hey so i have a traktor kontrol s4 and I’m a heavy sync user but want to develop the beat matching skill. So I set my tempo faders to 8% range (which I don’t really understand the ranges etc, if somone could explain) but the problem i have is whenever I try to match tempo’s with other tunes my matching is always 0.01 bpm off and no matter how slightly I push the tempfader I can’t seem to get the EXACT same bpm. Any tips on if I should change my tempo fader range and what these ranges mean and how they effect the fader?!
The pitch range is the amount the tempo or pitch can be increased or decreased…sped up, or down. So at 100% you can speed up and slow down the track by a large amount, but because the range is so high, you will have a very hard time beatmatching.
Now, the lower the pitch range, you said 8%, you will not be able to speed up and slow down the track as much, but you will be much more precise. This is because you have much more area to work with to match, whereas at 100%, you lose almost all degree of accuracy and sacrifice it to a greater amount of tempo change.
I think I got rambling, hope it is clear.
Once you play with it a little, you will see.
As for the .01, this is the exact reason I don’t use the BPM reader in traktor as it will rarely be accurate to the T. Think about it. If you were mixing with just vinyl, or CDs, not software, you would be in the same spot .01. But you would never know this just by listening…it’s just that you can SEE the .01 difference.
My advice, turn off BPM and phase meter and close your eyes and listen.
You could also set up two buttons with 0.01% pitch change (one for +0.01, one for -0.01). I have set this up on my Denon DNSC 2000 (which has a 100mm pitch fader) as I was struggling to get a as fine as I’d like. Sometimes I’ll make up to 4-5 adjustments using the buttons. At short, the fader is just not quite accurate enough. Although the S4 is suggested to have a better resolution than the DNSC 20000, I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to beat match on a 70mm fader @ 8% using the fader only.
I haven’t owned cdj’s before, but had 1200’s (100mm fader) for about 10years. It is substantially easier to beat match with the Denon and the 0.01 -/+ buttons set up.
Hope this helps
edit It goes without saying that you should turn the phase meter, BPM and tempo displays off. Don’t use visual on-screen cues (e.g waveform) to match either.
In terms of beatgridding I don’t adjust Traktor’s auto grids. I enjoy manually phasing even if I’m using sync.
don’t get bugged up on numbers and figures, if your bpm is that close you should just need to nudge the jogs to make it sound matched for at least 20 seconds.
Try to match without any visual aids, in the end that’s what you will learn most from!
there’s alot of good youtube clips that show different techniques!
I have never seen that method done in real life anywhere, but with that said, there is no right or wrong way to beatmatch.
Heck, if it’s really that quick, I’m going to give it a try.
I would disagree with this slightly, because with Traktor, your tracks are analyzed and beatgridded and allow you quantization to a level you obviously can’t achieve with vinyl, and only with rekordbox analyzed tracks with cd’s (not saying that players with hundreth’s playing cd’s will drift substantially, just that once they are gridded they will obviously drift less). So if you have two tracks at the exact same tempo, and in phase, you will find that they will almost NEVER drift if beatgridded properly, and if they do, it would be at miniscule amounts. So ‘beatmatching’ in traktor is essentially just putting two tracks into phase, which while you can gain some insight into beatmatching by doing, will never really allow you to train your ear to match two tracks minus waveforms and quantization.
What you CAN do, is play the tracks at slightly different hundreth’s or tenth’s of bpm’s and practice keeping them in phase. Or delete the beatgrid, turn off the waveforms and counter and have at it!
Sure, that’s one way and it works quite good actually!
While I have been using the cdj 1000mk3 and get to known the workflow I know that approx 0.8% speed change is like 1 bpm so using the bpm counter in cd player, which is relatively correct for atleast regular dancemusic you can set pitch to the same bpm directly.
Maybe this is why you haven’t seen people do it that way, because people rely on bpm counters to get close and then just fine tune a bit with pitch fader and have a nudge at the jog.
Thats the way I learnt many years ago. Brush the edge of the platter to slow or pinch the spindle and twist to speed up. Then adjust the pitch to suit.
Well in this video they have it running fast first and slow it down but sometimes I found it easier to do it the other way when learning
