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Mister Speaker posted:Pretty sure that's it, it's useful to keep the BPM value in the Effects section accurate (although the mixer has pretty good BPM detection anyway). I think it's also for features like Fader Start. I never really considered effects making use of beats and phrasing/etc. That actually makes a ton of sense, even if the mixer has BPM detection probably best to just have source sync, thanks.
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Dec 28, 2022 00:20
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It's one thing I wish they would extend to the Sound Colour FX section, if only for the Dub Echo effect.
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Dec 28, 2022 00:21
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Ugh I’m dying why didn’t I just buy something in stock now lol
some kinda jackal fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Dec 28, 2022 |
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Dec 28, 2022 00:24
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some kinda jackal posted:Ok I’m going to double post I guess because a big wall of text is just as annoying as two posts in a row. Ethernet connection on the mixer is also so the "system" knows what songs where played or are "on air / live". Really useful if you want to go back and look at your tracklist of what you actually played (not necessarily what you cued or loaded onto the decks). At home I just use one USB stick and usually when playing out, but I bring clones of that stick or if it's gear I didn't know who owns then I'll likely use a stick in each player. Just for my own organization I have USB sticks for each genre (House, Drum & Bass, Top 40, ect..), I'll generally bring adjacent genre sticks along like the House to a Top 40 gig.
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Dec 28, 2022 01:50
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i like the sync button, fight me
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Dec 28, 2022 05:12
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i'm not ideologically opposed to sync but it's less fun imo and lol @ using it on an unquantized track in any case
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Dec 28, 2022 05:30
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I feel the same way. I don't care if someone uses it, but I avoid it as much as possible because it feels that much more rewarding to go without it. I use quantize though, because gently caress screwing up a perfect mix with slightly poorly-timed hotcue/loop presses (it is literally impossible to get this right). I've used it in some circumstances, like in a recent mix where I had to drop the tempo of two playing tracks simultaneously to bring in a third.
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Dec 28, 2022 05:50
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My gear doesn't have a sync button 
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Dec 28, 2022 19:42
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So spending time in Beatport or any other music service has made me realize I have no idea what the gently caress electronic genres even are. And I think I need to stop trying to figure it out before I go insane. This doesn’t bode well.
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Dec 29, 2022 01:01
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some kinda jackal posted:So spending time in Beatport or any other music service has made me realize I have no idea what the gently caress electronic genres even are. And I think I need to stop trying to figure it out before I go insane. This doesn’t bode well. I had a stroke when they changed techno into two sub genres: "rumbling/stumbling" and "tweeking/peeking" or whatever.
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Dec 29, 2022 02:16
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e: Leaving the weird story out. Have some new-to-me decks.
some kinda jackal fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Dec 30, 2022 |
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Dec 29, 2022 03:51
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When beatport combined their downtempo (which has an insane amount of releases and rereleases that make it impossible to navigate, we’re talking tens of thousands per month) with electronica (a real genre that didn’t have an insane number of releases, maybe thousands per month), I had to stop DJing electronica because it was impossible to find anymore. It was a dark period for me and I actually quit DJing for some time (years…?) because of it. gently caress beatport. They don’t have any loving clue what they’re doing and they’re riding the coattails of being one of the first digital platforms. They don’t even fix extremely basic bugs on their website anymore . Honestly I don’t even think they have a frontend team that works on the store anymore. I could go on and on. I still use them because wtf are we going to do? The alternatives simply aren’t much better from a holistic perspective. Sure bandcamp and Juno have some pros, but the cons outweighs them significantly. mitztronic fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Dec 29, 2022 |
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Dec 29, 2022 08:51
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Complaints aside, before I found this thread and Beatport, my iTunes was littered with a ragtag collection of lovely YouTube audio rips of old trance and ambient stuff I had no idea where to buy proper versions of. For some reason a service like this didn't even occur to me. Just under $100 later and I've replaced most of what I care about. Other than the genre mixer the only real problem I have with BP is that it's slow as gently caress at times. Switching pages on listings can take five or more seconds sometimes, like it's streaming the data off an old dusty tape drive sitting in the corner of a server room somewhere. some kinda jackal fucked around with this message at 12:29 on Dec 29, 2022 |
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Dec 29, 2022 12:26
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Genre is just a lens we view music through. It is vague and was always vague and therefore isn’t worth getting brainfucked by. I tend to ignore it for anything other than punching into YT music for similar music to what I like. https://youtu.be/qX-YfuVQmX8 Honestly it’d be way more interesting to see someone combine multiple loosely-related genres into one long track. That’d be both hard and new lol pollyanna it’s called an album you dipweed.
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Dec 29, 2022 17:45
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I mostly agree, but I don't think there's any way to just browse beatport (i keep citing beatport because that's the one I've been sitting in for a few days now) without guessing what genre you think your desired track is going to appear in. I kind of tongue in cheek complained about it, it's not actually anything that I'm losing sleep over 
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Dec 29, 2022 17:58
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Somebody please help. My baby is very sick. She’s not moving   Realtalk. Gang, I am so beyond overwhelmed right now. I can’t stop fiddling with things. 
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Dec 29, 2022 23:08
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I played (and photographed) a friend's birthday jam last night. It was a strange gig, in an Indian restaurant after service hours. I supplied my DJM900 and there was a pair of CDJ900s that had seen better days - one of their track select knobs was missing, so I pulled a knob cap off my DJM and put it on, only to get frustrated and pull it off because it wasn't handling the press function very well. But what was more frustrating was playing on one deck only. We got the gear all set up and one of the RCA cables was bad. I troubleshot it and tried other options, like using only one side of it and seeing if it carried enough signal to work as the S/P-DIF input, or to run in mono. No dice. The guy ran out to source a new cable but by the time he came back with one, my set time was basically over, I had less than ten minutes of actual mixing. It felt really loving bad. Embarrassing. I texted the guy and said "this feels like it's reflecting poorly on my skills as a DJ" and he just said "lol." He's a nice guy but that didn't feel great. Here I was playing to a new crowd who now have a first impression of me as the guy who played middle-of-the-road breakbeats and didn't mix and seemed visibly pissed-off. It's fine, I'll get over it, but it was a lovely way to cap off a year of depression and virtually zero live sets, feeling like this is the only type of gig I can pull anymore. 
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Dec 31, 2022 03:22
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Is there some way when midi mapping in serato to get a higher resolution for mapping the pitch? I'm mapping an encoder knob on an akai afx and the minimum change in pitch for each "step" seems to be 1 BPM. Would love to get that down to .1 BPM. e: eh, I guess the FX knobs are higher resolution so that can work, I'd prefer to use the beat knob but won't be using FX too much for this set so I can sacrifice one of those susan b buffering fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Dec 31, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2022 05:17
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OK own a complete collection now. CDJ 2000 mk1s, and a DJM-2000NXS The CDJs are a real treat. They’re old and crusty but still feel really good. So many controls I’m slowly getting familiar with, but the more time I spend in front of this setup the less reserved I am about hitting buttons worried what they’ll do and just experimenting without worry. There are a few things that are confusing me, like that green tempo lock has turned on of its own accord a handful of times for reasons I can’t explain, or when I load a track and try to jog to where I want to set a cue point seems to reset back to the start of the track as soon as I lift my finger off the jogwheel surface. All things I’m sure have perfectly good explanations but just confuse me as a newb. The DJM is really nice and feels every part a professional mixer but it’s hella too busy for me IMO. I paid nothing for it so I’m not seriously going to replace it with anything, but the big hot mess that is the effects section in the middle is so visually distracting that it takes me out of concentration sometimes. This is a “me” problem, not a mixer problem. Like I said though, I have some immediate workflow questions but I think it’ll be easier if I just record myself making mistakes so I can ask, rather than try to articulate what I’m doing and what I’m seeing the CDJs do like I did above, so I’ll try to do that this weekend if I can. I’m really excited to figure out a proper workflow and while I’m starting to piece this together myself it would be stupid of me to not make use of the braintrust here.
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Dec 31, 2022 06:30
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The cue point thing seems like its snapping to start cue. Does it do it if the deck is playing?
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Dec 31, 2022 06:45
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Have you tried holding down the Cue button while scrubbing the jogwheel? I rarely have to set manual cues because my library has them all built-in, but I seem to remember this being the way the legacy 2000s handled cueing. Hold the button, scrub to where you want it and release.
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Dec 31, 2022 06:49
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wtf 
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Dec 31, 2022 21:35
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1. I’m trying to keep identity theft to a minimum these days but it’s so difficult! 2. Thanks for the suggestions gang, I’ll play with the cue button to see if it will do what we may think on mk1 2Ks. It’ll probably be a moot issue once I go through and figure out where proper cue points are set in rekordbox. E: I think at least some part of the problem is that the springs on the jogs on my 2Ks have literally zero travel. I just tried service mode to see what’s triggering when I just spin the jog by the flat face and as I feared it’s just randomly buzzing between press and release. Thankfully it looks like opening the CDJ and getting to the springs is an easy 10 minute job so I’ll try that tomorrow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz67dtzVmrc some kinda jackal fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Dec 31, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2022 21:40
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While the djm2000 is not my favorite mixer or the best sounding it does everything very well and if I could only keep one mixer that would be it. Love the built in link, all digital signal path, effects and esp control of are great, sound is fine, and the best is the space: I love resting my hands all over, it's more relaxing. I also think I've mentioned I was most excited for and then most disappointed with the freq mix, the volume curve doesn't work for subtle blends which is what that's all about to me. A 4 band xone is still better at crafting long harmonious blends. I wish the mic input was on the rear or a secondary one there. If your production / creative minded the midi and sampler might be really cool; it's beyond me.
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Jan 1, 2023 09:31
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The DJM EQs are heinous! You don’t need a Xone/4 band EQ to do long harmonious blends but using software that lets you set sensible EQ curves is a huge deal IMO.
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Jan 1, 2023 10:33
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I did a little exploratory surgery on both of my 2Ks and I'm really glad I did. They both had a fair bit of sticky liquid bogging up the cue/play button caps, making the action annoying and gummy at best. Five minutes in an ultrasonic cleared both sets right up. The jog springs were as flat as I'd expect after ten plus years of usage, so I extended them by hand to give them some life until I can buy something appropriate to replace them. The jog platters had zero travel before whereas now they are what I'd expect, and I can positively predict when I'm going to engage vinyl mode. Only real casualty was one jog roller wheel that I found rattling loose on the inside, but I've already ordered a handful of replacements and it doesn't seem to really affect usability for now. All in all a great experience to get inside some old gear and it feels much more consistent Not exactly sure why extending the springs would fix this, but you can see in the pre-clean video that the jog down detection was really intermittent even though I'm applying fairly firm downward pressure (not sure it comes across as such in the video) and seems much more stable after cleaning.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmbKRHgZzY4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwKIR2VRKlg  But of course the real question is "did it fix my vinyl cue seek issues?" -- I'll give it a try this afternoon, and if not I'll try to post some evidence for thought. e: There was a surprising amount of confetti inside too, for a sealed unit. I guess it gets in around the platters, but hot dang it was like a party when I opened the units. e2: First impressions is that yeah, I think it did fix my cue issue. I can load a track with no cuepoints, then scrub to where I want and it isn’t just resetting back to 0. Presumably that was because the jog thought I had taken pressure off, previously. some kinda jackal fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Jan 1, 2023 |
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Jan 1, 2023 21:13
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Ok so 135 pages this has probably been brought up before but seaching “cue” is proving to be painful. I’m trying to think of a beginner friendly approach to setting cuepoints. I’m starting to settle into setting a memcue 8 or 16 bars on a track before I expect to bring it in, to give me a bit of time to beatmatch, then another memcue at the point where I actually expect to mix in, and set same set of points for one or two places I want to mix out. Unfortnately the 2000mk1 doesn’t respect rekordbox colour cues so as I start to get more and more accustomed to the CDJ workflow I’ll stop seeing a random collection of cues and more of a “fixed set”. Also entirely possible that I can just stop setting the actual mix/flip cues as I get more accustomed to the music phrasing itself. I gather the newer CDJs have convenience features like bar/beat countdowns to markers which probably make one or the other cuepoint unnecessary. As I get more comfortable beatmatching I can probably reduce from 16 bars to 8, but I guess that then requires updating all my tracks accordingly. That sounds like a problem for future-some-kinda-jackal though. But had my first experience mixing through a few tracks with these set memcues and I’m going to be honest — way more adrenaline and big grins than I ever had with vinyl, mainly because the conveniences made it so much easier (for me, at least)
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Jan 3, 2023 16:07
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Are you doing the cueing in the CDJ itself or in Rekordbox? I would recommend the latter, especially with legacy CDJs it can be tedious to scrub around and find exactly the right multiple of bars. It's definitely an excellent thing to know how to do in case you have to play a track that you forgot to pre-cue for whatever reason. But you can set up keystrokes in Rekordbox that allow you to jump around by a given number of beats. I may have gone into depth about it ITT before, but this is basically exactly what I do. (Actually, I do the cueing process in Traktor because I find its browser faster, the track readouts clearer and the keystrokes more familiar and customizable. Then I use RekordBuddy to copy all of that metadata to Rekordbox. But that's another story.) Basically yes you have the same idea as I've been running for many years. Except I like songs with long intros, and to use as much of that intro as I can. I find the first downbeat, and place a Memory Location there (in Rekordbox, the default strokes are to press C to relocate the Cue cursor and then M to place a Mem Loc where your Cue is). The first thing this helps you with is making sure the grid is on the downbeat; if it's not you'll know right away and you can press one button to put it there. Then I use a keystroke that's set to beatjump by some multiple of bars, usually 8. I quickly find out this way which songs follow the correct formula of phrasing - a LOT of D&B does, a LOT of House and especially Techno does not. If you end up 32 or 48 bars over and you're clearly at the drop, you're in the formula, if not you've got an extra bar or two to deal with, baby. If you've got a track with a drumless intro, just go backwards: Find the drop, then use the opposite keystroke to go back in measures of 4 or 8 or however many bars, to find an appropriate insertion point for your first Mem Loc. I'm of course joking about this 'formula' stuff but I like phrasing that locks together as it just sounds right to me and it's easier without worrying about reading bar:beat countdown meters or thinking about where you've got to loop which track and by how many beats - on one hand that's a really fun challenge once or twice in a set if you know the tracks off by heart, but going into that kind of thing blind is the kind of anxiety fuel that would just ignite a whole trainwreck for me so I tend to avoid it live. Like I said, D&B for the most part sticks to the formula, but a lot of House tracks, because they're at a slower tempo, tend to make phrases out of shorter measures, so you may find it useful to have a couple of keystrokes for various bar jumps or just go scrub to the correct point with your mouse. Techno is right out, I've complained about this before but it's why the Techno I like is very few and far between and closer to Trance or Progressive Breaks. There seems to be an outright lack of formula in lots of Techno tunes, requiring you to drop stuff on like, the third beat of a bar and poo poo, and I don't like that. If there IS a song that bucks the formula I usually put an extra Mem Loc or two around the point at which it does - that way you can look in the track timeline of your CDJ, and if you see a bunch of arrows bunched together you're indicating to yourself that there's something weird going on there. Anyway, that's the gist of it, you're already right there just maybe consider using more of the intros - or don't, if it's more your thing to drop something right away. But the first two Memory Locations are IMO the most important, and all you have to do to check a track's compatibility in the mix is use the Cue/Loop Call arrows on the CDJ to test the drop, and then go back to wherever you put your downbeat. I think you can have as many as ten, maybe 12 Memory Locations, per track, so don't be afraid to use multiple ones. Hot Cues themselves are wherever you want to put them, and despite using them a lot in my OPS mixes to make just about every mix either a double-drop or a clean mixout (or both), I almost never use them live, because even on Nexus models they increase the track loading time (or worse, you don't have Auto Load Hot Cue enabled and you press one taking you back to a track you already played). They are fundamentally visually indicators for me: Intro, Drop, Mix-In Point, 2nd Drop, although they are all entirely mutable. So place a bunch of Memory Locations in the software, and then based on how you think you're going to be mixing that night, put Hot Cues on top of whichever ones you want. Coupled with the natural rhythm you get from experience (in my case a big part of this is unconsciously counting bars:beats in some part of my head while my hands are elsewhere), and being able to read your waveforms and bar:beat meters to ensure everything is I know you're local, if you want I can show you this in person sometime, maybe we can even talk :files: Mister Speaker fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Jan 4, 2023 |
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Jan 4, 2023 06:00
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Dude I am in love with the writeup, thanks so much! Means I'm on the right track. Local, absolutely. I really want to get into D&B sets since that's 100% my fav genre -- you better believe I'm going to have to latch on sometime once I get the basics down. I've been prepping all my tracks in rekordbox. It's way easier at my baby beginner level to let it do all the prep stuff like analyzing the phrases (even if it is woefully weird about it sometimes) and just try to place my mix points based on what I see/hear at that point. The 2Kmk1s lacking basic large waveform for precision visual alignment and a beat-jump button (I gather newer units would be way better at this, having both) would probably be really overwhelming for me at this point. I thought I would use hotcues all the time but it turns out I haven't seen even the slightest need for them yet at my level. I can call cues and loops by hand just fine. If I ever get to the point where I want to juggle inside tracks maybe that's where they'll come in handy, but I went from "oh I need as many hotcue buttons as I can afford" to "I guess 3 will be enough" to "what's a hotcue" in no time. It'll be interested what other "oh I absolutely need that" features fall out as I get more accustomed to how this works, and then maybe start to rise back up to the top as I get better and more accustomed to the basics  So I'm making what you'd expect to be typical newbie progress where you ramp up from nothing to "hey I can do this" pretty well. Starting/stopping quick loops and juggling them between decks quickly is going really well, I've had some good success mixing tracks into themselves, and with cues set up now I've started to mix different tracks with fairly good results. I think my next hurdle is getting a feel for what tracks in my, still limited, library sound good together. I don't even mean mixing in key, just what sounds good and what clashes. My first attempts at expanding beyond two carefully selected tracks invariably leaves me mixing in something that has a big booming jarring beat into something with a simpler beat, for example, or just something that doesn't vibe with the preceeding. Probably something I can fix with EQ and strategic fader control and better track selection, but I'm honestly not too fussed about it at this point. I'm less than a week in and still working on expanding my library. The trap I'm hoping not to fall into is just going to beatport and buying random tracks because "eh I guess that sounds good and it's on the top chart" on impulse, but really think about what I want my sound to be. Genre is still a thing I'm kind of working around. I love trance, but I think prog house is something I enjoy too, now that I try to nail down what all the mixes I enjoyed over the years fall into. But the two don't always complement, so it's just finding the right sound. So far I'm absolutely loving the standalone workflow. Some of the niceties I wished the 2K had, like coloured memcue markers, have fallen off my radar once I started getting used to how I marked my tracks. I kind of wished I had the big waveform but as I realized I don't actually use the decks themselves to line up/create cues right now it became a non-issue. It would still be nice to see the cues approaching at a more granular level but I'm trying very hard to not mix visually but instead to do it by ear. The only place where the lack of a big waveform and beat stream seems like it would be a pain is if I want to mix in a track with no discernable beats in the intro. Like a quiet buildup into a beat that you mentioned. I can cue in at the right part without too much of an issue by beat jumping back in rekordbox, but making sure the beats are matched right at the start might be a challenge without stacked waves. So I guess I'd have to just be really quick on the jog to adjust. This all seems like it's a little advanced for me right now but I'm excited to try anyway To combat the "i don't know what sounds good together yet" problem I have a pet project to just grab all the tracks someone's mix I already like and know intimately, and see if I can replicate it at some basic level. I'm not going to do a 1:1 of Sasha and Digweed's Northern Exposure mix, but I can probably use it, or something like it (maybe something simpler), to at least work on mix with songs I already like without the pressure of figuring out a flowing vibe. @Virgil, quick Q for you on the DJM -- do you find the cue/master pot to be cue-hot? I may be articulating this in a dumb way, but if I have my cue/master pot at 12 o'clock, where I'd expect a 50/50 mix, I find that the cue feed overpowers master by a fair amount. I probably have to go to 30% cue before I feel like it's even. If I just cue the master out and bring both decks to 100% volume then everything sounds even and levels look about equal so I don't think it's my source material. Not sure if this is completely normal or if I've got some more learning to do on how this works. Either way, not a big deal since I just wobble around the pot all the time as I try to get a feel for both tracks, just something that came to mind. I'm not sure if other mixers exhibit the same behaviour, only have experience with the 2KNXS. I was also going to ask the thread for monitor recommendations for a small room setup, but at the moment I think I'm actually happy to not annoy everyone else and mix through headphones entirely. I still want to buy a pragmatic good/affordable pair for music production in general, but it's not a priority. A better use of my time right now is to hook up a cable to route mixer master outs to my iPad or laptop so I can record and check what it sounds like after the fact. some kinda jackal fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Jan 4, 2023 |
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Jan 4, 2023 13:38
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some kinda jackal posted:To combat the "i don't know what sounds good together yet" problem I have a pet project to just grab all the tracks someone's mix I already like and know intimately, and see if I can replicate it at some basic level. I'm not going to do a 1:1 of Sasha and Digweed's Northern Exposure mix, but I can probably use it, or something like it (maybe something simpler), to at least work on mix with songs I already like without the pressure of figuring out a flowing vibe. Be careful with Sasha & John they had their own unique edits of tracks and sometimes spliced a few different remixes together, it will work for finding good sounding mixes but to try to replicate their phrasing and timing exactly will only lead to madness quote:@Virgil, quick Q for you on the DJM -- do you find the cue/master pot to be cue-hot? I may be articulating this in a dumb way, but if I have my cue/master pot at 12 o'clock, where I'd expect a 50/50 mix, I find that the cue feed overpowers master by a fair amount. I probably have to go to 30% cue before I feel like it's even. If I just cue the master out and bring both decks to 100% volume then everything sounds even and levels look about equal so I don't think it's my source material. Not sure if this is completely normal or if I've got some more learning to do on how this works. Either way, not a big deal since I just wobble around the pot all the time as I try to get a feel for both tracks, just something that came to mind. It's imbalanced in every mixer; just something about the signal flow or design. I sometimes hear people gripe about the loss of Split Cue (cough ...Mojaxx from DJCity...) in mixers, like do yall not remember how horrible that was with a blaring master in one ear while a tiny cue in the other (or whatever way it was, one was always distractingly louder than the other).
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Jan 4, 2023 19:27
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I'll never understand the draw of split cue. One of my buddies always used it and it was the first thing I turned off on his mixer if we ever went b2b.
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Jan 4, 2023 19:49
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Thanks for that. I was 99% sure it was just “a thing” so not worried at all. I tried the split cueing thing and I guess it has some utility if you’re super spatially aware but to me it was just easier to keep it mixed and play with the wet/dry if I want more clarity on cue or master. When I was into vinyl a hundred years ago one of my friend was also adamant that split cueing was The Way You Should Do It™. Who knows, maybe he was right and my resistance to split cue was the difference between me being an aging DJ headlining festivals in 2023 and some guy posting about cue levels on a forum in 2023 Virgil Vox posted:madness  Apropos of nothing, I ordered my DDJ-1000 before all this CDJ madness and wish I’d cancelled the order while I still had the chance. Now I’m locked in on a “reserved” unit. I had some weird aspirations of using it as my mixer + deck 2/3 with the CDJs, but the more I think about it the more I think it’s a dumb idea and I’d be keeping a $2000 piece of gear for no reason. RedOne told me I couldn’t cancel the order once I confirmed I wanted to be on the waitlist/reservation for the next DDJ shipment, but I’m going to call them to see if I can cancel anyway. Like literally I’m going to tell them that if they send it out I’m just going to send it right back so maybe they can save themselves some hassle processing a return. It’s not like they won’t sell it if it’s sitting in stock, you can’t keep them on shelves now. some kinda jackal fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Jan 4, 2023 |
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Jan 4, 2023 21:47
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I always thought split cueing was for people used to mixing while listening to the master out of the booth monitors and the cue mix in headphones.
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Jan 4, 2023 21:50
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I use split cue pretty often. It's great in inconsistent listening environments, or when you actually do need to find the beat of a song, but once things are roughly in line I usually switch back to stereo with the Cue knob at like 10-o'clock. All of this is also one of those things that gets hosed up if the venue's soundguy has your Master knob turned down at all - we ITT know my gripes with this issue are well-documented.some kinda jackal posted:So far I'm absolutely loving the standalone workflow. Some of the niceties I wished the 2K had, like coloured memcue markers, have fallen off my radar once I started getting used to how I marked my tracks. I kind of wished I had the big waveform but as I realized I don't actually use the decks themselves to line up/create cues right now it became a non-issue. It would still be nice to see the cues approaching at a more granular level but I'm trying very hard to not mix visually but instead to do it by ear. The only place where the lack of a big waveform and beat stream seems like it would be a pain is if I want to mix in a track with no discernable beats in the intro. Like a quiet buildup into a beat that you mentioned. I can cue in at the right part without too much of an issue by beat jumping back in rekordbox, but making sure the beats are matched right at the start might be a challenge without stacked waves. So I guess I'd have to just be really quick on the jog to adjust. This all seems like it's a little advanced for me right now but I'm excited to try anyway CDJ2000Nexii don't even have stacked wave displays, at least to my knowledge - pretty sure that's a slightly newer development that started showing up on the standalone XDJ models (partly because they only have one screen in the middle). The 2ks have 'phase meters', little lines above the waveform display that show you the deck's grid position relative to whatever deck is currently the 'master' in your Link environment. I use the 'type 2' phase meters:  Honestly you're probably better off without the waveform displays and phase meters for now anyway. I'm really glad I learned on a legacy pair of CDJ2000s, even if ignorant young me was a bit miffed at the time that "these aren't the new ones anymore?" Not to dip too deep into that luddite poo poo but there really is something to be said for learning without visual aids to help you. Most of my 'Bulletproof DJ Library' (the posts I've made that go on about track intake, Cueing, Playlist organization and transferring to USB sticks, that I've been meaning to make into a long-winded video for some time), was borne of pragmatism, working within the box I was given and ensuring compatibility in case I run into even-older gear. Two big holdbacks from this system that are unnecessary but I still do out of habit, for example: - You mentioned having 'only' three Hot Cues. I felt the same "oh that's a bummer," coming from a Traktor controller that effectively gave me eight of them. So I thought for a minute and ended up settling on only needing Hot Cues for the drop, mix-in point, and 2nd drop (or outro); A/B/C Cues reflecting Cues 2/3/4 in Traktor, because I don't really need Cue A (the intro downbeat) to be a Hot Cue at all, just a Memory Location. That was a bit of a pain in the rear end to manually change in every track and because new CDJs and RekordBuddy now I don't really do it anymore, but I would if things were still manual. And as I said, these days I barely use Hot Cues when playing out at all, when I was a kid using Traktor it was real fun to play them like drum pads and mash up mixes thinking I was Skrillex, but these days the Hot Cues sit and gather dust, except for the last one which I use often in pre-planned OPS mixes to make every transition a double-drop and/or perfect mix-out. - Using Mixed-In-Key to not only write the song Key to its Comments field, but also in Camelot (alphanumeric) notation at the beginning of the track name. Literally almost every track in my library starts with '7A - ' or '12B - '. Have you ever tried playing on the CDJ850s at Thymeless? They only have one-line LCD displays, so all you get is the track name. Having the key ahead of it in Camelot notation allows you to 'Sort by Alphabet' which actually ends up sorting by Key. Even some of the newer players benefit from this; I may be wrong about this, but I think while Rekordbox supports alphanumeric key notation, some of the Pioneer players only use traditional ('Am', 'Ebm' etc.) which would be fine except they forgot to write in the algorithm that sorts that properly around the circle of fifths, so instead you end up with keys sorted alphabetically, which will get you nowhere harmonically. quote:I was also going to ask the thread for monitor recommendations for a small room setup, but at the moment I think I'm actually happy to not annoy everyone else and mix through headphones entirely. I still want to buy a pragmatic good/affordable pair for music production in general, but it's not a priority. A better use of my time right now is to hook up a cable to route mixer master outs to my iPad or laptop so I can record and check what it sounds like after the fact. KRKs are the go-to DJ monitors for most people I'd say. They're cheap, sound nice and bassy for electronic music and you can even get them at Best Buy (a lot of people started making GBS threads on them when this happened but I've owned my Rokit 8s for 12 years and I love them). Also worth checking out the Pioneer DM-50Ds, a nice little pair of bookshelf monitors I use as my Booth when I don't want to be too loud. Mister Speaker fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Jan 4, 2023 |
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Jan 4, 2023 22:36
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gotcha gotcha gotcha, for some reason I thought the nxs2 had the stacked waveforms but maybe I was confusing that with the 3000 and XDJ like you mentioned. I'm perfectly happy learning without the bells and whistles right now. The form factor and memcues already make this way easier than I remember vinyl DJing being. I've had good success beatmatching like a baby for a few days now, and even the tiny waveform is enough to give me enough of a preview of what's coming up that I'm not forever paranoid like I was trying to frantically remember where I can expect what on a record. But that's just me. Good advice on the monitors, I'll have to see how I feel about adding a pair in the near future. Have some credit from returning my lovely Mackie CR5s a while back so maybe it's a good impulse buy regardless. So for now I'm practicing and building my library. Pretty happy to maintain status quo. Not sure where I go from here, I think it would be fun to set a goal for myself to do something like a recorded set in six months? Maybe a livestream by December? I love making up stupid goals to push myself so maybe I'll aim for that.
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Jan 5, 2023 00:56
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Another rekordbox question from a newbiw: Have you guys ever come across a track that just won't beat grid properly over the long term? I'm working on preparing this track and while it initially stays very on grid, it quickly and visibly drifts by like 1/16 of a beat. I tried to find the first instance of "wow that's wrong" and hit the "make adjustment from current position" but after half a track it's visibly off beat again. If this wasn't a new track I'd swear it was digitized off a medium playing on a wobbly motor, as it is I can't really understand how a track produced digitally drifts this naturally all over the place. Is there a better way to handle this than just going through the track and seeing where you can't bear the sync discrepancy and adjusting forward from that point? I'll caveat this question by saying it's not actually a big deal IN PRACTICE-- on the CDJs I have I don't really rely on the beat grid for anything granular enough to notice an 1/16 drift and I can easily compensate for any discrepancy given four or eight bars to beatmatch and mix in, but my pseudo-OCD is gnawing at me knowing there's some kind of discrepancy that is going unfixed, hence why I've spent the last bit meticulously adjusting the beat grid by hand. I know Rekordbox has a dynamic analysis mode -- is this what it's for? I always imagined it was for much wider swings in BPM like transition tracks where you start and end with like a 5-10% delta.
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Jan 5, 2023 12:36
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Yes some tracks intentionally have tempo drift programmed into them, whether to elicit a subtle feeling, or deliberately to make it difficult for DJs to mix. Sub Focus - Last Jungle (original mix) is like this, IIRC. Yeah, AFAIK dynamic mode is for tempo changes. At least that's how I do it. You're supposed to be able to follow a curve in tempo pretty accurately by quantizing it with enough dynamic mode adjustments, but I rarely do this, just place an adjust where the new tempo locks in. Theoretically if it works for curves it SHOULD also work for tracks that ebb and flow in tempo, but maybe there's an upper limit to how many adjustment points you can place - even if not, it seems like way too much work for me and might destroy the feel of a song that was deliberately programmed to waver in time. Mister Speaker fucked around with this message at 14:16 on Jan 5, 2023 |
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Jan 5, 2023 14:07
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Something of a DVS curiosity since I'm sitting here musing on the vinyl format (just asked a question in the Vinyl Thread in NMD) because it's trippy: Do both Serato and Traktor control vinyl read information in the phase between left/right channels? I know Traktor does something with it for Absolute mode (being able to pick the needle up and place it somewhere else to scan through an MP3), and I'm wondering if it's just what I think it is: a gradual difference in the phase as the groove progresses through the whole record. You pick up the needle and advance it a minute or so down the track and the software immediately hears the phase difference and adjusts the playhead accordingly. Is this correct, or is there something more complicated going on in the encoding? Furthermore, doesn't this mean that the new Phase hardware that's all the rage (ironic in title and also making it impossible to do searches for the above query anymore), is precluded from using Absolute mode at all? Not that anyone does anymore, but interesting if so.
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Jan 5, 2023 18:51
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If you're using Phase [the hardware] you don't even have the tonearm down so there's no way to move through a track like that. That's why Rane Twelves have that seek strip at the top.
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Jan 5, 2023 20:44
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My dudes, I love my CDJs but I opened them up to replace a broken plastic bearing and took the time to add some moly grease to the spindles for each, as well as the two metal rollers that hold the top platter in place and they feel SMOOTH. Not CDJ-3000 smooth from my 30 second spinning one at a shop, but they don't feel like an old 20 year old PC fan. What a cool quality of life improvement. Not sure if lubing is recommended or not, but I'm not in a club and they're not going to get super gross quickly so I'm not fussed at ALL.
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Jan 5, 2023 20:51
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