Issues with pitch adjustment granularity

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

Issues with pitch adjustment granularity

Hi all,

Complete newbie here so please go easy. I used to use Traktor Studio 2 for DJing with my laptop and was pleased with the ability to right-click on the pitch control to get fine adjustments that would let me get the beatmatching pretty much bang-on. I have now taken a step into the present and upgraded to Traktor Pro 2 on Windows 7 and I even purchased a Numark Mixtrack (not Pro as I already have a very good sound card).

Now I am finding I am not able to get the beat match anywhere near as close as I used to be able to. I am enjoying the use of hardware to mix, but am frustrated that I am constantly riding the tempo bend controls to keep everything in time. I am aware that I can adjust the pitch range on Traktor but to get the fine-grained control that I am used to I need to set the range to 2% which makes it impossible to mix tracks that are any more than 3bpm out.

Now my question is: are there any alternatives to Traktor that are likely to help? I would like to try Serator DJ Intro as I am aware that Serato is famed for accuracy and reliability but I cannot even try it out unless I get a controller with an in-built audio card. I would like to avoid this as it may be a waste of time if there is no difference and I already have a very powerful audio card that I do not want to replace.

Also, I know that I can use Syncing but beatmatching is half the fun for me and my old-school friends.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Cheers,

Stephen

2

The problem isn’t Traktor, but your hardware. It’s about MIDI.

You are using a standard MIDI controller, which only allows 128 steps between the bottom of your pitch fader to the top. Hence the lack of precision.

You might want to look at a controller with hi-res messages such as the S2.

3

OK, thanks for the help! So do you think if I switched the Mixtrack Pro with Serato’s tight hardware integration that I would get around this issue?

4

No, it’s still a standard MIDI controller sending the same standard lo-res MIDI data, regardless of the application.

5

Right-oh. Thank you very much for your help!

Stephen

6

You could map two buttons to fine increase/decrease of pitch and use that to nudge it into the correct position once you are as close as you can get using the shitty pitch fader.

7

Have you tried changing the pitch/tempo range? the smaller you make it, the more precise the pitch slider will be.

8

Ah! How do I do this? I cannot see any mapping by that name. This sounds like exactly what I’m after!

9

Hey, thanks for the reply. Yep. This is pretty much where I am right now. The only issue as I mentioned earlier is that this then only gives me the ability to match tracks that are within 3bpm of eachother. And I am considering processing all of my tracks to bring them within this range but it seems a bit drastic.

10

3 bmp is drastic.. I don’t think any company would make a controller that has a problem like that.

Maybe try downloading a new mapping from the controller mapping thread

this may help

On another thought thou… are you trying to mix 2 tracks together with a large bmp difference like dubstep to d&b?

11

Tempo is the function you’re looking for.
Another alternative is to map the jogs to control the pitch (tempo) during playback via a modifier.

12

OK, how do I map Tempo so that I have a more fine control of it than I otherwise would have? I cannot see ‘Fine Tempo’ and Tempo is already mapped to the pitch fader and is not fine enough so I’m lost as to how I can match it in this way

13

if u get it that close just hit the sync button…problem solved

14

So, lethal_pizzle, I ended up taking your advice and buying the S2. Couldn’t be happier! Pitch control is now perfect :slight_smile: Thanks for the help!

Stephen