Pablo Martin

Traktor Pro basically rivals Ableton Live for Djing, but allows more freedom with ‘on the fly’ track choices and easier browsing within Traktor rather than having to pre-plan an Ableton set beforehand.  I mean lets be honest, most Ableton DJ’s now probably only use 2 channels of full tracks and another two tracks to add samples and loops over the top. Well apart from the fact that in Ableton you could play live melodies and leads over the top of other tracks, in Traktor you can do all the same with the full 4 decks layout.

Before you start gridding your tracks, you need to square away your prefs to match your music.

• Open your preferences and go to “File Management”.
• Under “Analyze BPM Range”, change the Min/Max BPM to what your tracks that you’re gridding are (eg, Min: 120, Max: 136 for general techno)
• Make sure “Place AutoGrid-Marker” is checked
• Now go to “Transport” and choose “Snap” under “Mouse Control”.

Now Traktor is set to always return a number in that range, so it’s going to get your grid right 99.9% of the time. Then for DnB, do like 160 – 185, dubstep at 135 – 150, etc. Also, every time you load a track, Traktor will create a grid for you.

• Load your track and let it analyze.
• Generally, you’d be done now. There should be a grid marker on the first beat of the track and the tempo should be exactly right.

Making sure all your Trak’s have been ‘beat gridded’ just like ‘warping’ in Ableton, and the quantisation feature enabled, all decks sync’d up to the master tempo all that is left for you to do is go through each track and set up up to 8 cue points or loop points.

TRAKTOR PRO