How to: fix tracks with unsteady BPMs using just Traktor Pro

(this is a copy and paste from my thread on djtechtools.com)

So: you've got so good at controllerism that you are killing the dancefloor with 4 decks fx laden crazyness. You can't beatmatch, you can't be bothered to beatmatch, or you are so busy mashing things up that you have no time to beatmatch. As a consequence, those brilliant funk/soul/rock tracks with a live drummer don't appear on your playlists.

There is a solution that requires no other software: you don't need Ableton; you can straighten your track up with just Traktor Pro. And you don't have to be able to beatmatch either.

Essentially, you are going to use Traktor Pro to re-record your track as you change the speed it is playing back at.

• Set Keylock on your track and make sure you are using HiQ keylock
• Get your track in a spare deck. Get a kick drum loop or tick sound loop in another spare deck
• Output your track to master, only monitor your click track
• Set a grid marker on the first beat or recognisible rhythmical sound of your track. Try and beatgrid the track so that the transient markers are on the beats for as long as possible. Don't worry about the rest of the track when the beats do drift off
• Have the 2 decks sitting in your headphone mix so you can clearly hear them both
• Set internal mode for both decks. Sync the tick deck to the track deck. Now, make the tick deck the master and sync the master deck to the tick deck
• Set the waveform zoom on your track to maximum. Drop a cue point at the very start of your track and cue it up
• Select the 'Grid' advanced panel on your track
• Hit record and then start both decks
• Use the make grid narrower and make grid wider buttons to keep the transient markers on the beat. A left click will change the grid by a small amount. A right or control click will increase it by a larger amount. The mix in your headphones will assist with this process
• Stop recording at the end. Load your new, less wonky track into Traktor and attempt to beatgrid it. If you are not yet satisfied with your track, repeat the process

 

This topic comes up every single day but now when someone posts it up everyone's quiet.

Bumpity bump for an informative post + link. Thanks lethal_pizzle.

 

Agreed. Incredibly useful post that many could do to read and learn.

STICKY.

 

This is smart thinking but I can see a major loss of audio quality if you are then pitch shifting this same tune again to tempo match/sync it while playing out.

e.g. - if you warp a track in ableton, render it out, and then bring it back into ableton to play in a live set you have to play it at the original tempo you rendered it out at. speeding it up or slowing it down will sound awful. the effect is amplified if you use the same time stretching algorithm both times because you are essentially stacking the time stretching algo on top of itself ... kind of like two similar kicks phasing each other out.

i cant imagine it would sound much better in traktor

 

It is true that there will be a degredation in sound quality each time you do this or any other process that involves pitch-shifting. Analogous to, but different from, tape to tape transfers or track bouncing back in the day.

Not sure about the same algorithm destroying the music more than using two different ones though.

 

I also feel the necessity to point out that this requires a huge amount of manual work (of course, depending on the track, Ableton also might require quite a lot of manual tweaking).

However, I admit that the idea of doing the warping this way has never occurred to me

 

Yes it does - not everyone has Ableton tho'

 

This is essentially the same as warping the track in Ableton but with less precision. Which is great if that's what you want to do, but if you're dealing with tracks with live drummers, old funk and the like, you may find yourself very unhappy with the results. Part of the beauty of this kind of music is the human feel that comes in part from the live tempo drift. "Correcting" the drift will take some of that feel away. The effect is even more dramatic when tempo shifts are used for emphasis in the song -- I would highly recommend against flattening out such shifts in this manner. Personally I prefer the method described by Ean Goldman in this youtube video -- http://www.djtechtools.com/2010/04/25/mixing-tips-using-rock-songs-in-a-set/ -- instead of warping the track with mixed tempo, you set loops where they work and work around the loops. You need to keep track of the different tempos since traktor won't (yet?) let you enter more than one tempo for a song, but that's easy enough to do using the comments.

 

@djproben...I would agree with all you've said above, mate!

 

Great Post! Thanks lethal_pizzle!

 

I don't know if this has been specified or not in other threads on the same topic, but for vinyl rips, major drifts and the like, rather than wanting to change the whole track, I just set new grid cues at the main points I would bring in another track. This way, rather than having to modify the whole track, a subtle nudge accomplishes the same thing. Mind you, you lose your cue points to "regridding" your track every so often, but its better than re-encoding and losing quality over and over. Also, as long as the drift is between .1-.5, you should be able to get pretty close, even with a little drift.

 

Well... I'm off to do what i do best. I dont know what monday holds but I know this weekend I'm still rockin with the best!

Have a great weekend everyone. Dont let the thought of new or replacement gear get in the way of your calling if your playin out this weekend!

 

just learn to beat match ..maybe the easiest option.

 

I agree, this is way too much work, especially if you have a thousands of songs.

 

when traktor scratch pro initially analyzed all my tracks it gives me wrong bbms on almost all of them! When i play the tracks at 0% they sound slower than they normallly would. how do i fix this? Thanks for the help

 

Hi there I have a problem with tracks playing mega fast even when it say there BPM is only 128. What is going on? I could really do with a hand to sort this out.

Cheers Bengo

 

nice 1

 

I don't think you're understanding the point here. Beatmatching will only work if your BPM is steady, and the thing with old funk/disco tracks is they vary in BPM range ;-) Try mixing some old funk and you'll see. And oh yeah, constructive comments are always better than negative

 

Actually, syne101's comment about manual beat matching works very well for mixing tracks with unsteady BPMs. However, more to the point regarding Traktor, the effects are synchronized to the beat grid ... if the tempo fluctuates (and thus the grid is off) the effects simply don't work like they're supposed to. And no amount of beat matching skill will help there.

 

True, but that isn't beatmatching but gridding ;-)