Video Training: How To Use The Transport On The Traktor Kontrol S8

Phil Morse | Founder & Tutor
Read time: 2 mins
Last updated 22 October, 2015

Traktor transport
Yup, that’s your “jogwheels” in the Kontrol S8, and yup, you can manually beatmatch, nudge, scratch (of sorts) and do everything else on them that you can on CDJs and even vinyl… as long as you know how to. Today’s video shows you.

Today we’re bringing you the first of our Get Started With The Traktor Kontrol S8 series, which is an exciting new five-part video training we’ve made on the new Traktor Kontrol S8, designed to help DJs coming from more conventional DJ controllers, CDJs or even vinyl to make the most of this new flagship from Native Instruments.

I think it’s true to say that this is the first truly mainstream hardware / software DJ system that dares to comprehensively reimagine how we might DJ with digital music. The Remix Decks, built-in screens, lack of jogs, ability to work with both Midi gear and analogue gear, and more, show Native Instruments’s intent to put this unit at the heart of digital DJing, at least for today’s electronic genres.

However, we know already from a lot of your feedback that, while a lot of you “get” why such a unit is potentially so important to DJing, it’s still a daunting prospect getting used to some of the ideas baked into the S8. Hence this tutorial series is designed to help DJs coming to the unit for the first time or considering buying it to understand better some of the concepts.

We’ll be looking at the displays, switching to other gear / switching laptops between two DJs, the FX engines, and how to use loops on the unit… but we’re going to start today right at the very beginning, which is how to use the transport. Or to put it another way: “How do I cue my music when there are no jogs?” We’ll answer that question and many more in the video.

The Training Video

Check out the other parts in this series:

Got any specific questions about the Traktor Kontrol S8, transport or otherwise? Want to add anything to this tutorial’s info? Please feel free to do so in the comments.

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