Can Sync hold a DJ back?

If you are importing the songs in Traktor anyway, you can just take ten seconds to check if the beatgrid is right.

A minute, you need to get a faster PC

The trouble is, you don't know which songs need manual gridding until you come to play them, and realise that they are out.

A minute, you need to get a faster PC

Yeah I cant understand why people trash Traktor grids, . There are some that it messes up usually because there is either a long section with an off beat that confuses the system and it puts the grid on the half bar, or the tempo drifts in the track. but except for a small percentage of virtually all sequenced music the beat grids are fine and spending time manually beatgridding them seems like a pure waste and maybe even some form of rage against the machine for having the temerity to automatically set a beat grid.

You do know that beatgridding a song takes like a minute tops, don't you?

Tell that to Madeon. While I wouldn't consider him a DJ in the traditional sense he is still a DJ. If you believe you learn phrasing, song structure, and harmonic mixing from beat matching and it can't be learned any other way then I implore you to explain the many people who aren't djs who understand these concepts... Avicii definitely was wrong when he said old school DJs use reading the crowd as a feeble attempt at staying relevant. What he should have said is this whole sync debate is a feeble attempt at old school DJs trying to stay relevant.

learning to make two tracks play at the same speed and that the snares line up properly is a purely mechanical activity. Knowing how to beatmatch is certainly a worthwhile skill to have, but it doesn't mean you can't be a good DJ if you don't. I believe it would behoove any student of the art form to learn how to do it, just like airplane pilots still learn to navigate with charts even though they have GPS and radar, but I personally don't give a fuck how they do it as long as they get me to my destination in one piece and the plane doesn't spiral into the ground. Same goes for any DJ.

I forced myself to learn straight up vinyl because I wanted to, and got quite good at it. To be honest if I were to go home right now and try to throw down an hour on vinyl, it wouldn't be perfect... you really need to practice it regularly.

It sounds like you did the right thing and have learned it enough for your style.

My point was simply pointing out the folks who say things like "Yeah, I lined up beats on CDJ-2000's once, it was so easy", who state that they know how to beat match and that it's "easy" are deluded.

Learning to beatmatch is tedious and time consuming, but it forces you to do something that is so simple and overlooked: It force your to LISTEN.

And not just "I like this track" listen, it forces you to learn to understand the structure of the music. During this period of learning, the other facets of DJ'ing like phrasing, harmonic mixing, and most importantly timing will begin to fall into place on their own.

Learning to beatmatch is tedious and time consuming, but it forces you to do something that is so simple and overlooked: It force your to LISTEN.

And not just "I like this track" listen, it forces you to learn to understand the structure of the music. During this period of learning, the other facets of DJ'ing like phrasing, harmonic mixing, and most importantly timing will begin to fall into place on their own.

And for the digital sync users who state they learned to beatmatch in a week, I don't believe so. Try using actual vinyl on decks, and not only beatmatch tracks initially, but keep them beat locked without any audible pitch corrections (aka, riding the pitch). It'll take you a LOT longer than a week to master that, and be able to do it continuously for hours on end.

And then you need to train your ear to be able to do all of this on other systems, PA's and club systems. That's a whole new level of learning as well.

Walk before you run.

Lies.