Confused about manual beatmatching. Nudging and all that stuff.

These are all skills that will just come with time and practice. it will take you a bit of time to be able to make sense of 2 different tracks playing at once. In answer to your questions:

1) Its a good idea to learn this with both headphones on and have the headphone cue split set to having probably just a bit more volume on the cue track as opposed to the master. I find the 9 O’clock position is good for me (its all personal preference). Hit play in time with the beat and listen carefully. If your not sure which is faster just nudge the track (the one you’re cueing up) either forward or backwards a little, with the jogwheel. Listen to see if it sounds better or worse (more or less in phase). If you nudged it forward and it sounded better, then chances are you need to speed up the track you’re cueing. nake a mental note of what position the pitch slider is at. Use this as your initial reference point. You know that the track is faster than this position so you know not to make the pitch any lower than this point. Increase the pitch a little and listen. If the track stayed in phase longer then you’re getting closer. If its worse then you would need to reduce the pitch. the basic process is nudge the jogwheel to keep the tracks in phase, adjust the pitch and listen. You will keep doing this until the tracks stay in phase. Keep making a mental note of the position of the pitch slider as a reference point. If you keep doing this and then you suddenly find that you’ve made the track you’re trying to cue, too fast then make a mental note of where the pitch slider is. Now you have 2 reference points to work with. You know where its too slow and you know where its too fast so you know that the right amount of pitch is somewhere between those 2 points. With practice this will become much easier. I would suggest that its better to learn to beatmatch using the jogwheels at this time. When you have mastered beatmatching, then you could learn to do it without touching the jogwheel.

2) The ability to beatmatch perfectly will just come with practice and time. You have to train your ears and your brain this new skill. I can beatmatch with ears only then look at the screen and it will be bang on (or extremely close to) most of the time. I would suggest trying to learn to beatmatch with just your ears as it is a valuable skill but one advantage of digital is having the information right there so you can use it you want/have to.

3) You could start it anywhere simply to match the pitch of the tracks if you really wanted to but it is much more useful and logical to start it at the beginning of the phrase as you can hear how the tracks will sound together (compatible keys and just generally how then blend together) and if you start it at a random pint then it could throw you off a bit.

Sorry I hope this wasn’t too longwinded and hopefully it will make sense. let me know how you go or if you have any more questions. Now practice practice practice!

The purpose of nudging the wheel is to keep the phase of the tracks lined up. If you get the track in phase but its the wrong pitch it will eventually fall out of phase. You nudge the wheel to push it back in to phase then quickly make an adjustment to the pitch. You then listen again and hopefully it falls out of phase much slower or not at all. You repeat this process until the tracks BPM and phase are matched. Make sense?

adit, post: 21017, member: 2099 wrote: How to disable the beatgrid? The temptation to peek is just TOO strong.

The way my buddy did it was by covering his screen with a black piece of paper completely cutting off the screen.

Sorry, one more thing since it looks like you’re a Traktor man.

http://www.djtechtools.com/2012/04/25/perfecting-traktor-beatgrids-eans-method/
Don’t fear sync and beatgrid. Learning to manually beatmatch is great, but there’s no shame in using a beatgrid if you take the time to make your grid perfect.

Some fellow DJ gives you crap about this? Shrug it off. Preparation is one of the best skills a DJ can have, and taking the time to perfect your collection with cues and grids just means that you did your whole night’s beatmatching in advance at home so you can focus on the dancefloor more and on the busywork (yes, I said it) less.

Ah you are trying to transition two tracks with different beat styles or different genres, like mix a dance track with an “oomph oomph” into a hip hop with a ” tsch tsch tsch oomph” …

Now that is a totally different beast. There are several different ways to do it, the thing I use most is “switching the bass drum”. This is really hard to explain without showing, but I try it like this:
Kill the bass on the track you want to bring in (I adjust the rest of the EQ also a tad, but that is experimenting) bring the new track in with the transition (sometimes a slight effect like echo/reverb can help cover your tracks). At the same time transition the bass by killing the bass on the running track and bringing in the bass of the new one and align the EQs to help the transition.
This is really lots of experimenting, but I hope you understand the basic is to switch the beat and of course only applies if you have 2 tracks that have a good bass beat, but different pattern. If you have totally different genres you might have to go to even more advanced stuff.