I played a show not too long ago on cdj-1000’s for the first time and I trainwrecked. The bpm’s were matched up but they were still off beat. I have a show tomorrow night that’s on cdj-1000’s I’m kinda scared tbh. Idk what was the problem or how to fix it. So if you guys could help me with that, i would greatly appreciate it.
What I’m asking for:
-Why do tracks not beatmatch if they are at same BPM. for an example. I have one track at 140, another at 140 -2% Pitch bend and the track with 140 -2% is going slower or faster.
you have to match by ear. there’s pretty standard increments you can eyeball percentage wise but there’s generally a wide enough range that qualifies as a specific speed that you’re going to need to narrow it down by ear in your headphones, and probably tend to the decks a little too, as you go.
i forget what the range on the 1000s is like but i know that on like 6%/10% range there’s about two to four ticks percentage-wise that qualify as any particular bpm on my 2000s, you have to find the right one.
my friend is telling me .7% is a BPM. is there anyway to make all the bpm’s the same on my computer than burn them. I know how to beatmatch by ear, as I use traktor/serato, but it’s the track slowing down or speeding up that messes with me.
there’s a way to do that (use ableton) but I’m 110,000% sure that unless there was something tragically wrong and broken with the CDJs that you were playing on that they were not speeding up or slowing down on their own. you’d be surprised how quickly a very small inaccuracy can drift when you’re beatmatching.
likely you’re not hearing them speed up or slow down on their own, you’re hearing the natural drift of a very subtle tempo difference.
also: the standard increments are tool but not a rule. the percentage is based on the original speed of the track. 1% of a drum and bass track’s tempo is not 1% of a house track’s tempo. average percent difference for 1bpm for d&b would be around .57%, .8%ish for house. what i meant was with practice, you’ll start to recognize ‘magic numbers’ that start showing up for you when you’re mixing between different speeds.
I’ll be playing dubstep mostly. trap and moombah a few tracks. I friend told me an easy way to find where to match is to once you transition start next song on the 32 beat. than mess with the pitch to find where it should be. is this correct?
okay after watching some tutorials it seems the best way to make sure its on beat is:
-set cue to first beat of song (do that always anyways)
-set pitch bend faster than the other song.
-hold down cue and than beat match.
That could work but it isn’t the only way to do it. The important thing is to use your ears, which you don’t seem to be doing based on what you’re saying here.
Yes there is but please don’t do this… This is probably ok with songs close to each other in tempo (though still not ideal as you’re probably converting mp3 > WAV > mp3 to get it done), but unacceptable with songs with widely divergent tempo (you mentioned dubstep and moombahton for example) unless you’re trying to do something intentionally weird. But you’re much better off learning to beatmatch while performing rather than doing it ahead of time and saving your songs at the wrong speeds.
If you learn to read the pitch increments, rather than the actual BPM display, you’ll have a much easier time without listening too much. Eg: 128 + 1.6-1.58% is 130.
this is more or less the process to beatmatch, yeah, but the important part is listen to the tracks playing together, find the drift, adjust the pitch, and continue until it’s close enough.
you need to keep your ears focused even when you’re well into the mix and adjust and re-sync the tracks.
This.
You need to learn to control drift before you can say that you can beatmatch by ear. It’s not just something you do at the beginning of a song, it goes throughout the whole set.
the bpm reading on a cdj isnt accurate enough for mixing, you need to fine tune by ear. i know that when playing stuff between 126-130bpm, .80% is 1bpm