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Traktor Pro Effects and File Browser

So on top here right now, I'm displaying my clock since I was going over tempo but conveniently aiken switch to my effects unit by selecting fx kind of like the tv station right over here I could have been on my audio recorder, which is very self explained toward so we won't review that and the fx there's two different types of effects inside of tractor one is called a group effect a group effect will give me three different effects with one parameter that a control for each on the left hand side at my dry, wet dry means there is no effect on the signal it's a dry, clean signal coming from the track deck out to the mixer and then wets means there's a ton of or not a ton but it's increasing so dry none wet a lot we're in seattle, so we'll just keep this all the way up wet and then the right hand side I have a single effect or a I think it's called single right like I call it an advanced effect but uh let's call the single effect and the single effect will give me one affect choice but t...

hree parameters that I can control for that so a good example for when you'd want to use this is something like a tape delay taped last things like feedback, speed filter all sorts of different parameters that you simply would not have on a group effect and group effect would come into play, especially in the next two um, next, of course, when I go over creating some middie mapping, all right, so we're going to map out some really cool group effects but basically three effects one perimeter each one effect three parameters for each that's different sweeping a group in a single effect. Now I can select which effects I want let's start with the group on the left buy clicking here and I have a menu, your men, you might have a lot more effects, but what I've done is I've actually limited the amount of effects that I have because I'm not using every single effect inside of tractor there's over forty effects and tractor. So what I've done to start and what I suggest you do is when you first get tractor probe, I would open up your preferences and then going to go into a different page inside of this tree, paul effects appropriately on up here I have some routing and I'll explain what the routing is gets. This is also very important the effects panel mode, which is right now group and single I can't have a before effects in it's really going to do two a lot less confusing and then we have effects pre selection now what is this? These are all the effects that I could have in my effects list but I've taken out because I don't use them I'm not I don't have a need for a different filters you might I don't I'm not in some modulation effects it reminds me too much of deejaying in nineteen ninety nine watching donald god used the flans anybody who's been to a house or techno party in the late nineties? Early two thousand's has heard the flan jj I was like that was the big thing back then was the flange jj like kids just sweating on the dance floor in that flynn came on it was just could gooden and bad memories there all right so I've taken out flinch so we don't have to relive my childhood and all these different filters and phase and iceberg things that I don't use right um and the reason I've done this is because it's a lot easier to find the effect that you want when you don't have a bunch of stuff that you don't use so on the left hand side I have the effects that I can add and I have the effects that I already I'm using here so there's not that many so that way when I go into my list I don't have a million things I just have what I need very convenient, more efficient that's what we want to be we want to be efficient okay, so that's it I'll get back into this in a second so how do we get in effect to signed it starts in the mixer so if we want the group effectively here to be playing on deck eh let's selected so here's a fixinto one let's turn up our dry wet to say fifty percent and let's turn on the reverb so here's, my affects parameter this is going to adjust the size of the reverb for the delay is going to be different delay times for the gators and to be different gator times and then below the knob I can turn that on or off so I'm gonna play the deck with all right so we got some pretty cool effects there I could then change those if I really wanted to I don't need to use those effects so that's a group effect now I'm gonna close this we don't need this at this particular moment now let's go over the advanced effect which is going to be the tape delay it's over here unlike on a group effect where you turn on the effect below the corresponding knob, you're going to turn on the effect below the dry wet on a single effect that's good to know too good to remember because this into come into play when we go over hardware so let's turn on affects unit two for this channel let's hit play three parameters that I can use on one effect on tape delay is a lot of fun to play around with all right? We have a ton of different effects I would suggest going through every single effect in single effect mode really getting to know it and then if you don't need all the parameters put it in a group effect we only have two effects in this, but you can have for which means if you have for a group of ac units you could actually have twelve effects on at once, which will melt heads promise we don't want to do that here where creative live I'm sure the cleaning guy wouldn't appreciate that all right, so those are affect units it's fun stuff um we'll play around a little bit more with that and the next course on hardware but let's keep it kind of concise and go over something that's less fun, which would be our browser so the browser is split up into two different sections you have your tree, you've heard me say that word tree quite a few times and then we have our list, right? So our list isn't to be all the songs and the tree is going to be different sections so we won't get too much into this because it's not that fun but it's definitely essential having a organized music library is very important again when I started deejaying it was on vinyl and he would show up to a gig with maybe sixty to one hundred pieces of vinyl so that's anywhere from one hundred two hundred songs that you had at your disposal so finding a song was fairly simple you go through your crate it was all color coordinated whatever you find your song you throw it on now in digital deejaying we have thousands of songs most djs have thousands of songs inside of a library so finding a song is a lot harder. Well, it doesn't have to be, but for the most part it can be a lot more difficult. So how is it done? Let's start in the track collection the track collection is a continue going to contain every single track in our library within tractor, so I have artists, releases, labels, genres, all tracks, all samples and remake sets. So within these folders, I have all sorts of stuff in here. All right, so these are all my songs. I think I saw cashmere in there who I'm going to see tonight and let's close that below I have playlists. We're going to want to use playlists the most playlists will give me a very clean and organized folder to find all of my songs that I want to play safe for a particular night or within a particular genre they're all going to be analyzed so on and so forth I have explore this is where I can go into my hard drive and find songs that may not be in itunes or my track collection I have audio recordings which are recordings that I've done with the audio recorder then I have itunes and items is really convenient let's create they play list based on itunes and I'm going to create a playlist that I'm going to use in the third course to create a remix set so make sure you take that course as well or else you're missing out on the really juicy stuff and I've already created this creative live playlist here there's nothing in there and I'm actually going to delete this real quick so right click really play list yes and I'm going to control click on play this folder and I can either create a folder and a folder will look like the house and techno with guys that I have here the little folder with a plus sign I want to create a play list though call it creative line makes deck songs I'm gonna go back into itunes and then I'm going to select all of these teams supreme tracks if you don't follow team supreme, go to soundcloud and follow them they're really good guys and it's all original music week after week cool so now I have a number of different songs in here taken from itunes that I want to put into a playlist so right now they're all most of them are look like they're analyzed there's some important information in there but just to make sure I mean going to right click or control, click on that play list and hit analyze what analyze is going to do is set the's functions you see bpm, the b grid, the key, the gain all of these type of things right? I could go into special and customize this if I want to, but I'm going to do all right select ok and then in the bottom here you're going to see that these tracks are analyzing now you want to do this beforehand because this bogs down your computer and although tractor doesn't take up that much memory, we want to make sure that our machine is running at full efficiency, so analyzing your tracks beforehand is super important and let's back up for a second and actually go over something else that's gonna make sure that your library is best organized so back to play lists in a second let's go into track collection and this right click on this something that I have selected upon startup is consistency so let's check consistency I'm gonna select this and then what my computer's doing right now or what tractors doing is it's going through my music library and making sure that there's no tracks that are missing it's checking whether or not tracks have been analyzed or not checking consistency right? We want to make sure that our library is most effective so this is what the consistency report looks like. Looks like I have four thousand and seventy eight total tracks looks like I have a ton that still need to be analyzed but I have zero tracks missing, which is the most in full report in part is not to have any missing tracks there's nothing more frustrating than going into a library, loading a track and having tractors say this track does not exist we just want to avoid that. So checking your consistency report is very important to assure that you don't have missing songs. If I go into my preferences, I can actually have that happen let's. See which one is it? Uh, my butt here file management show consistency report on startup so my tree file management show consistency and this is also where we can choose your music folders. All right, so you're directories, your root directory, your sample directory, your green except directory your itunes directory. All of these things can be customized, so when you go into your tree and select one of these things it's pointing to the correct folder and music folders could be say we get a brand new folder of music that maybe we purchased on a non online web store on a different computer, we just put it on this computer and we want to add it, weaken the neck select ad, go find that folder and on my computer, and we're good to go. So again, these air really essential parts to make sure that tractor is looking at the correct folders. So now that we've ah went over this which one should have won over in the genesis of this section? Let's, get back to our play list so I have a number of songs here. They've all been analyzed, but maybe I want to add some tags or some metadata to this. So this is going to help me search through my massive library to save metadata. One of the first do is select the song I've selected this a non see song by t k can be, and I'm going to right click our control, click. I have a number of different things that I can do here on the track listed load into decay and poor cover art elite relocate all sorts of different stuff. I'm gonna go into edit when I open up at it. I now have a a ton of different metadata tags that I can add and metadata is information like the track, the artist. Saw the data that's stored within that song that help us search for the song and later time so what I want to do here is make sure my title is good that seems to be good the release teams supreme volume sixteen the artist take a k and b the remixer it would be him as well, but we don't want that he is the producer so there's really no point in that as well the label but sad the label to be team supreme and um let's give it a five star rating being generous the comments and maybe we can comment this banker because it's twenty fourteen and we all love bangers and ah, maybe we met the lyrics oh baby, yeah, I'd like that or something like that maybe those aren't the lyrics but I'd like to get a little bit creative and this is the file path as well. So why did I make that ridiculous lyric or add banger or any of these things? Well, I'll show you to save this first remembered it apply that applies the metadata and then select ok, now you can see the labels there the comments there, the lyrics is not there so say I want to customize what I see displayed up here say I don't need to see the import day it's not important to me on the track header we're actually for control click and then all of these that air take their what you're going to see so I don't need the m four dates so let's find that so there it is it's gone the comments so they're the ratings still, there may be a want ad the lyrics, my amazing lyrics that I've added all right, so I selected that and here's the lyric oh baby yeah I like that I mean, how many songs have been written in the past ten years of those lyrics I should've put tonight or ah you and I together or something else very cliche but that'll do maybe the next song so now when I search and I want to find a song with that lyric I say, oh baby yeah I like that and then here's my song by t k can be right there convenient say I want to search the label team supreme came supreme I spoke supreme wrong so seeing soup right there we go. So here is all the songs and team supreme which was all of them so maybe that's not the best but maybe I could you bangor and then there's my song as well so again, meta data will help us search through our stuff or not stuff searched through our massive library and find the songs that we need we also have here creative live remake set say I want to have these um I always always know that I'm going to use this folder uh are this playlist and I wantto quickly access it on top here so here I have a number of different playlists techno house deep alice shane's house tech else yada yada yada but I want this creative live remake set and I wanna place it right there so there we go shane's house creative lives remix tech songs that's it so there's our browser all sorts of good stuff. So just to quickly review what we went over in this course we've went over the mixer we went over the track, dex, we've been over the different types of effects you've been over editing all of these different things of the advance panel we went over the track collection and the browser. One last thing that I'm gonna throw in here is kind of ah ah final tip is different effects routing and this is something that slipped my mind when we were going over effects but let's go to effects here now and select effects in our preferences and up top here of effects routing I have send insert in post fader send is if we have an external mixer and we want to send the effect into maybe the effects routing within that mixer um, his own ninety two mixture actually has an effect sense so we can send the output or whatever delay and, uh, he used that externally inserts gonna work like this. So answer isn't have the effect before this fader. So watch what happens when I turn on this reverb. I don't like to have in search, and I'll show you why theo there's, my river when I turned on the fate of thief river goes with it. I said that a post fader what's it happens, I'm going to play the track and the river is actually happy after this, fader so I can kind of throw this volume up a little bit and you're still going to hear the river with different delays as well. You you you do so one final fun fact, so that wraps it up for the first course tractor pro software essentials again, my name is nick, a k a new trick with native instruments, and I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. It was fun. Stay tuned for the next course on hardware and middie mapping and the final course, which isn't to be advanced techniques with remixed x, and we're even to get into some machina, enjoy.