A friend of mine who still scratches on vinyl was saying that he never uses the pitch control, except to slide it out of the way of his finger/hand movements.
It made me think: how often do we all use pitch? Either with the hardware pitch control, or auto-sync, doesn’t matter?
How much of your usage is the pitch on zero percentage?
For me, My first track might be at 0% but after that, beatmatching will mean that none of my decks will be back on 0% for the rest of the night. The only exception I can think of is if I’ve had to do a cut mix through silence or Echo/wash out effects Into a different genre. And even then the first track might be played at 0% but then it’s almost any % within acceptable reason to keep beatmatching
So I’d probably say that I’m on 0% pitch for about 5% of the night , if that
My sets go somewhere from 160 to 180, or when playing uptempo I go from 190 to 230.
So there are tracks that match my current speed, then I have the pitch fader at 0, but if the track is 199 and need to push it a bit, then pitch fader is somhere else than 0. I mostly have the pitch resolution on 4% to have maximum precision. Try to avoid tracks with too much speed difference but if needed then I go to max 20% range.
Summing up - yes I use pitch fader a lot.
Play most of the time with 4% pitch range…usually return to 0% , as I don’t use Keylock or sync.
I play mostly melodic techno and progressive house, so BPM range is around 120-124 BPM most of the time.
A lot depends on the genre for this but I know a lot of RnB/HipHop DJ’s play tracks a few percent over 0 simply because it makes it easier to groove to, e.g. Hotline Bling is a “banger” to the HipHop crowd but it’s too slow at 0% to figure out a decent groove that’s inline with the hype part of the night that you’d drop this track, so we play it a few percent above to make it easier.
I’m sure there have been many times where I’ve done an entire gig and not touched the pitch faders at all.
I do mostly general parties these days (pre covid) - birthdays, weddings etc. where the clients want to hear the music untouched. They don’t expect to hear scratching, looping, effects, samples or long beat mixes.
There are plenty of ways to get from one track to another without needing to beat mix or adjust tempo, so I rarely even do running mixes. It’s the music choice that’s important, not how it’s segued.
Like Martijn Garritsen, who’s tracks were made for him to be 138bpm, so he wouldn’t have to pitch.
You are right of course. I make evening openers for a wedding-DJ friend of mine, with 3 or 4 tracks fitted in 3 to 4 minutes that the couple specifically chose to start the dance with. Simple transitions and sometimes a real mix
Me too. I’ve actually been hired by other DJs to make first dance medleys for them, because the tracks were so far apart in genre or BPM (or both) that they couldn’t think of a way to do it themselves.
I got a lot of inspiration from the early DMC DJs who made megamixes when there was no such thing as samplers or key lock. Splicing quarter inch tape to create stutter edits and loops.
For such thing I like to do some old school drop mixing - just find a good spot in both tracks to do an instant change without any blending together.
This technique is very fun but also can be very hard if the songs don’t match together.
