Lessons

Lesson Info

Intro & Traktor Pro Mixer

Hello and welcome my name is nick circus. I am the lead product specialists at native instruments, and I'm also an artist deejay goes by the moniker new trick and it's good to be here in seattle at creative live, this is the first of three courses on track to pro the first course is tractor pro essentials software essentials? Where are going to be covering pretty much everything that you're seeing here on my screen so it's really important when using tractor pro to understand exactly what you're looking at? The interface can seem rather complicated to somebody that's started deejaying on two turntables in a mixer. So it's, really important to kind of I understand what you're looking at, and then everything else in the future courses will make a lot more sense. So let's start by going over what track to pro is this is digital de chang. So when I started deejaying in nineteen ninety nine, my options were very slim. I had two turntables and a mixer, and they were really poorly made, belt ...

driven turntables, and it really poorly made makes her so this wasn't anything special. What it did teach me was how to properly mixed two tracks by matching tempos on blending track selection, these type of things that are really not, um, that complicated. Right nowadays, we have a lot more options of how we can d j we're going to get into things like effects q points, editing be grids and temple matching key matching all these things. You're gonna be covered um in the over the course of these three courses, so let's get started with the software essentials. So what I'm looking at right now is the track to pro software, and I have a pretty basic layout as far as my deck choices, so you can have up to four decks and tractor, I only have two decks because I wanted to kind of keep things trimmed down for the sake of this tutorial deck a would act like you're left turntable deck b would act like you're right turntable and the middle here I have a digital mixer it's maxed out right now what I mean by that is I'm showing everything that you could possibly see in the mixer, and the reason I'm doing that is I wanna make sure I go ever everything but will also be trimming this down to get the heart it's a software going to look the way you want it when I say good, that means the graphic user interface so let's start by going over the mixer mixers, this section in the middle it's broken up into a few different areas. I have a nine q I have volume ii filters gain and key else have across later here at the bottom the signal flows from the deck and when I say signal flow think of a guitar player they have the guitar they plug the cable into the guitar maybe it goes into some petals and then into the amp eventually right so that's how the signal flows in a guitar set up something that I'm sure everyone is seen in a deejay set up it starts in the deck and then when it goes into the mix of the first thing that it's in a hit is this game knob so the game not is a variable volume control so I have the ability to turn down the volume and turn up the volume of the track and this is independent from the volume fader that I see here under the equalizer and the reason is d j slight toe have their failures paid all the way at the top so it's very rare that you'll see a deejay mixed their volumes where the volume feeders are a little bit lower than the other and that's so they can simply pull the fader down and then slam it up you know when they're mixing or a scratch deejay doesn't have to worry about getting things perfect it's not like working on a mixing console in a recording studio so if I have a track that's a little bit softer than the other. And I can already see by looking at my stripe away form here, which I'll explain shortly that this track is a little bit quieter than the one injecting. So I would most likely want to boost the gain here. But in tractors preferences, I can actually set a certain amount of head room that I have and where I want my tracks to be matched up, and what I can also do is turn on auto gain. So auto gain is really helpful function and tractor pro that automatically matches the gain of both tracks, so they're matched evenly based on how much headroom I want. Tow activate auto gain. I simply press this blue dot right here and it's in a turn orange. And you can see since I have a really quiet track, it boosted this quite a bit that six point seven d b and just so you guys know a little fun fact, every three d b is double the volume. So if you turn something up, three decibels that's twice the volume let's turn on auto gain for deck bia's. Well and this track is also a little bit quiet, so it turned it up three d b and that's most lucky because neither of these tracks have been mastered. So if you have a master track it's going to be closer to nominal which is zero or in some cases even negative tv so now I know both tracks are at even volume after the game knob the signal will flow into the equalizer and right now I have a three banded q it's important tio not important but it's easy to think of it like a car stereo getting cars they're a pretty much everyone has low mid and high this is base mid range in trouble so pretty simple I can actually change this inside of tractors preferences so you could get into the preferences by their clicking this to like on here on the top right or I'd like to use quickies and the quickie to open up preferences is command comma and this is the way to open up references in just about any pro app it's going to command comma so keep that in mind it's in a speed up your work flow I'm really into hands on type approaches to controlling software um something that I'm sure other courses that creative live have expressed. So now that I have my preference is open on the left hand side, I have a tree and there's a ton of stuff in here all right? We're not going to get into everything and my tree is a little bit bigger because I have all of the tractor control hardware and here so yours at home might not look like this the one we're going to focus on right now is a mixer because that's what we're going over and inside of mixer I have a number of different options in here I have my mixture layup and I can take off the cue to filter the cross bitter all this stuff you see it's getting a little bit less complex we want those on level is where activate how much headroom I want all right, so headroom is I guess the best way to think of it it is how much extra volume aiken turn things up so if you have a glass of water and that glass of water is only halfway full obviously I can pour some more water into that volume works the same way so if I have two tracks and they're at full volume, I'm not going to be able to turn them up anymore I'm gonna be overloading so head room is the amount of room that you have to fluctuate volume so we'll be essentially really like to do is keep volume's low therefore we can turn things up right is once it's that max you're right, max the limiter is going to make sure that I'm never overloading the output bus so the output is all of the tracks combines going out to your papa or your monitor mix and then auto gain is what I just explained to write enable auto game also have things like out across big time which will get into and thie cross fade um smooth or sharp so is there a smooth cross fade there's the volume slowly go up and down or if I'm a scratch d j I'd like to have a really sharp so it only takes a fraction of an inch for the volume to get full so I could cut the kind of segue way back too what I was talking about with the up top I have e q types and there's a number of different types all of these are modeled after analog mixers that exist my show you the zone mixer because this is actually a four bandic you on activity you see mike you changes now so I have high mid high mid low in low end I really like the way this one sounds but I think it's just easier to follow along when you only have a three band so let's go back to the three van dijk over here and I also can change my filter type I'll explain what the filter is in a second I might not go into the preferences but just keep in mind that there's a number of different filter types as well so that's the preferences for the mixer close that so after the q it's going to go into the filter all right in the filter what this does is it cuts the high end or the low and depending on which side that I turned to filter to so let's play this track here to go to a park when there's some audio booth that's what's called a low pass filter or a high cut filter you're cutting out the high end and letting the low and pass if I turn that said all right I'll be right now I'm gonna play the track and it's going to cut the low end and let the high pass filter sweeps are kurt and just about any deejay said that you go out and see nowadays it's almost over used but it can be used very tastefully and really is an essential piece and creating a dynamic deejay set after the filter there's a couple things that can go in the way of this you could have the effects go first and I'll explain that and a little bit more detail when actually go over the effects but the single then flow into this volume fader and again the volume fader is either all the way up or all the way down and that's by preference but and my fifteen plus years of deejaying I'll say that just about everyone has their volume haters either spit spiked up all the time or all the way down and then of course we go to the cross fader the cross fader is pretty I'm self explanatory on the left hand side, you're going to be listening to the decks on the left and when it's on the right hand side of gonna be lives listening to the decks on the right, this square or creative live style little square thing right here if you guys can see the creative live logo, but it kind of looks like that I can choose which decks are on the left hand side of my cross fader, in which dexter on the right hand side now it makes most sense tohave decks a and c and the left because tractor lays out their decks in that fashion and to have a nd on the right hand side, you can I'm sorry be indy on the right hand side, you can get complex if you want and to make some strange like a d, but doesn't really make much sense to do that. To be perfectly honest with you, these arrows are stepped cross fade and then auto crossfit but you might think doesn't make a lot of sense, but a little later on we'll go into adding cross fade q points that might make sense where somebody like a wedding deejay than he it's take a bathroom break that sums it up for the mixer um actually there's a couple of things that I should cover in here that I just was an oversight we have our master effects so the we have two effects units here and I'm actually going to display them so this is my clock and this is my audio recorder but we want effects so both effects units here right now run active on both decks so if we want the effect on the right hand side effects in it too to be active on deck a we would select to if we wanted both effects units active on the deck we would select one and two so this is the master effects at this point we can start tweaking turning on changing different effects on either affects unit below that we have key and key is something that is unique to digital deejaying we did not have this luxury when I was spinning on vinyl on vinyl when you slow down the tempo of the track the pitch also fluctuates. Where is in digital deejay? You can maintain the original pits of the track and change the tempo we can also key match and the key match by actually changing the pitch of a track. So let me give you an audio example of this so what I'm gonna do in this example is gonna leave key lock on and I'm gonna take sink off which will explain later and then I'm going to fluctuate this tempo and you're going to notice that the pitch is not going to change it all so right now I'm not one hundred thirteen beats per minute with the same pitch now about one hundred thirty eight beats per minute and the pitch is still the same and go back to the original temple did they can change the pitch and then we turn off key lock and show you what happens when I speed up and slow down the track. It would be really handy when you're mixing two tracks together. Harmonic mixing opens up whole new possibilities of what we can do with t j, so we're not limited to matching tempos of the songs we can match songs at the same key, and this is really an amazing tool that djs take advantage of nowadays whether we know it or not, that makes him two tracks together there at the same pitch, it was merely impossible to do that on vinyl unless you produce the track yourself or you knew exactly that the track was at the specific tempo, so say one twenty four for example in the key of c right? If you have two tracks and they're both at one twenty four in the key of c, you could mix those together that really any speed and they would work perfectly, but it was just very rare and extremely difficult to do it properly on vinyl, so something unique to digital deejaying and something that tractor makes easy all right, so that's the mixer we also have a pan and a q but those air pretty self explanatory so let's move on to the deck right now I have an advanced deck open and what I mean by advance let me open up the preferences real quick and go to a new tab in my tree called dex leo we're gonna get into two tabs and here dex layout and track decks so index lay out you're going to see on top I can choose my deck flavor track decree mixtec live input I'll get into remix texana later tutorial so just be patient I can also change deck flavor here, which I typically do saves one step of opening up the preferences but what I wanted to show you is the deck layout right here the size of a and b the size of the cnd so I can display c and d if I wanted to, we're not going to do that we're going to keep it basic and we also have our decks layout size a and b so when I open this up I have micro, which is a very small deck small, which is a small but not a small micro essential and you can see that all of these different layouts display different amounts of information advances what I was at note that you could also changes simply by double clicking on the top bar of that deck so it's a little bit faster. I customized my own deck layouts, depending on what style of deejaying or what my set up is. A lot of times. If I'm using a external deejay mixer, I won't have tractors. Internal d j makes her displayed because there's really no need. I can do everything on the hardware mixer that I have in front of me. If I'm using a all in one tractor controller like the control s for or the control s eight, I want to have the mixer displayed just so I know exactly where all of my parameters are in two different places, so I just wanted to show you that there's other things that you can customize for the deck, for example, tempo fader, which I'm gonna leave on since I'm using the mouse for this tutorial planter scope, which I have off because I'm not using turntables and there's other things, like grid, which and ah, the color motive your tracks, which I will explain shortly.