Tried it yesterday while doing the loose.fm radio show and loved it. I was able to go and answer the door while I had 2 tunes in the mix, with the cross fader in the centre. That sync button is magic.
I did also notice while messing around in Rekordbox yesterday, that some tunes from Bandcamp don’t seem to stay in time and Rekordbox couldn’t do its grid business. I mean tunes with a drum machine and sequenced synths, not live drums. Just thought it was interesting as it means it was either the original tape that was not keeping time very well or it was digitised from a warped record. In those cases I guess I’d still have to make an effort.
You can adjust the grid on Rekordbox, as long as the track is somewhat in time. Sometimes it clings to the wrong bit of audio to determine the grid and things go all nasty.
Alternatively you can warp the track on Ableton but that’s a whole other can o beans.
Ha, why? It seemed to work. Saves you having to use headphones or the pitch/tempo control. Why would you not use sync? You can see the two tunes playing perfectly in time on the screen.
You can even press play a bit early or a bit late and the quantize button fixed that too. I quite liked pressing play a bit early, it reminded me of trying to punch in an overdub on a 4 track tape machine in the 90s, you would have to drop in to record just before the beat. I don’t know why I never tried playing digital files before. I like records, I guess. But I will definitely get more music off bandcamp now.
I guess I still enjoy having a little interaction with the decks. It’s all a bit ‘painting by numbers’ anyway, and then to remove the final element of keeping in sync, by way of a button, just takes all the fun out for me.
It’s also meant that a lot of people that shouldn’t be near set of decks now think they can ‘mix’
Plus you can’t really rely on Rekordbox quantizing the tracks correctly, so I imagine you have to spend quite a bit of time doing it manually.
I’m fascinated by the digital options now, especially for messing about with at home. Can’t imagine what it would be like to DJ out using it though with so many possible things to go wrong. It was hard enough some times just to get 2 working turntables in a club
There’s pro’s & cons to the sync button. If you’re playing an eclectic set with a range of tempos then its a big no no, obviously.
If your playing live in a small booth with poor or no monitors and drunk whoppers jostling and shouting in your ear hole every 2 minutes, then it can be quite handy
One of its big downsides like Hower said is that its given very unimaginative DJs licence to pollute the air with very flat, boring and monotonous sets.
So people actually use Rekordbox to DJ with? Like straight out the computer into the mixer? Or can you split the channels or something or am I being dunce here haha. I just make playlists and then actually use the CDJs… I’d die of boredom otherwise.
Rekordbox has a performance mode Designed to be used with Pioneer controllers. You can do it straight from the laptop audio out, but you can’t monitor anything unless you use an external soundcard of some sort.
I got Rekordbox to analyse the files and I set a cue on the first beat, then made a playlist and exported to the usb stick. But I tried Performance mode at home just to check how the sync works and if the cue points get remembered, which was helpful practice as it worked the same on the CDJs. I was playing with another person who only had records, and I had also brought records, so obviously had to use the pitch when moving from records to digital but when I got the digital going on two CDJs my mixing was absolutely fantastic . I just had to press play around the start of a bar, without headphones needed, as i had set the cues already.
Last night I decided to play my first all digital set and the lad I came on after was syncing everything and doing the triangles in the air thing, He let me start 5 minutes early because he “timed it wrong”, which seemed awfully dull. He’s not a new DJ by any means. I felt like a ghost of Christmas past searching through the tracks, going nowhere near the sync button - although seeing the bpm takes all the worry away and watching the waveforms was honestly a lot easier. I haven’t felt that relaxed playing ever although I did start going a bit efx and loop mad because I truly didn’t know what else to do with my time. Not carrying a bag of records and just having some thumb drives and headphones in a small bag was a gamechanger. Honestly, can’t see myself taking records again especially as the sound set up for vinyl is definitely not the priority anymore.
I have this a lot (1/5 purchases) mostly from bandcamp, but occasionally other digi vendors, files not appearing on cdj after being analysed, after some digging I found This also has something to do with which type of files the dsp/whoever uploads to bandcamp to sell. so, Sometimes they unknowingly use the combined stems file that mastering sent back, or some other non finished no meta data file. It’s an easy mistake to make when you have 5different folders of the same ep, file names all ending with ‘mastered’ usually I send em a message saying what’s up
. I just had to press play around the start of a bar, without headphones needed, as i had set the cues already.
usually I send em a message saying what’s up