Has anyone encountered the issue of the pitch slider getting stuck on the Prime 4? I thought it was because I was using sync but even on a set without sync enabled the pitch slider will not function on occasion. I have to move it back and forth really fast until I can get it to change if I am lucky. If I am not so lucky, then I have to reload a different song and then reload the song that the pitch slider was stuck on.
This happens totally at random and it’s not a reproducible glitch but it’s happened enough that I wanted to ask about it.
It doesn’t have to have sync on, if you have a track loaded on the deck C or D and pitch was moved it is enough. Search for “soft takeover” to understand how it works. Look at the arrows next to the pitchfader to know in which direction to move the fader
As Slay said, You have a green LED arrow both ends of the pitch fader. This lights up to indicate which direction you move the pitch to ‘catch up’ to get out of sync and bring full control back. The distance you have to move it varies on how far apart the BPMs are.
Soft takeover stops the big jumps in audio when turning off sync. You have to catch up to where the pitch fader would have been if you hadn’t sync’ed the decks BPMs.
I’ve noticed this as well… It’s very annoying the way they have the pitch control setup… Too much time is spent moving the pitch slider up/down just to get the pitch value to re-engage… Its awful.
It takes a fraction of a second to look to see whether the up or the down led light is on, and move the pitch control toward the light.
Short of having some massive “meeting of numbers” graphic bar graph on the main display, where two crosshairs meet when the pitch that auto-sync or layer last left the pitch, and where the physical pitch control is, the two led lights is as good as it gets.
Other options:
have either the up or the down LED flash at different speeds depending on how far the pitch control has to be moved in order to reconnect with the software pitch number (so flashes faster and faster the closer you get the pitch control to reconnecting with the software pitch)
on a future model, use an endless rotary control for pitch
on existing models let the user use one of the current endless rotary controls as pitch … let them reassign the linear pitch control for some other task… like maybe fast Hamonic Key changes
on a future model, have the pitch slider motorised so it jumps to the right setting when you’ve finished with auto-sync or layer change (but you just know that someone’s going to leave their headphones or drink in the path of the pitch control…. Don’t you) (doubles as a Steve Aoki cake launcher )
I can feel the appeal of relative pitch. In practice it could work well, until the pitch control is placed near the ends of its travel. At those stages, you’d have lots of movement/change available one way, but little movement/change available the other way.
Some kind of “clutch” or “ignore” button would be needed, such as “shift”, so if you press shift and move the pitch control (to re-centre it for example) the deck would ignore the pitch control movement if the shift key was held down.
In my opinion it would be more useful to have a “Tempo reset” button (like Pioneer) to automatically and gradually reset the BPM from the modified value due to SYNC with the old track, up to the value of the current position of the pitch fader. This operation could be accomplished when I turn the SYNC off (ie blue light off).
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