Essentially it allows you to assign up to 6 effects to any track, adjusting parameters of them on the fly. The top of each play section holds 4 knobs and a couple of buttons for effects. Not being a turntablist-style DJ myself, I can’t speak as to how well this would work for scratching, but I’ve seen it done by others to admirable results. As is common with Traktor, if you’re playing anything other than straight 4/4 beat music, you’ll probably have to adjust your initial track position because it tends to put that first point at the location of the first sound, which isn’t always the first beat of a track.Ī jog wheel holds a combined function of allowing you to speed up or slow down a track, as well as a turntable-esque “scratch” function that is enabled by pressing down slightly on the top while turning. Of course, you can still do the “old fashioned” way of pressing an In and Out button to set your loops, but Traktor does an amazing job of picking them out and setting them automatically.Ĥ hot cues can be assigned to each track, enabling you to jump to a specific section and immediately start playing from there. There’s a loop section with knobs to control loop location and size, as well as setting loops and making them active. Each of the play decks has buttons to fire off 4 sample players, plus 4 hot cues. From left to right you have a play/control deck, a 4-channel mixer, then another play/control deck. It’s relatively portable, has a load of features that you’re not likely to find on many other controllers and makes much of what I’ve come to love about the Traktor Pro system even better to use. It is a fully-featured 4-deck mixer, plus 2 MIDI controllers all wrapped into a single system. When I first laid eyes on to the Traktor Kontrol S4 from German-born Native Instruments, I was impressed. Being a die-hard vinyl purist, it’s been a long road for me to accept that MIDI controllers can be not only viable but actually preferable in some cases. If you had asked me 5 years ago to write anything about a MIDI controller that would take the place of a traditional turntables and mixer DJ setup, I’d have laughed at you. Though the S4 ships with a special version of Traktor called Traktor Pro S4, Traktor Pro is a free update and it’s what you’re going to want to use. Also, since this is a review of the hardware, I’m not going to go too in depth with the features of Traktor Pro, except where necessary for the hardware tie-in. If you’re not familiar but this still interests you, there are loads of tutorials across the Internet and YouTube is full of them. With that said, if you’re reading this then I’m going to assume that you’re familiar with DJ terminology so I’m not going to take up extra words explaining things. Larger jog wheels would let us perform scratches more naturally, but you do soon get used to the size and you can always attach a regular turntable or CDJ to the Kontrol S4 if you want to scratch on a larger platter.While we don’t cover too much in the way of specialty gadgets here at TNW, the success of a review that I did on another Native Instruments system a few months ago leads me to believe that there are more than a few of you who quite like to read about this sort of thing, so I’ve decided to branch out a bit and include reviews on this type of equipment when I can. Our only criticism is the size of the jog wheels. You can also use the jog wheels to speed up and slow down tracks momentarily to synchronise them, and the very low latency and responsiveness helps here too. This responsiveness means you can perform your scratches and beatjuggles naturally without having to compensate for any latency. This means that the jog wheels control Traktor using a special protocol rather than the older MIDI protocol, so moving the jog wheel has a near-instantaneous effect on a track. Because NI manufactures the Traktor software as well as the Kontrol S4, the integration between both is extremely tight. Thankfully, the Kontrol S4’s jog wheels are excellent. Modern DJ controllers only need jog wheels to scratch, so if a controller has them they need to be good. There’s quite a bit of friction in comparison to scratch-oriented crossfaders such as Ecler’s Eternal crossfader or the DJM-T1’s crossfader, but we had no problems performing scratch techniques such as crabs and flares. The Kontrol S4’s crossfader is great for mixing or scratching.
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