Question about Beatmatching and Tempo

[TheSpiral]

Hello,

First time poster and... well I haven't been reading a long time either. Anyways, I've been in the audio/music business for a while, but I just started Digital DJing with Timecode Vinyls and Serato.

Okay, I haven't seen an answer to this so here goes:

I'm beatmatching a 120bpm track and a 122bpm track.

120bpm is playing, I start beatmatching 122bpm.

I adjust the turntable Pitch slider so that 122Bpm matches 120Bpm. Great. It works. 122Bpm song is now playing at 120 BPM.

Next song is 125 Bpm. I now have to Adjust the 125 Bpm song 5 Bpm instead of just 3 because the last song was slowed down 2 Bpm.

See where I'm going with this? If using the Pitch slider to Beatmatch, it appears to me as if the slowing down is additive, so that in this scenario the whole set stays at 120bpm and By the time I'm in the 128-130 range, It's ridiculous to try and use the pitch Slider.

Am I missing something? What is the trick to avoid this?

[wattersb]

when mixing from 122 to 125, that is a very low percent difference. the audience wont hear a difference in temp change over 4 measures or so. When both songs are playing you can either adjust the tempo of the master track (if using sync) or adjust the tempos of both tracks.

If that is too much, you can just go up three bpm during the verse or a buildup for the chorus of some sort.

In theory you should start out lower tempo, then go higher, eventually dropping back to low. This is the overall goal rather than keeping everything at 120 bpm.

Hope this helps!

[Xonetacular]

Am I missing something? What is the trick to avoid this?

There are two pitch sliders.

[riotto]

Also remember that the song playing doesnt have to be at a static BPM the entire time. For example lets say the song playing is at 122 BPM, and your cue'd up track is at 125, you could use the pitch adjuster on the song playing to gradually raise the BPM to maybe 122.5 or 123 ( I find most people cant tell the difference when a song is gradually raised up to 1 BPM, this usually works best during a breakdown with no vocals ) and then beatmatch the cue'd track to 123. Having a gradual raising of BPM throughout the set will give a perceived energy boost as time goes on. So in this case maybe start your set at 120 BPM and at your peak go up to 128 BPM

[Karlos Santos]

Once you have matched the 122 track to the 120 track, slowly up it back to 122 or even 123. Now when you bring in the 125 track you dont have to slow it down so much.

When the 125 track is playing at 123 you can slowly (as the track is playing) up it to 125 if the next track is 125 or higher.

Theres no law about sticking to one BPM as long as you arent making big BPM jumps within one of 2 tracks if you want things to flow. The crowd wont notice.

[TheSpiral]

Ah! Okay, Thanks so much for the help guys.

I thought that perhaps you would just slowly raise/lower the tempo of the tracks in a way that is not noticeable but I wasn't sure. Thanks for confirming that that is a perfectly viable solution

Thanks again for the help!

[guiltyblade]

There are two pitch sliders.

Lol exactly what i was thinking.