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Traktor Pro Deck: Loops and Advanced Panel

So I'm using tractor scratch pro, which works with timecode vinyl and for those of you, they're not familiar with time could vinyl is that gives you the ability to put a piece of vinyl that has a kind of ringing tone on there which will send timing signals to tractor, allowing me to do things like scratch and to use that to control its very awesome that's been out for a while now, but I remember the first time I used timecode vile it blew my mind that gave me the ability to create a track or create some really cheesy new trick scratch tones and then scratch that stuff immediately. I thought that was the coolest thing ever I still do uh it's just that final is becoming less and less of a popular tool. So, um normally I would have q and q and play here. Ah, those are very basic functions that I will cover, so we're not really missing too much, but we have our obvious play. We have flux, which I will cover in a later tutorial on hardware basically just quickly it's a looping effect that m...

aintains the play had position when you enter a loop, so when you exit that loop the travel, then jump back to where it was before you activated it. Here we have different leap sizes and these are in divisions of beats so one thirty seconds of a beat up to thirty two beats, one bar is four beats, so this is where math gets easy. We have thirty two beasts, which is a bars we also have the ability to set our own in and out points with a loop, and then over here, this is where we activate a loop, and I'll explain the use of activation. Um, right now, so I'm gonna play this track, and I'm going to set a couple different leap sizes I couldn't resist, so those are my different leap sizes again, their beats it's really easy to active toe at a loop. Um, types of things we can do with looping, I like toe loop at the end of the song, which just gives me the ability to kind of loop out of our mix out of a track if I know the crowd isn't digging it and it's at a point where the track isn't really at its mix out point, I can and set a loop q and jumped that loop and then mix out of the track. Um, it's also great for using it as an effect, um, I can loop a track and kind of leave it on one of the lesser used decks, for example, dec de say, like, I have ah, good acapella I can throw it into a deck d and have that looping and then whenever I wantto kind of have that luke come up, I could just throughout my fate or on deck b there's a ton of different uses for loops and it's, one of the um best parson digital deejaying and something that tractor really makes easy even on really expensive hardware like the pioneer cd jay's the looping in there isn't grid based, so you don't have the ability to add a perfect eight beat loop and this is something that tractor makes extremely easy and gives you a lot of power over kind of creating remixes live so that's a predetermined lips, eyes let's create our own lips, eyes play on the track so what I did there as I hit the end and then the out is where I want to leave to start the out is where I want it to end deactivated out e could also active right and let me explain when active comes into play and I'm going to jump a little head, which I'll just get over to you in a minute and I'm gonna create a loop say right here that cream eight beat loop I'm going to save it again I'll explain how to save that, but now I'm gonna deactivate that loop and say I load up the song I know that this loop is saved here and when the play had finally gets to that point I wanted to start looping now I don't have loop active right now I know that there's a leap saved there but it's not active so let me move here and watch what happens when I moved past that I go see nothing happened right? So that looped wasn't activated which is a problem because we wanted it to I know I had that saved so let me go right here say I load up the song and then I had active so this loops active right now but when I hit play my play had still going to start here all right? So that's really the main use case for active I've seen on other tutorials people kind of confused about what the purpose of this is but having worked at the company these are the types of things that I know cool so you're a deck might look like this right now let's get into the advanced panel of the deck so to get into the advanced panel we could do two things we could either double click the top deck header or we could tap this little arrow right here let's do the arrow and let's start with move all right so we've already went over looping and the move has some functions that are very similar right? There are four different move functions one is beat jump and I kind of describe but be jumping is earlier when uh I was going over the strike the right weaken jump around to different positions in the song um and that's called be jumping but say we want to be jump in a perfect say thirty to beat increment so let's activate b jump and let's select thirty two go into the middle of a song and when you hit play and I'm gonna hit these left and right out what's gonna happen is the track is in a move perfectly thirty two beats forward and back check it out. You can already see how this could be very, very useful again, it's one of those things that somebody's digging a track you can move forward or if the buildup is way too long or whatever there's a million different reasons for it. Maybe not a million, but there's plenty of reasons to use be jumping we could also change loops. So what is a loop? Move let's find out so I have a two beat leap here and when we find a part, we're kind of make sense. So let's activate a to beat lee pier, which is right before the break and then I'm gonna jump around this a little bit, so check it out again among loop I'm gonna do to him in a match what's going on here let's activate that lee began and said of getting in and out I'm gonna get these left right arrows which I should have done originally so what I'm doing now is I'm moving the loop around again this is a really fun tool to use when you're creating a remix live which I'll do in the third course creating some remixes that's the good stuff that's the juicy stuff definitely recommend checking out that course so when I'm gonna have the most fun with so that is looper moving then we could also change the loop in in the loop out point so I'll go over lubin and say I am so I wantto change lupin point by one beat all right so let's do that so I click one and now I have a three beat waiting for one two three four one two three four one two three four back to three one two three so that gives you the ability to change the loop in point and maybe I can change the loop out point as well six not sure what it is you might ask why would you want an odd lupin? Oddly a point well say you wanted to mix from a track uh that's in four four and to attract that's in three for attracted since six uh the easiest way to do that without completely destroying the crowd with a train wreck is to add a three beat loop all right, so that's one of the use cases for this there's not a lot of use cases, but that's one of them so lupin through about point and there's some other functions here like extra fine and find those air just very small increments in and out. And then loop what? What does this mean? Well, loop gives you the ability to beat, jump or do any of these move functions depending on what the loop sizes? So if I have a thirty to beat loop, then I'm going to be be jumping thirty two beats. All right, so say I haven't ap loop and I had moved now I'm be jumping eight beats, so it kind of gives you the ability to not have to select an increment in two different places or if I said a loop in in a loop out point that's longer than thirty two beats, say, sixty four beats then if I said this toe loop it's going to be jumped sixty four beats so let's keep that in mind, it's kind of helpful to know that that sums it up from move. The next advanced panel is cute, so this is very important and I'm going to delete some of these key markers I'll delete one on the software will do the rest on my ex one that's next to me to delete a q point you select it and then go to this trash icon on the hardware you just hit shift apologize for doing that on the hardware but it's the only thing that I will do on the harder right now all right cool. So now we have my track here the very first thing I'm gonna do is go over the different types of q points because tractor has a ton of them let's create a key point actually I met you my more thing first this is getting a little ahead of us but I promise all over this momentarily all right? So my first complaint is actually a grid marker and you can store a q point on the software by going to a position in the song and then tapping a gray number so something that's not colored or white like you see here this is a grid cube but the most common q point is going to be a hot cute ah hockey will jump to a position in the song wherever you wherever you set that q point so say uh let's just have a couple of these rights to say here I want to keep point right here that's the break I put my play head there and then I hit the open key point and then it saves say want one at this break is well let's save that say I want one here them so now I have four key points watch what happens when I played the track and I hit those numbers so you can use hockey's and a number of different ways in this case I'm using them at different sections of the song first course break so on so forth but you can get creative with this and have one on a kick in the snare turn off kwan ties and then do some finger drawing so keep boys can be used in a number of different ways just think of it is a way to slice up your beat so you have eight q points inside of tractor and this is something that um it's great because not all digital deejaying software had that many q points I think most of them are have caught up to that number at this point. All right, so what other types of cubans do we have? Well, we have faded and fade out and remember I was talking about that auto cross fade um in the wedding deejay right? So say your wedding d j and you ate a hot tamale and you really got to go maybe I want to have a playlist that has a fade in and fade out point all right? So I couldn't go use the bathroom, get cleanly and then come back to my deejay mix and it's still going right part in the er graphic hot tamale reference I swear that's never happened to me um no I don't use you created invade appoints another use case could be like maybe a battle d j just wants to scratch and have the tracks switch automatically um it's kind of cheat cheating I don't know if I would do that in the battle but um yeah, the point is we have fate and fade out uh no really use of getting into that right now a more useful one would be something like a load marker, right? So say, um I want to track to load exactly where this key point is so I'm going to create a new key point and then change that toe load obsess loop toe load now whenever I load the track it's not going to go to the beginning, which is the default it's going to go to wherever my load marker is, which is right here, so I'm sure you khun already think of a number of useful cases where you'd want to track the loaded a specific point it saves you a step on and that's really what proficient workflow will do any step that you can save any button that you don't have to press the better and when we get into the mapping tutorial on course to we're going to save you a ton of time because we're going to really uh make sure that our hardware is a sufficient is possible other types of key points is we have loop so I already saved loop point earlier I promised you that I would explain that and I'm a man of my word well so I'm going to explain that now so here we go let's create a loop here I have eight beat loop and I want to now save that it's super simple I just had an open q point it turns green and there we go so we have three key points I'm sorry five six q points my math I'm telling you it's not that great so we have won three before I can jump between my key points with these arrows here so when the deck stopped the back key point or the back arrow will go to the previous q point when did explain things didn't go back to the beginning is the key point the right arrow will go to the next I find it just this easy to actually hit the key point to use this so it's up to you I can also map out my key points so say I want to move a key point to a different slot I'll hit map and I want this ah keep went six to be young people on a map slug coupon six top coupon eight and then boom it's not saved all right let's delete some of these by clicking, delete, click delete or in the hardware it's shift and he had to keep one but we'll go over that in the next tutorial so that's q points another thing I should note we can name these coupons so let's go to key point three here and may be named that break so in this middle section it's called an n which means no name I actually don't know if that's what it means, but I'm assuming let's call this break can't know everything but no name is probably a good guess on we'll call this one break too sweet and we'll call this one beginning all right, so now they're clearly named very helpful so last but not least we have our grid and now this is very important to know how to use when you're using sync, so be gritting is the process of putting a virtual grid over our track that will match the tempo to whatever the master is. So I have my master set to the clock, which is one hundred twenty four, so I have a track that was originally one hundred twenty six speech for a minute let's set the secret so firstly first thing to do is get right on a kick drum and I'm gonna zoom in very close all right? So now I'm super close into the way for him and you can see that my beaker it is a little off all right, so it's not perfectly on the transient the transient is the beginning of any sound, right? So I clap the beginning of that clap is the transient it's from my hands first meet that beginning initial point of the way form as are transient so this is an audio stuff right where we're going a little bit advanced here. All right, so we want to get the beat grid right on the transient of every single kick drum this track is house music which is kwan ties meaning it's right on the grid there's no human fluctuation to it may be like a hip hop track would have. So how do we do that? Well, it's, fairly simple. Once we're in here first, this kind of go over the different functions of the grid section these left and right arrows are going to move my be grids go left and right. So let's, just move that over a little bit and let's assume that that is the transient, which is this section right here let's flip throughout the song and we can see once I flipped through the song with my strike view that I am getting some different sections so it looks like that's pretty good it was awful would look something like that, but it's not off to perfect cause I did it I'm just kidding so say sometimes we have a look down here we have some tempos that are not quite, um correct like want like sixty eight point four nine nine I could most likely assume that this is that one you know, sixty eight and a half or maybe tractor analyzed this and it was at half tempo because I know for a fact that the song is not at sixty eight and a half or right here I have this lost mightiest song, which is at one hundred twenty seven point nine nine five beats per minute let's just assume that's that's one twenty eight this is at exactly one hundred twenty six which I know is correct but say it was off a little bit right it's a little bit weird how tractor does this but I'll explain you have this left arrow which is going to compress the big grid, so the slower the song is I'm sorry the fastest song is the smaller or tighter that be great isn't be so if I have attractive that drama based on that one hundred eighty beats per minute by be christened poem boom movements and be happening but if I had that at sixty beats per minute or eighty beats per minute half that it's going to be every two grid markers is one for that but that tempo so it's a little bit different so we want to compress this be great a little bit. Speed up the tempo for whatever reason. When I first started using tractor, I would have thought that this would be like increasing the tempo, right? Because it's is going up and going down. But it's actually stretching out you see how these grid mark it's kind of a little bit further apart. All right, so I'm at one twenty six. I'm good to go here. I can also cut the tempo in half, double the tempo. I can reset, I can have it automatically done and I can even tap it out. It really depends on how you want to go for it already. Know this tracks one hundred twenty six beats per minute. I've already set my good marker so there's really no point in me doing any of these things next. I just wantto lock this track to see what happens when I lock it. I could no longer tweak any of these parameters. It's locked it's. Good to go that track and now going to a play list of my catalog and I know that it's going to be reliable in every scenario.