Traktor Pro: Is there a way to visually determine bars and phrases
Sup Everyone!
Just wondering if anyone has figured out a way to visually see how many bars are in a particular piece of a track. I know that if you hover the mouse over a part in the song it will tell you how many bars are between that point and the point of the song thats playing or cued up. But im wondering if there is way to be able to tell how many bars are in that break down coming up or is that outro 64 or 32 bars, while the song is actually playing?? I like to spin all kinds of music, especially together, so i cant always rely on assuming the basic phrasing rule of thumb for a particular genre of music. If anyone has got a technique they use for being able to tell how many bars are in a certain piece of a track i would love to hear it thanks in advance!
None that I know of. You just gotta know the song, there is the phase meter and it does section out the songs in the stripe, but that’s as close as you get in Traktor I think. It’d be an interesting algorithm to locate and identify the ‘building blocks’ of a song and lay it out in a grid over it, that would be the start of skynet…
You could always mark song up with markers and use the different ones to make a system that would help you visually identify the phrases and the bar count.
like > flag for start of a phrase
< for the end
| for 8 bars
Seeing as you can have up to 32 hotcues, I’m pretty sure that if you wanted to mark up the song in 8 bar increments using the different types you could definately get a system down to visually see the phrases. Only problem is it would take a while to mark up all the song.
that’s the most annoying thing about Traktor imo… the fact that it scales the waveform down in size so that it fits into a fixed space within Traktor. This means that a 1 minute tune looks exactly the same length as a 10 minute tune… impossible to accurately judge visually when a breakdown/whatever is coming (like you can with vinyl, to a degree)
I don’t typically have trouble finding breakdowns in the stripe. There’s a pretty big difference in the intensity of transients clearly visible in the waveform. I’ve also taught myself to watch the rate of the waveform tape for a few measures to estimate if a big change is coming 16, 32, 64, or more bars away.
Basically, use your ears and learn your music. If Traktor can feed you information about phrasing and what’s happening next, it won’t need humans control it. It will probably achieve sentience and enslave the human race.
Except it measures from cue points, and only works from the current position.
You need to set it in your Deck Display under preferences. You select one line to be Beats from Cue. I have mine set so Beats in Phrase is zero cause I don’t like counting measures.
If you hover over the wave form summary display (at the bottom) it will also tell you how many bars away from the current position, but I haven’t figured out 100% how to read it.
The way I do it is to know the approximate length of a phrase at the BPM of the tune, eg for dubstep 27 seconds is 16 bars. Then you just use the minute markers to get an approximate idea of the phrase points
It only needs to be approximate because the music allways makes it obvious when you know roughly where it is
if you use the prefs-option → Global View Options → Stripe View Fit _> Record u will see adiffrence between songs of diffrent lengths (only works in scratch mode)
i vote you go old school and just get to know it.. one of the many beauties of dance music is that they stick to 16-32 bar phrases, and when you look at the waveform it’s pretty clear where these phrases are just by looking at breaks in the waveform. experiment and you’ll get to grips with it
I always do it in terms of the song length, and then compare the two decks.. ie if i have a 6.29 song and a 4 min song, if the breakdown of the second looks slightly smaller than the first, then i guess they’re the same length (usually 32 bars)
I spin a lot of funk, hip hop, and r&b as well as all the edm stuff. For all my non edm music I like having cue markers at the beginnings of verses, hooks, and bridges so when if I glance up quickly I have a rough estimate of time before I’m suppose to drop in the next track.
I throw a 16 or 32 bar loop saved in my tracks so i can easily visually see how big the loop is on the wavform display. that makes it really easy to judge how many beats there are in a given section.
Having visual markers that arnt cue points would be nice though
You set it in one of the Preferences, it’s toward the bottom. Unfortunately they won’t let me have anything fun at work so I can’t check here.
But yeah, just make sure your cue points are where they need to be and put the Beats to Cue in the deck details.
And, well, I chalk this up to the same conversation as the beatmatching / sync conversation. You need to know your songs, but it’s one thing to know your songs and another to have a detailed and complete break down of how many beats are in the breakdown, while trying to reference how many beats are in the build up of the next track. It just makes life a whole lot easier.
And, well, when you’re working on the fly with a new release you haven’t had a chance to really study life becomes a WHOLE lot simpler.
thanks in advance! 
