I’ve been practising getting really tight beat-matching and it isn’t hard.
I noticed that when cueing another track there is a orange-indicator that moves around a center point, it seems that most (all?) the time when playing on the beat, it should be in the center.
I tested this by pressing the sync button and it almost always aligns to the center point.
If traktor makes it so easy by having this center point, it makes it real easy.
So for guys who are lazy and use sync, practice and train your ear.
YMMV
Since matching beats goes quickly when you train your ear and practice, I enjoy spending hours finding tracks that go well together and mixing them beautifully lol.
I honestly had no idea what the phase meter was until about 4 months into me using Traktor. I don’t see why anyone would depend on it anyways… It tends to be off a lot, but not to the untrained ear of course.
So are we calling moving the pitch slider until the BPMs on the 2 decks have the same number and then pulling the phase meter to the middle, manual beat matching? Cause if you ever get in front of 2 TTs and an old school scratch mixer you’re gunna be SOL. I’m not being a snob here - I love me some sync button. Just sayin…
Live drummers present a particular challenge. Even if I get a really tight grid over a 8 or 16 beat loop at the beginning of the song…the live drummer will “drift” all over during the remainder of the song. The phase meter can be a useful tool, but it can also lie to you.
Yeah live dummers, especially older disco etc can present a challenge, but again you don’t ned to rely on the phase meter to thell you this, just use your ears, and ride the pitch.
Even old school, there were stickers on the records on the radius of the “1” beat…and every song had BPM recorded for the mix in (and out) point for reference. No one (who actually cared) would come into a live club set with a couple of crates of new (to them) albums and try to thrown a set together on the fly.
I said I just noticed that phase-meter thing seems to align in the center most times when the beat-match is correct - and therefore it’s a bit of a cheat for lazy users.
