1210 M5G pitch resolution
My pitch control seems to increment about 0.09 per movement… that seems to be its resolution. Its kinda annoying.
Lack of info about this on the interwebs as well.
The m5g pitch resolution is plenty good enough. If you’re having problems, it’s not the fader’s fault.
Also - per movement? How do you measure “a movement”?
To hazard a guess I’d say that the track is following the turntable, it is just the bpm on the screen doesn’t update to cover up the fluctuations of the bpm that happens with all dvs systems… When using timecodes you should be using your ears not watching the screen as your ears don’t lie but the screen can be wrong, also if using your ears you tend to make finer adjustments to the platter speed which leads to better more precise mixing… At least it does with me 
I am using DVS.
This is how I am measuring a “movement”.
What I am doing is I am loading a track onto traktor and then playing using the control vinyl.
Lets say my current track is playing at 174.91 bpm. I then move the fader a tiny little bit and wait, then see if traktors bpm counter has changed.
I repeat this until it changes. I don’t have to move the fader very far, it maybe moves 2 mm. What happens though is that the bpm increments from 174.91 to 175.0.
I am finding that i am having a really hard time beatmatching tracks which are only 1 bpm different at drum and bass speeds. I am doing this by ear, I can easily hear it drift but I am unable to move the fader in a way which allows me to lock the two decks together.
This means I am constantly pitch riding which I find incredibly annoying.
As an example I have a track, normal bpm is 172, I have it pitched up to 176.75. On the other deck I am trying to mix in a 173 bpm tune, the closest I can beatmatch it to is 176.70 or 176.80.
To me a 0.05 difference in bpm is easily noticeable to my ears, I can hear it drift after a few seconds.
I took out some old vinyl though last night and tried beatmatching it to the control vinyl, so DVS on one side, real vinyl on the otherside and I didn’t encounter this issue.
So that got me suspecting that it isn’t the turntable pitch control, it might be traktor can’t detect such small changes in pitch.
So at this stage I am a bit confused, is it the turntables? Or Traktor?
I know I am beatmatching correctly here.
If “a 0.05 difference in bpm is easily noticeable to my ears” is true, then fix the matching with your ears and ignore the screen…
Traktor although I don’t use it has the highest frequency timecode at 2000Hz, it can easily pick up changes in speed. If the bpm doesn’t fluctuate (that means bounce around +/-0.03bpm) then NI have probably made the bpm on screen less sensitive so it doesn’t bounce as this would cause more concern with users “you should search on the vdj forum about it” it makes no difference to mixing but everyone thinks there is something wrong…
I don’t think you understand that although I can hear the drift I cannot move the fader in a way which actually matches the bpm. In my example I have a choice of 176.7 or 176.8.
This is my complaint about pitch resolution. You are telling me to go fix it and I would if the tools would let me. I’m only using the screen to provide objective information about what is going on. I can beatmatch by ear, I learnt how to do that when I first started DJing.
Without objective information though you are unable to follow what I am talking about.
This problem does affect my mixing as I tend to do 2.5 min blends and therefore it is important for me to get the bpm right. Currently I have to pitch ride the fader constantly as I it keeps drifting due to this issue.
And the BPM does fluctuate about +/-0.03bpm for your information.
Welcome to mixing with vinyl. If you don’t like it, switch to CDJs or controllers. They don’t use physical motors the same way, so it’s easier to set a pitch and leave it.
When I actually mapped a MIDI fader to control pitch in TP, I could easly get within .01BPM by ear. On Vinyl, I can’t get that close, and no turntable ever will. It has to do with it being a physical motor. That doesn’t, for a second, mean that I can’t get perfectly smooth mixes, it just means that you have to babysit. If anything, the m5g required less babysitting than any other turntable I’ve personally used.
BTW, unless your beat grids are perfect, you kind of have to babysit with Sync as well…and CDJs are somewhere b/t sync and vinyl.
honestly I use the questionable turntables HDT 4.5 with the the most questionable software vdj with absoutely no problems beatmatching, The only other suggestion is set up your timecode config perfectly… there will be how to’s all over the internet. If that doesn’t work check all the grounds (especially the cartridge), if it still doesn’t work swap the headshells around to rule out a problem with the carts… if that still doesn’t work replace your vinyl… If all that is ruled out then you have a problem..
I get the same thing with TS, but i only find it a minor annoyance. I can get close enough that I can keep everything lined up with a brush on the platter or a twist of the spindle every couple measures, which is simple enough to bounce to. I suppose it would be more annoying with DnB.
That said, I also have rather beat up techs that are long overdue for an overhaul. One needs a new tonearm, and the pitch faders are in bad shape. If I could afford to fix em…
There’s your issue - it’s not the hardware that has low resolution, it’s the software.
haha, that’s a myth.
playback speed variations of vinyl are hundreds of times bigger than those of digital. this is not just due to imperfections of the turntable’s motor but also due to the imperfections of the vinyl itself. e.g., a center hole that is one-fifth of a mm off center (which is considered to be within the production tolerance) will lead to a very large wow at inner grooves.
Don’t know if I buy that. I’ll til’ Mostapha chimes in to make up my mind…
rgtb is right.
As a side note:
There is literally nothing I can find that’s actually better about analog audio than its digital equivalent except for tube guitar amps (though not solid state amps…digital modeling is better than analog solid state), tape saturation, and some level meters. With everything else, the more I read and hear, the more I’m convinced that digital is just plain better and that all of the analog wankers are just holding everyone back because they don’t understand how to translate basically the same practices from the analog realm into the digital one. I’ll give the analog wankers that a real SSL 4000G+ probably does sound better than any of the emulations (I’ve heard/used one…didn’t have a chance to AB it with any of the clones). But at any rate, it’s not $800,000 better.
I use the pitch fader completely to make all changes. Riding the pitch so to speak.
Why did I learn to do it this way? Due to another problem I find with TSP combined with M5G’s.
When you touch the platter to slow down or push the record to make it faster, TSP appears to be extremely sensitive to this and makes a huge pitch bend effect on the sound. One of my friends who still spins real vinyl and doesn’t use DVS, I introduced him to TSP and he had a really hard time with this effect.
The M5G’s have this torque compensation effect where if you touch the platter, twist the knob or push the label it will momentarily reverse what you did and speed up or slow down the platter in reponse to your actions. With real vinyl this isn’t bad but with the control vinyl and traktor I find that this makes it impossible to do very small pitch bends. Traktor detects your initial change to the platter (causing the aforementioned pitch bend audio sound) and then when the M5G does its compensation traktor will then overcompensate, leaving you with the track still drifting like it was before in the same phase.
Combined these two effects meant that I kept trying to make very small changes and if I was in the mix it would cause horrible pitch bending of the sound of the incoming track. Very unacceptable.
So it forced me to learn how to pitch ride. Riding the pitch was the only way I found to make very small changes to the platter and also not have the crazy pitch bend audio. Note that I don’t seem to face these issues when I am using real vinyl. It only seems to do this with control vinyl.
I blurted out this example because you seem to be thinking that the problem lies with my skill in beatmatching vinyl. That somehow that there can’t be anything wrong with the tools. This example is how I found a problem with traktor and then found my own workaround for the issue.
I no longer believe that traktor scratch pro emulates real vinyl perfectly. The pitch bend issue was the first thing to point me to that. Telling me that there is a 2khz control signal doesn’t tell me anything really because neither you or I understand what the software is doing with that 2khz control signal.
I am having a hard time finding a solution to the pitch resolution issue, the most information I have found about this issue is an old thread on serato forums. I can accept that this maybe a problem with my skill, however I would like to hear of other people’s real experiences with this turntable + tsp, rather than someone telling me to go home.
haha, that’s a myth.[/quote] rgtb is right. [/quote]
Well I’ll be goddamned… I stand corrected.
Actually I do know LOL
basically the whole record is pitch from start to finish, this is to tell the software the absolute track position when you do a needle drop, then the smart part about it is that the left and right channels are played slightly apart, this lets the software know the speed the record is moving and whether it’s moving forwards or backwards by calculating the disparity between the left and right channel…
The thing about the signal being 2000Hz means that it is recorded at that frequency, serato is done at 1000Hz therefore traktor has double the timecode resolution of serato…
Honestly I’m gonna leave this alone I don’t even use the software in question, If you want help with vdj’s config holla, cause I am being no help here… good luck
Whilst you have the general idea (and honestly anyone who knows how to use timecode will understand the basics), what I meant was that you don’t have the actual algorithm used to calculate these positions.
Without such intrinsic information you can only make educated guesses about what is really happening. We aren’t discussing the overall scheme of the system, we are discussing the nuances of the timecode algorithm.
Yeah…computers are kind of impressive. They’re a lot more precise than vinyl-cutters and motors.
I finally figured out wtf is wrong.
I was using 96khz in my audio settings. It is the one thing I never changed in all the tests I did, today, I downgraded it to 48khz and man it is like night and day in terms of easyness of mixing.
Its like all the difficulty I had before has turned it into ez mode