You bought a vocal in F♯ minor. Your track is in A minor. Ableton wants a number in a box and gives you no help whatsoever working out which one. This page answers that in one line — and then asks the better question first: does the sample need transposing at all? Often it does not, and nobody tells you.
Set the key your sample is in and the key your track is in. The number is what you type into the Transpose field in Clip View. Press play and you will hear the sample against your track's chords — raw, then shifted.
—
| Shift | Result | Notes outside your key | Verdict |
|---|
What you are hearing. The sample is rendered fresh into an audio buffer in whatever key you select, so it genuinely is in that key. Shifting it changes the playback rate exactly as Ableton's Transpose does in Re-Pitch mode — which is why large shifts sound like a chipmunk. That artifact is real, not a simulation, and it is the reason section 5 exists.
Start here if you are new to this: set the sample to C major and your track to A minor, and look at the number. It is zero. Those two keys contain exactly the same seven notes — C major is the relative major of A minor — so a sample labelled C major drops straight into an A minor track untouched. Half the transposing people do is unnecessary.
No thinking required. Find your sample's root down the side, your project's root across the top, read the number. It is always the shortest of the two possible shifts, so it never asks you to move more than six semitones. Your current selection is outlined.
This grid assumes both keys are the same type — minor to minor, or major to major. If your sample is major and your track is minor, use the calculator above instead, because the relative-key shortcut usually gives you a better answer than raw root-to-root arithmetic. Green cells are free or nearly free; red means you are asking a lot of the algorithm.
The Camelot wheel that DJ software prints on everything, with the actual key names on it. Click any segment to set your project key. The lit segments are the ones that mix with it without a fight.
| Move | Means | Effect |
|---|
Why adjacent keys work. Two keys one step apart on the wheel share six of their seven notes — they differ by exactly one. That is not a convention someone invented for DJs, it is arithmetic, and it is why the calculator above will often tell you a one-note clash is worth leaving alone.
Splice tags are wrong often enough that it is worth checking, and plenty of material has no tag at all. No software here can analyse a file you have not given it — but the manual method takes two minutes and always works.
Play your sample on loop in Ableton, then click these one at a time while it plays. Eleven of them will grind against it. One will disappear into it — that is your root. Sustained notes and the last note of a phrase are the easiest places to hear it.
Then major or minor. Once you have the root, play both triads against the sample. The one that vanishes into it is your answer; the other will sound sour on its third. If neither is comfortable the sample is probably modal — try Dorian if it feels minor but bright, and Phrygian if it feels minor and dark.
Two shortcuts worth knowing. A bass line usually states the root on the downbeat, so a sample with bass in it is far easier to pitch than a vocal alone. And if the sample ends on a long note, that note is the root roughly nine times out of ten.
Every semitone you move a sample damages it slightly. How much depends entirely on what the material is.
| Shift | Vocals | Melodic / chords | Drums & percussion |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Free | Free | Free |
| ±1–2 | Essentially inaudible | Inaudible | Inaudible |
| ±3–4 | Character starts to move — noticeable on a lead vocal, fine on a chop | Fine | Fine, and often desirable |
| ±5–6 | Obviously processed. Needs Complex Pro with Formants on | Usually still fine | Fine — this is how you get a different kit |
| ±7 or more | Find another sample | Thin going up, sluggish going down | Still works, but it is a new sound rather than the same one |
If a clip is set to Re-Pitch, or unwarped, pitch and speed are locked together like a turntable. That means every tempo decision is secretly a key decision, and vice versa. This catches everyone at least once.
—
| Transpose | Speed becomes | A 94 BPM loop becomes | A 120 BPM loop becomes |
|---|
The useful direction is backwards. If you need a 94 BPM sample to sit in a 126 BPM track and you want to repitch rather than stretch, the calculator tells you that is +5.07 semitones — so a sample in F♯ minor arrives in B minor, not F♯ minor. Work that out before you write eight bars of chords in the wrong key.
Most of this collapses into one habit. Work out the key of anything you import, immediately, before it becomes part of an arrangement you have grown attached to. Everything else on this page is arithmetic, and arithmetic is easy — it is only ever hard because it gets discovered too late.
Demo audio is synthesised and rendered fresh into a buffer in whichever key you select; the transposition is genuine playback-rate repitching. Formant correction here is a filter-bank approximation rather than Ableton's algorithm.