dumb question about beatgridding/matching incompatible songs in tractor 2.5
Hi all,
I have been playing with Traktor since DJ studio 3, but I have a problem with not understanding beatgrids properly.
I have no problem matching up songs that have similar bpm, but what about when you want to put 2 songs together that have vastly different bpm, either one is way too fast or too slow to work properly.
I know a little bit about drumming/percussion so what I want to be able to do is use a cross rhythm or some sort of 6/8 pattern to make songs go together when they don’t want to ??
Also with lets say a Bob Marley song- lets say I want to put it to a techno beat… I just can’t seem to get it to match using a grid, no matter how long I tinker and set grid markers and play around… so how can you beat grid something where the beat seems to slide or move?
Thanks for your wise words and patience all (p.s I do 3D animation and film editing so I guess I am a bedroom dj/music producer)
Putting a Bob Marley track to a techno beat would be something more along the lines you’d use Ableton for. In Ableton it would be easier because of the warping feature. Most well-known DJs will do that if they’re making mashups of popular songs. They’ll make them in Ableton beforehand and then play them in their set. I’ve never really tinkered with beatgridding songs that have varying BPMs because I play all electronic stuff. The trick, or so I’ve read, is to find a spot where the bpm is constant and beatgrid the track based on that section. Then when you want to fade the track in…you loop that section so you always have a constant bpm.
Not sure what you’re asking. The beat grid is nothing more than a metronome + a cue point, i.e. you’re saying “this song has a BPM of X and the first beat is at time Y”. If you take song A and apply a grid to it (and it grids up OK) and take song B and do the same, if you use Traktor’s sync it doesn’t matter what the relative BPM’s are they will sync up. You could sync 85 BPM hip-hop to 220 BPM speedcore and Traktor will happily put the beats in sync (how good it will sound is another matter).
So if you have a properly gridded Marley track and a drum loop you should be able to get what you want. The rub, I suspect, is “properly gridded”. I doubt anything by Marley (using that as your example) is going to grid up well. EDM is all computer generated so you type a BPM into your software/sequencer and you get exactly that. Real music played by musicians on the other hand, drifts because humans aren’t that accurate (although some are pretty damn good). Try taking any random disco track and try to put a grid on it in Traktor, it will lead to madness. To get a good beat grid you need to do something called warping, where you use software to flatten out the track so it has a precise BPM. Once the track is warped you can grid it in Traktor and then do what you want. Most use Ableton to warp tracks, but there are probably other programs out there that to it, and there are various tutorials floating around the web on how to warp if you are so inclined. Traktor (despite people requesting it for years) does not support any sort of warping so you need other software to pull this off.
Or instead of warping the track you could beatmatch the old fashioned way. I learned how to mix back at the tail end of disco when “riding the pitch” (pitch too high and use variable finger pressure on the side of the platter to match) was required.
Bob Marley and a lot of other older live albums were not recorded with metronomes, so the beats will not be aligned to a mathematical grid. You should get a copy of Ableton and get into it. It is really amazing. You can load that Bob Marley track and use a feature called WARP (stretches and shrinks the audio waveform) to line up with any beat.
Damn it sucked when you had to “ride the pitch” on a track with a long solid note instrument (like a string section). It would go down an octave when you touched the platter and I would wince every time. lol.
