I’m a latin DJ playing all kind of music and rithmus (about 3 Gigs pro week) and i have been happily working with CD players for the last 10 years. I’ve bought a new VCI 100 + upgrade Traktor 3 and I’d got very frustated after some gigs so i’m now thinking about to send it back. It is not posible to set the in and out point of loops exaclty as within cd players(denon 1000). It seems that the loop points are somehow calculated from the beat. In case that you are mixing music like salsa in which you don’t get remixes from any music label you must get perfect loops from your set. However is seems not to be possible with traktor and vci 100. When I try to set the loop in and out with traktor, the position of loop in is somewhere moved and making live looping imposible. Do you know how to set up the traktor 3 to get the loops correctly?
Welcome to the boards Nestor! It sounds like you just have the loop set to snap mode. Go to the Loop details section in Traktor and click the ‘Snap’ button so that it isn’t lit up anymore. This will stop Traktor from snapping loops to the beat.
on the vci-100 there is an unlabeled section in the upper left of the unit titled Loop Function.
if you use the standard vci-100 .tks (the one that’s downloadable from the vestax site) the 3 white buttons on the upper left of the vci are mapped to the ‘Loop Set’ Panel in T3 (usually found on Page 2 of your Details Section) these 7 buttons are mapped to the active deck:
(on the VCI from the top down)
Set/In
Active
Reloop
the 4 black buttons to the right of those correspond with the 4 loop lengths you have set in the ‘Loop Set’ Panel .
to set a loop manually:
use the top two white buttons for setting loop points in (set/in) and out (active).
NOTE!!
make sure you do not have a loop length set , or T3 will automatically create a loop in that lengh. pressing one of the little black buttons to the right will toggle in and out of a loop length.
you can have ‘snap’ on or off, depending if you want your set in and out points to stick to the beatgrids…
since your music has such odd time signatures/changeups, you want ‘snap’ to be off…
use the 3rd white button for relooping the last loop set (when not in a loop)
use the 4 black buttons for changing up between loop lengths while within a running loop.
The earlier advice about unsetting “snap to beat” for cue points is good advice. I notice you say you are a latin DJ, and I was wondering if you are using a lot of live recordings? Traktor finds beats with the assumption that the beat grid is extremely regular, and for most electronically generated music snapping to the beat grid is the right thing to do. For live recorded beats and music the grid is more fluid and the tempo may change by small amounts throughout a song, which throws Traktor out and gives you the pain you are experiencing. Two ways you can solve this:
Set the cue points by hand, do all your tempo matching by ear and essentially turn off all the automatic beat-matching and beat jumping that Traktor offers. Use your skills to set accurate loop in- and out-points and live the laptop life with purely analog controls.
Process your tracks to “regularize” them, forcing them to conform to a regular grid. This is best done using Ableton Live which has a unique sound engine that automatically finds beat markers and allows you to move these markers onto any regular or irregular grid you like - adding or removing swing, tempo chances and irregularities. Beat-grid your tracks then export them as fresh MP3s with a new name that labels them as regularised. Using these regularized tracks you will be able to use all the beatmatching and loop tools that Traktor offers.
Better still, switch your entire setup to Ableton Live!
I was going to post the link to Ean’s beatgrid article and video, but it looks like it is broken. Maybe Ean or someone can get the post the right one. I think that would help nestor with his problem.