elmgroove

Think of a DJing like driving down the highway.

You’re gonna be playing music pretty consistently for most of the night (cruising at a pretty steady pace). You may speed up or slow down depending on traffic, construction, or “mood of the crowd.” But shit, sometimes things come up and you gotta stop completely, especially if there’s a huge 18-wheeler lying perpendicular across the highway.

I’m not sure if that was helpful or not, but once I started with the metaphor I just kept going with it haha.

If you’re dropping in a slower RnB track in the middle of a faster paced set, I wouldn’t attempt to do any crazy mixing. I feel that’s an instance where it’s best to let the track breathe. Then bring the next track in once the RnB song starts fading out – but again, gotta let it breeeeathe and don’t try to mix the two songs too much. My 2 cents…

Just to reiterate what rjwhite41 said, start using your volume faders for these kinds of transitions. You have a LOT more control this way.

IMO, the crossfader should only be used for cutting/scratching and maybe hard-cut transitions.

Are you talking about like 1970s disco kinda music? I don’t think I’ve heard this one before. But I’d venture to guess these people says it’s harder because if they’re using a controller, they’re probably the ones completely reliant on the SYNC button. Disco was/is usually played by human musicians, so there’s the fact that the beats aren’t going to be running at an exact BPM the whole song. So when blending the records, the DJ needs to know how to manually nudge the turntable a bit to keep the two records in sync.

But of course, this is all completely feasible on a controller, it’s just whether you make an effort to use this technique.

Are you deleting tracks from Traktor’s collection? In my experience, once you import a song into Traktor and set up cue points (using 1, 2, 3, 4, etc) they’ll remain there every time you reopen the song, unless you delete them from the collection. And of course, this doesn’t apply with the cue button/floating cue.

How long have you been using Traktor? I realize all DJ software pretty much does the same thing. But I feel once you’re used to a software system and have become comfortable with it, why change? It’s only going to mean extra time to adjust. Plus, you’d have spent money on now two professional-grade DJ packages. Have you looked at other controllers more geared towards Traktor?