First and foremost, I am proud to say I have started the process of switching over to Traktor from VDJ. Looking forward to learning a lot more.
My question for you guys is, when it comes to hip-hop (or any other kind of music) do you guys set limits in traktor as far as what the highest BPM you want or do you just leave it as is? I just finished transferring my music and it’s showing BPMS up to 190. In vdj, it use to cut off at 160. Is 160 still too high for hip-hop? or do I just let it be? What do the rest of you do? Thanks in advance.
It’s probably whatever the reading is giving you (190 or whatever) divided by two. Otherwise, I /think/ there are top and bottom range limiters built in, but I could be wrong.
I understand that part, my thing is i find myself going from 80 bpms to 160 bpms, and back down, etc. I know I can limit it, I’m just trying to figure out a way to keep them grouped a bit better. That’s why I’m wondering if you guys ever use the bpm limiters, and if so, what are your min. and max. bpms? (pertaining a little more to Hip-Hop than other genres)
i suppose the only time you would change this is if you have an idea of about what the bpm of a new track is and you want to auto set the grid and have it be really accurate, so maybe you make the max and min a couple of bpm apart
but i cant see that ever happening. hell, i just thought of it right now as i typed the first line.
See with that is that your max is more than double your min, which means that you’ll have the same problem as the bloke who posted this thread, some tracks have a chance of being double or half their actual bpm. Your average dubstep track could register as 70 or 140, your average hip hop track could register as 90 or 180 bpm. As a result of this traktor will screw up and massively pitch bend tracks to sync them even though the tracks are at the same bpm.
I keep mine to 100 to 200 since my tracks tend to be between those. To be honest I find myself treating downtempo tracks as if they are twice the bpm habitually so it just means traktor’s readouts are reflecting how I count it. It also has the benefit of making my beat jumps skipping the roughly same period of time whether or not the track is 80 or 140. 32 beats at 80bpm is a hell of a lot larger portion of the track than 32 at 140.
My preferred range is 78-155, though you might want to go lower with some hip hop, maybe 70-139? I like to spin dubstep so I’d prefer those songs say 140 rather than 70 but your mileage may vary… But yeah keep the range no more than double or you will get unpredictable results.
I play everything from occasional hip hop to drum&bass so i have my limits set from 70-190. This doesn’t normally cause too many problems and doubling or halving the bpm is easy, and if I’m analysing a bunch of new D&B and it decides half of it’s at 131bpm (which happens quite often) it’s not hard to change the limits to 150-190 or whatever temporarily.
side point, if you’ve only just started using traktor beatgrids I suggest you watch some of the videos from DJTT and others on beatgridding tracks, they really help.