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

ok thanks man. positive is good. sorry to call ya out. but i will try your suggestion. sounds right. hey does audacity work for warping i liked that soft anyway. any help my useless maudio soft. just kidding.

 

wwzmach! people should lower their heads and praise the dj or producer yes as simple asitis putting beat markers works and is quick and a small footprint i just gridded "play that funky music white boy" sync is flawless.

really though just scroll through after setting in the transport settings to vinyl and not snap at the playmarker position set grid markers as many as needed. and your grid is flawless.

 

Thanks for the tip.

 

just a thought . with t2 the colored waveforms will be much easier to set markers with. but then maybe the beatgrids will be flexy or accurate anyway.

 

yea learn to beatmatch on 4 decks....
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This kinda makes sense to me

 

Tell Jody to make more "dj friendly" records

On an even less serious note, gosh I remember the days when you'd come home with 20-30 records. Key & BPM them all by hand (literally) and then snap them to grid markers Alright the first part of that was serious, but the latter I found amusing.

 

I remember the days when I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down the club, and pay the club owner owner for permission to come to work (apologies to Monty Python)

 

Good suggestion... but question.......

That would take up the slots on the HOTCUES buttons which will be highlighted in white. If I made any of these WHITE CUEPOINTS to LOOPS - as I am using the DNMC6000 with the HOTCUE buttons, which I can have 8 on each deck... the grid would move. So, how can I assign HOTCUES/LOOPs without disrupting the grid? Thanks.

 

you can have far more than 8 cue points, only 8 are on the buttons for hot cues with quick keys etc. but you can have far more than 8.

In the cue tab there is a button map cue points, play around with it and you'll see you can move cue points around and renumber them.

Also if you set your DJ cue points before you start maping grid markers the grid markers will have to be after number 8 and thus not filling up your hotcue spots.

Out of interest you can also move the default grid point that always takes up slot number one off to number 9, 10 etc. by mapping another cue point into its place and budging it down the list.

It would have made alot of sense if Traktor had allowed a grid marker and a load marker to be off the 8 cue points by default, leaving the 8 hotcues ready for the real action you need them for.

I guess we are only just getting version 2 of the software so it still has a long way to go..... Think version 2 Photoshop or Cubase or MS Word against what is available today. !

 

Not really. NI have, by their own marketing speak, been at this for about ten years. You had the Traktor DJ versions before Pro and Scratch Pro. It is an advanced piece of audio software, all things considered. You can't expect a piece of DJ software to do "everything audio". If you need to edit audio there is software out there to do that. If you need to manage tracks with unsteady tempos there is software out there for that.

Traktor is for DJing. It's not an audio workstation and it doesn't need to be.

 

I'm still waiting for my voucher so I can't confirm if it is like this in T2 but I suspect that it is. In S4 there is an option in preferences to make grid markers not use any hotcue points.

 

@lethal_pizzle

this is really work for me, thanks

 

another good tip, if you are trying to get the bpm of a track, that traktor isn't getting right.... personally i find the tap semi useless, it seems to ignore me most of the time........ so first set a new grid marker at an obvious point on the first beat of a bar.

then set a loop with 4 or i prefer 8 or 16 as it gives more accuracy, but for difficult ones can be just 4 beats, and set it starting on the grid marker.

then let it loop and move the end point of the loop until you have the perfect loop

then start changing the bpm until the grid matches the end point. the start point will remain on the grid as its locked to the grid marker. so you can easily play with the bpm until the 4 or 8 beats of th grid matches your end marker.

if you just try to do it with a regular cue marker or a floating loop, its hopeless as the grid on both ends of your loop moves around all over the place, and you can never assess it properly.

its another little fix that is not really obvious and is easy in softwares like cubase etc. I really wish they'd have harmonised traktor a bit more with the way that loops and markers work in these softwares, but it is what it is.... we've had that conversation a dozen times....

I haven't seen the new version 2, but what would be real nice is if it could mark the first beat of the bar slightly bolder, so its easier to see bars, rather than only beats. Bars are important to a DJ as well....

 

I agree

This works!

 

the way a song is recorded is the way it's meant to be played. Now yes you need to speed it up or slow it down sometimes but the track itself should never be modified.
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or loop 4 beats and match the pitch to a song where the bpm is accurate and play with the pitch values until it matches the other bpm in the other deck

 

Hello and thank you for that, to illustrate even more so, would anyone be kind enough to show this done "live" in a video?

Best regards

 

Hi,

I'm relatively new to Traktor Scratch Pro 2 (with Audio 4 DJ) having moved over from a Serato SL 1. I played out last night for the first time with TSP2 and it held up well, but when I was gridding my tracks yesterday afternoon I really struggled with how to handle old disco and funk records with live drums.

I own Live 7, so I know I could go and grid the tracks fully and then re-render, but I agree with djproben on page one that the live feel is what makes these tracks so special.

Reading this thread and watching Ean's rock/live tutorial has helped me understand ways I can work around the problem, and I can see myself building in/out loops as described, but having to change the BPM setting (to three significant figures, natch) whilst playing out simply isn't workable.

Perhaps this is a stupid question, but given that the beat grid is an abstract entity, why can't Traktor assign different tempos to different parts of a track? Ie. beat grid one is set to 87.226, beat grid two is set to 95.107? It's just meta-data after all. I'm imagining it would work the same way that Ableton does (except that I wouldn't want to use warp mode to preserve pitch, therefore I don't want the beat grid to timestretch my music).

Also, on the topic of gridding, does the tempo tap function in the grid section allow you to tap out time in 8ths or 16ths? Serato's tap function uses the first two taps to calibrate the range and then you can tap out at double time for better accuracy.

All help and suggestions appreciated.

Thanks

timdp

 

Hello

I have to agree with some in this post about how poor traktor is at reading in bpms from older funk tracks, it has been poor for years and to my suprise is still as poor in Traktor 2.

I really thought this would be one of the problems NI would have worked on and sorted out.

when you have 1000s of great old tunes from vinyl that when analised in traktor come back with crazy values for bpm, something is very wrong...

the tap button give better results, crazy...

then you got this issues of the beat grid, trying to make the markers in line throughout each old funk tune would take months and months.

I have tried and I know... and its still not perfect

A CDJ 1000 is constantly sampling the bpm of a tune and correcting / updating and this is what traktor needs to do.

Some kind of inteligent elastic beat grid...

I know someone previously said traktor is only audio software, and is not design as audio editing software, but surly the idea is for people to move over to a digital format with the same features as cd players.

If it can not even analyse bpms correctly, what hope have we got !

very dissapointed with traktor 2:angry:

A few coloured wave forms in the new version is hardly a fix for what has been a major problem for years in traktor !

 

yes, i completely agree... the utter contempt that the developers and marketing department of Traktor seems to have for their customer base is quite extraordinary.

this huge effort to make the new colored waves forms and then release it with bugs that don't display the wave forms properly, making the new version actually worse than the old version.

total refusal to add a few more marker points, no way 8 markers is enough if you want to do anything more than play a vinyl style mixes back to back.

they just have blinkers for what they want to offer and what they think the customer needs, you get used to it or you shove off.

 

I've raised this issue with Traktor support and they have raised a feature request:

TP-2952
allow different grids(tempo) for different grid markers to provide a beatgridding
solution for tracks without constant tempo, or tracks with tempo changes