José Reach

6/10

I bought myself a Kontrol S4 in december, but it was a busy period. My family had discouraged me to buy it, as they rather see me hard working at college than DJing. I decided that it I live my life and still chose to buy it, but deep down I still felt the resistance which brought the fun down.
It took me a while to install everything decently with upgrades from traktor. I had distortion problems with my controller, wich I fixed few days later by turning the internet network off. I wasn’t used to a controller like that, it was new to me to play with 4 decks and samples decks.

Beside of that, the unboxing part, when I holded it in my hand for the first time, the smell of a new controller, to see it completely clean without dust, scratches or finger prints, to feel the knobs and the jogs with my hand, … that was just awesome! Knowing that you own the most awesome and powerfull digital controller on the market and playing music with it made me feel powerfull.

Ask a dj friend of yours if they have a DJ program like traktor on a CD, and if you may install it on your computer, that way you’ll spare money on program.

In your case, I would chose between these 3 options:

Mixtrack Pro is a decent beginners device. This is usefull if you don’t want to invest a lot and want to look if djing is for you.

Traktor s2, is a very good controller. Appart from many features, it’s easy to use, professional and comes with a perfect program (traktor pro 2) and has a very good audio quality. I’m also guessing that in the near future, Native Instruments will release the Kontrol X2 which could be attached to your S2 controller which will allow you to use pads to cross the thin line between mixing and producing music. The Traktor S2 is at the expensive extreme edge of being affordable though.

The Novation Twitch is a cool thing. It allows you to do more than the standard starter controller, it’s creative, comes with traktor, professional while it is affordable. It only has no jogs. I would call this the midway.

A beginners controller is good if you still don’t know if DJing is for you, and you don’t want to invest a lot. The risk is that these controllers might bore you easily after you found out how it works, which may cause you to eager for a better controller or cause you to quit DJing.
Or you can spend more money for the S2, which is also easy to learn on, but which is also usefull if you want to go beyond the beginners phase. It will cost you more money, but because of the reasons above, you will be more invested and involved.
Or you can chose the midway and go for the Twitch.

Not long ago I had to make the kind of same decision as you have to do. In the end, I went the expensive way and chose for the Traktor Kontrol S4. I don’t regret it.