Playbeat: Easy way to make a pattern play at double or half speed?

I am curious if there is a means to have a pattern play back at twice or half of the session tempo in Ableton Live. For example, I am making a drum-and-bass trak. I like many of the “trap” beats in oracle, but their native tempo seems to be double what I expect for Trap (e.g. 65-75 bpm). This is natural, genres like trap, jungle, dnb etc. can be heard and interpreted as having BPM’s that are 1/2 or 2x what someone else might decide is correct, and it is still “correct” but in this case, not convenient. I want to play the Oracle beats at a tempo of 150 bpm, that’s considering the backbeats to be on beats “2” and “4” of a measure. Right now, I get backbeats on beat 3 of each measure that goes by, which is another way of saying is too slow - half-speed - for the track. I thought about recording it out at twice 150 bpm, but Live has a max BPM much lower, can’t get to 300. =-) I also did try recording the loop at my track tempo and then playing the resulting audio clip back at 2x audio playback speed (tried it both before and after warping) but the processing artifacts from such a big speed change are degrading the sound quality. What do y’all think? (Welcome tips from anyone reading this, of course!) Thanks for any time you have for my question, and happy beat-making oops I mean Playing
-JD, SF CA

Ahhh I found the answer, or one answer at least, which is to first press the ALL button to enable changes to all tracks, and then change the time basis per step, or whatever we want to call the center selector of the five to the right of the ALL button, which expresses the portion of a measure assigned to each step across the sequencer rows. Default appears to be 1/16, and changing it to 1/32 gets me double-time; changing it to 1/8 makes it half-time. Easy! And this invites experimentation too in that I can see setting different rows to use differing time steps is as simple as selecting the individual row or rows to modify. Well, maybe this post will help another user someday.

Hello jakdawgus,

Exactly, you can change the time/measure for the sequencer or even for each of the individual tracks.

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