Using Loops on a CDJ.

[Slippy]

Hi All

This is both a statement for beginner djs and a question for the more experienced.

using your loop function on a cdj properly can be very daunting at first, but some useful times to use a loop are:

When you need to get out of a vocal heavy track fast(eg: you definately cant let track play through, but theres vocals constantly) and still want a nice long transition and your bringing in a track with vocals quite early on so you need to avoid vocal clashes, you can find a nice 4 beat spot in song that wont sound looped, loop it, and start bringing in your new track over the loop.

When you are bringing in a new track with a long intro, you can loop a nice melodical bar in the track your coming out of to keep things interesting and if you eq it well can sound very very nice particularly with some good house music

hopefully this helps some people, please be aware im quite new to mixing myself so for all i know this may be terrible advice but in my recent times of learning to use loops these are two ways i really enjoy to use them.

also be aware that when you are looping the track.. even if both tracks for example are exactly 128 bpm... you may find the loop is falling out of beat, this is definatly true on my cdj400s and after some googling ive found that as soon as you hit loop if you speed to looped track up by 0.26% it will take alot less nudging to keep in beat.

this leads into the question nicely because omg i dream about having decks that could just keep a beat in time perfectly? why does it go out of beat? it seems to speed up as this 0.26% rule does seem to work really well, but i really fear using loops at a gig because its a fine line from a great transition or a train wreck as your beatmatching on the fly with two tracks going full ball to the crowd!

does anyone have any tips regarding this or maybe just some more good ways to use loops in the mix ?

[Suby]

I havent been mixing that long either but I have found the same thing on my CDJ350's, when u loop a 4 bar loop, they do seem to go out of time and I have to nudge it every bar or 2 to keep it in time. I am interested to see if my new decks will be the same.

[street]

it happens with cdj2000s as well and there top of the line

[Mitch]

the cdjs are only analysing the song and applying an algorithm to get the beat count and apply the loop, which its possible for it to be the tiniest bit out which will affect your loop. And if your looping manually, human error + reaction time is more than likely to prevail and it will be a bit out.

You don't win either way

[chrismak]

mitch is right.

even though it sounds good, your loop will almost never be 100% accurate.

shorter loops are even harder to keep beat matched because the inaccuracy is doubled with each iteration.

assume you have a 128bpm track with the pitch set to 0, and you make a 4 beat loop.

in this instance, a perfect 4 beat loop will need to go for 1.875 seconds.

assume your loop sounds ok going for 1.86 seconds. that's 0.015 seconds difference and 99.2% accurate.

the bpm of your track becomes 129. after 32x 4-beat loop iterations (about 1 minute) you are nearly half a second too quick.

[imadje]

Mitch and Chris are right.

The only way round it is to keep your ear on it throughout and nudge accordingly.

Or get a DVS and press SYNC.

Personally I think a DJ in control of a small nudge every few bars adds real groove and individuality to a mix.

There are so many ways you can line up beats, some laid back, some pushing forward. Same way a drummer can chill or push on the pulse of a song.