – chadoh
    Commented Mar 2, 2014 at 3:21
  • I was commenting on the minimalism of this answer compared with the rest of gbsr's ableton-related output. Google 'gbsr' and 'ableton' for more.
    – ObscureRobot
    Commented Mar 3, 2014 at 3:57
  • That said, you can probably use grain delay to do pitch shifting. There is a ton of "hidden" stuff in Live, gbsr knows where most of it is.
    – ObscureRobot
    Commented Mar 3, 2014 at 3:58

3 Answers 3

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I am not sure sine I haven't tried this, but you can map the cliplauncher to your keyboard. So, if you were to map that together with the semitones, in theory you should be able to pitch way longer than the normal -+48 semitones. this would then work live as well since the cliplauncher is for the track in general, not a set clip. This way you can resample and repitch on-the-fly.

what you do is that you go in to midimap-mode, select the stop/play-button on your track and hold down the first note, and when you keep holding it down you press the second note; this way it maps a range between these two. As I said, not sure how far this range stretches, but this together with the semitone mapped should probably be enough.

There is a possibility that it is using the transposition-knob in order to do this pitchshifting though, in which case you are out of luck. but hey, worth a try. At the least, that's realtime pitchshfting in a live-setting for you ;9

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Do you have M4L? If you do maybe try this patch:- http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/347/pitch

You could also try doing this with grain delay plugins, but YMMV...

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  • The effect that you linked to is pretty awful. It destroys the signal even when not pitch bent at all, and only allows bending up. I'd love to hear more about how to accomplish this with a grain delay. I don't have any fancy hardware (just a $2000 computer, you know?), and all the tutorials I've seen about using grain delay say to hook it up to a pitch bend midi control, which I don't have.
    – chadoh
    Commented Mar 2, 2014 at 3:38
  • Sorry, that one only does pitch up - did you do a search there for pitch shifters? This one seems to do the trick if you use three in series set to down shift by 24 semitones - max fft window gives the smoothest result but you're adding delay into the signal path so there's a trade-off. Grain Delay can do it by using two and setting -36 for pitch. You'll need to play with the frequency, delay and feedback till you're happy with the result, but the first one sounds smoother...
    – ghostgum
    Commented Mar 11, 2014 at 0:39
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This (from Twitter)

Hi! A simpler (works also with sampler) in combination with a Pitch midi effect will do the job. Good luck.

Screenshot here: https://mobile.twitter.com/PJGriscelli/status/439900681105719296

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  • The linked image has provides no answer to this question.
    – Rory Alsop ♦
    Commented Mar 5, 2014 at 14:35
  • Actually it does...there could be more explanation, but the solution he's suggesting is to load the track you want to pitch-shift into a Simpler or Sampler instrument in Live (pretty easy, create a default/empty instrument and drag the audio into the window). He is using the MIDI pitch effect but basically, if you use your computer keyboard to send a midi note or create a clip with a midi note that triggers the sampler, it will pitch shift the sample across the entire MIDI range.
    – he_artburns
    Commented Nov 8, 2014 at 19:26
  • Unfortunately, I believe Live uses the standard middle C = 60 Midi values, so the maximum you can pitch down would be 5 octaves below that, to 1
    – he_artburns
    Commented Nov 8, 2014 at 19:26

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