5 Hidden DDJ-FLX4 Serato Features

Last week I showed you five hidden Shift button tricks for the Pioneer DJ DDJ-FLX4 in Rekordbox, and since then students and readers have been asking for the Serato version.

The FLX4 works with Serato DJ Lite out of the box, and with Serato DJ Pro if you’ve got a licence. But it was made for Rekordbox first, so with Serato some of its buttons are mislabelled, and some of the best tricks aren’t printed anywhere on the controller.

All five of these use the Shift button. There are two of them, but they both do exactly the same thing, so use whichever one is nearest. I show you each one in Serato DJ Lite in the video above.

1. Switch off Vinyl mode

With Vinyl mode on, the top of the jogwheel behaves like a record. That’s handy when a track is paused and you’re moving around it to set a cue point.

With a track playing, though, brush the top of the jogwheel on your way to another button and you can stop the music dead.

Hold Shift and press Out. Now, while a track is playing, touching the jogwheel anywhere only nudges it slightly faster or slower, so you can’t stop it by mistake. When the track is paused, you can still move through it as before.

Hold Shift and press Out again to switch Vinyl mode back on. If you never scratch, it’s a safer way to set your decks up. And Rekordbox users can’t do this from the controller, so this one’s yours.

2. Move the tempo fader without changing the speed

Sometimes you need to slow a track down or speed it up further than the tempo fader allows. Maybe you’ve synced to something at the wrong speed, or you just can’t get it quite fast or slow enough.

The official way is Shift + Beat Sync (labelled “Tempo Range”), which cycles through three tempo ranges. But switching range in the middle of a track is risky.

Instead, hold Shift and move the tempo fader. The track ignores it completely. So if you’ve pulled the fader all the way down and need to go slower still, hold Shift, slide the fader back to the top, let go of Shift, then pull it down again. Do the reverse to speed up.

This is the one I didn’t know about until I made this video.

3. Start tracks with the faders

Set a cue point, then hold Shift and push up a channel fader, and the track starts playing from the cue point. Pull the fader back down and it returns to the cue point, ready to go again.

The catch is that the track starts as soon as the fader moves, so by the time it’s loud enough for your audience to hear, you’ve missed the first beat.

The fix is to use the crossfader instead. In Serato’s settings, set the crossfader curve to its sharpest setting, all the way to “fast”. Now hold Shift and move the crossfader, and the track starts at full volume instantly, for a much cleaner cut.

Bonus tip: if you start a track by holding Cue and want it to keep playing when you let go, press Play while you’re still holding Cue.

4. Get around a track fast

To get straight back to the start of any track, hold Shift and tap Cue. If the track is playing, it carries on from the start; if it’s paused, it waits there.

To move through a track quickly, hold Shift and turn the jogwheel. You can get from the start to the end of a track in about a second.

Do it while the track is playing and Serato jumps by whole beats, so with dance music that hasn’t got too much going on, your audience will barely notice. Jump from a chorus into a verse and it’ll sound odd, but when you need to get somewhere in a hurry, you can often get away with it.

5. Sort your library from the controller

Hold Shift and press the left-hand Load button, and your library is sorted by BPM. Press it again to reverse the order.

Hold Shift and press the right-hand Load button, and it’s sorted by artist, A to Z.

It’s a quick way to find something at a similar BPM to mix in next, or to get to an artist you know you want, without going to the laptop.