Traktor Pro BPM

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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1

Traktor Pro BPM

I’ve been using Traktor Pro for a while now, and love it with my VCI-100. However, some songs have the BPM reading way off.

I sometimes cheat and use the sync button (that’s what it’s there for!) and sometimes mix ‘manually’. This can be a pain in the butt if the BPM is way off in the first place though.

Also, I use BPM-linked effects and they sound plain wrong with the songs where the BPM reading way off.

What’s the best way I can control the BPM readings? Ideally, I’d like a programme which is SUPER accurate in calculating BPM, and then somehow ‘tag’ the BPM onto the track so that Traktor will then open each track at it’s correct BPM.

Is there anything/any way I could do this? Any advice hugely appreciated, as always!

2

There’s a couple of things that I’ve done that have worked for the odd song that it can’t figure out.

1: Reanalyze the BPM (although this might be a version thing).
2: Manually set a Beat Grid. Ean did an excellent Youtube clip quite a while back on Youtube, which explains it about as easily as possible. If you get the beat grid sorted, the BPM will be accurate.

3

Dunno how accurate it is but i’ve used this http://www.mixmeister.com/bpmanalyzer/bpmanalyzer.asp

It’s free and once it’s analysed your track it writes the bpm info into the tag. Then import it into traktor and i’ve found that once the tracks are in traktor the grids usually need a tiny bit of tweaking and theyre sorted.

4

How painstaking is amending the beat grids?

Bearing in mind I got into Ableton as a DJ tool and enjoyd it until the warping of every track bit came along!

Don’t mind doing prep work for a DJ set, as long as it doesn;t bore the death out of me!

5

watch the videos, there are plenty of tutorials on it and it’s really not that hard. Takes maybe 30s per song.

DJTT did some good ones and so did DJ Professor Ben (djproben on here) so just hit up youtube.

6

Search beat gridding. lost of discussion along with direct links to the videos mentioned above have been posted.

7

If you don’t have the patience to go over every single track in your collection to verify that traktor set it correctly, and if not, correct it yourself by ear, then you don’t have the patience to be a DJ.

You will get all kinds of good insight, and cool ideas for track transition when you listen to your WHOLE collection with the intent of aligning beat grids and setting bpms. You will listen to tracks that for some reason or another are not tagged as one of your favs in your BRAIN. And you go, damn I forgot I had that one.

I have 5 gigs of DnB, and I had to MANUALLY beat grid ALL of it, Traktor is notoriously bad with DnB.

It took me the better part of 4 days, from breakfast till dinner, and some late nights as well, to get it all done.

Sometimes it got boreing. Sometimes it got mind numbing. But the way I sound when I play, and my ability to navigate through my ENTIRE playlist, I have the confidence of KNOWING Traktor is giving me the right information, outweighs this by huge margins. I can sync ANY two DnB tracks in my library and they will be in beat. They might not be the right feel for each other, but they wont be train wrecking.

I’m lucky I didn’t have to spend two years with my collection on a non-digital setup to get the same ability with THAT collection.

Your track collection is your’s. No one else’s. So make it your own. Make love to it, spend time with it, sleep with it. Think about it when your at work, think about when you exercise. Your ability to “rock the party” with YOUR collection is going to be a skill you will hone for the rest of your life.

You will always have room to improve, and you will never reach a perfect method.

But as long as you strive to be better every single day, than you were the day before, you can ensure you will always be on the road to getting better.

DJing is not all fun and games. It is not playing your most massive tracks back to back to back.

It is a lot of hard work. It is BEING HUMBLE. There is a lot of HOMEWORK.

The reward is, for the vast majority of our ranks, almost entirely personal.

We don’t do this for money, or for fame, and those that have it now will tell you they never would have dreamed getting to where they are now when they started. It comes to then naturally because they do it for the right reasons, and in many instances, they get lucky.

But let me tell you something about luck. The harder you work, the more you put in, with ought expecting anything in return, the LUCKIER you get.

8

Good reply. Forgot to add I’ve been DJing for the past 11 or so years using vinyls originally and then moved onto a digital setup. I also listen to a LOT of music from all genres and don’t typecast myself, hence why I have a 160gb iPod that’s always on.

Thanks though, good post!

9

Yeah, sorry for coming off like an ass talking down to someone for starting in digital >.<

Props on the vinyl, you obviously put your time in.

Just equally the digital world needs its time put in.

Sure you can “emulate” what would take a lot longer to learn on vinyl, but to really match, or surpass you analogue fellow, you really need to put that time in, and make it your own.

Thanks for the positive reply! :smiley:

10

It depends on your tracks. If you have a lot of housey tracks with weird intros, it might fail on these, but Traktor does really well with standard 4:4 EDM. I only have to fix a very small handful of tracks. Weird how Abelton is really bad about syncing up long tracks. I full agree with you… warping every track just sucks. Totally takes the fun out of the hobby for me.

11

ScratchLive

Ironically, I still use Serato|Scratchlive (which I switched from due to iTch dropping balls) to do my BPMing…with iTunes and it works GR8.