AlphaTheta XDJ-AZ Full Video Manual & Training Tutorial - Tips & Tricks

I'm about to give you a comprehensive free tutorial on the features and operation of the Alpha Theta XDJ AZ Flagship Standalone console. By the end of this tutorial, you'll understand everything there is to know about it. I'll show you every feature, help you troubleshoot common issues, give you practical tips for using it at gigs and in home practice, show you all the ways you can get music into it, and even explain how to integrate it with other hardware and software so you can unlock its full potential.

Now, this is a highly capable piece of kit. It's got pretty much everything you'll find on a Pro Alpha Theta DJ system, and it feels very similar to using club gear to DJ on. You can play from USB drives across all four decks, stream your own music from the cloud, use Beatport, use it as an external controller with DJ software, add record decks or media players, mix in microphones, and its 10-inch screen is the best ever on such a unit from Alpha Theta.

Now, if you're coming to it from another Alpha Theta or Pioneer DJ model, or another hardware brand or type of DJ system, this detailed walkthrough will really help you to get to grips with your XDJ AZ. So, do check out our table of contents. You can hit Ctrl and F or Command and F depending on your computer, just type in the keyword, and if we've got a chapter marker for it, it will be highlighted. Just hit the time code, and it's going to jump you straight to that part of the video. It's designed to be a video manual, so do bookmark it so you can come back as often as you like. It's 2 hours long, so do treat it like a reference resource.

Now, now, if you're a pure beginner or an intermediate DJ, I do have a word of warning. This video alone is not going to be enough for you to play great DJ sets. There's many skill sets and pieces of knowledge that you have to have to crush it as a DJ. So, I can teach you today about this piece of gear, but if you don't understand the rest of the gear that you'll need, or how to find and organize music, or the basics of counting and timing and beat mixing, or the skills of programming and performing a DJ set, or how to achieve success as a DJ, whether that's as a hobby DJ or for a career, of course, you're going to be frustrated.

When I started back in '92, we didn't have YouTube. We had to learn by trial and error. I learned on cheap turntables and a crappy Gemini mixer. It took me years of frustration before I got good. I remember nearly giving up several times. I'm so glad I didn't, of course, because I stuck with it, and DJing has become my career. It's brought me decades of joy. So, I'm going to make that promise to you. Yes, if you're new to this, you're going to run into some frustrations, but my job is to get you through them.

The teaching style we use here at the Digital DJ Tips school is to focus on the end result, on actually getting you quickly to be able to play DJ sets that you're proud of. That's where the real magic happens. That's where the real learning happens. It's not in your bedroom, it's not in your home studio, it's playing to other people, whether that's at parties, in clubs, live streaming, sharing DJ mixes, whatever you're dreaming of.

Now, if you like what you see here, I've got two extra resources for you. Firstly, we've got a crash course for beginners or for those new to digital DJing. It's called The Complete DJ Course, where you'll learn all you need to know to be able to DJ like a pro, fast. And even better, it works not only for the XDJ AZ but for all DJ gear. Once you follow the course, you'll be able to play confidently on anything. The video course is about 80 lessons long, and you get access to me personally as your tutor. It's a phenomenal investment in your DJing. I'll put a link to the course in the description underneath so you can check it out.

Now, another great resource is our global bestselling book on how to DJ, Rock the Dancefloor, which is a fantastic primer on those five big areas of DJing: gear, music, mixing, performing, and success. This book, it's now in its second edition, has helped tens of thousands of DJs to get started. Again, there's a link in the description, but I'll also tell you how you can get a free copy of this book later on.

So, we've got a tremendous amount of information to cover here, so I think we should get started. Moving roughly from left to right and top to bottom. Top left is the microphone section. This whole area here is the deck section, and of course, we've got another deck section over here. Here's the touchscreen, and this is the browse functions. Then here we've got the mixer, and this is the master output. Moving on to the booth output and the USBs.

Here in the middle of each deck section, of course, is the jog wheel, and then at the bottom are the performance pads. This is where the headphones controls are, and then here we've got the sound color effect, and this is the beat effect. On the front of the unit are the headphones terminals, and also the pairing button for Sonic Link headphones.

Around the back of the unit, a Kensington lock. We've also got a USB for your computer. This is the Ethernet or Pro DJ Link network port. You have to turn this on in the settings if you want to use it, by the way. Moving along here, these are the outputs. So, we've got balanced XLR outputs, unbalanced ones I'm using here in the studio, which carry the same output as this but with RCA cables, and then we have also balanced TRS outputs for your booth. This is a terminal for earthing turntables, and then here are our analog inputs for two analog inputs for the outside two channels on the mixer. And here's the inputs for our microphones.

Up to the touchscreen. Tapping Source will bring me to the Source screen. This is the icon, and this is the name and status of the current device. The USB drive I've got plugged in, this is information about that device. We've got 116 GB available on it. Tapping I will give me a little bit more information about that device as well. At the very top, top here, we've got connection status icons. So, there's a Wi-Fi connection, there is an internet connection, and there's one that's not turned on, which is Bluetooth up there as well. So, this is the timer where we're recording. This would be ticking up if I tap on this little cog here, we go to the device settings. These are settings associated with this USB. I can change the waveform color of the unit here. I can also change the background color of the USB itself, which changes this color here. So, currently it's set to default, but if I wanted it set to yellow, it's now turned to yellow up there.

Down here, then, let's move out of there. We've got the Local Library currently selected, but I could select Cloud or Beatport here, and we'll be talking more about what you can do with the Cloud and Beatport settings later. So, also in this cog here, here is a My Settings. And My Settings will load any settings that you've got on the USB that you like to have your Rekordbox software remember. So, when you plug your USB into a unit, it will set the unit up according to your specifications.

Clicking on the Browse button at the top here will bring up the Browse window. Tag List and Playlist also bring up variations on the Browse window. We'll talk more about those and everything else we're looking at here briefly later on. So, when we're in this window, we get at the top here what we're currently looking at: USB one. Down here are the categories. So, I can go down here and select different categories to view the information in different ways: albums, and artists, and playlists, and so on. I'll go back to the track list here.

So, here's waveforms. Now, these waveforms are little preview versions of the bigger waveforms you see when you're actually playing tracks. And a nice thing about these is that when you've got your headphones plugged in and you tap on these, you can actually listen to the track and preview the track in your headphones without it actually being loaded onto a deck, which is quite nice. The little arrow at the top here will take us back to where we were previously, up a level, in other words, on your folders.

So, then at the top here is a little icon with three A's on it, which, as you can see, is changing the size of the font, which is really nice. If you've got good eyes, you can get more tracks listed on there, and if your eyes are a little bit ropey like mine, then it can make it all a little bit bigger for you. Again, we've got the standard icons at the top here for our connectivity. We also got the record icon at the top here. A little bit of extra information down here about the tracks, BPM and key, but you can get more information about the tracks by clicking the I in the top corner. This time, the little I is going to give you extra info here. Now, there's no artwork here, but if there was artwork for the tracks, there'd be down here as well. I don't have artwork on my tracks. And across the bottom, you might have noticed we're retaining these views of what's loaded onto the decks.

Couple of other things you can do up here apart from changing the font size. Tapping Preview will get rid of those preview waveforms if you don't want them. Tapping this little arrow icon here will let you choose an extra column to put in here. So, if I want the artist as well, I can have the artist listed there, or I might want the rating. Uh, and I got the ratings column there as well. So, you get to choose a little bit about the information that you have displayed here.

Now, you're going to be spending most of your time in the main waveform view, which is this view here. Here are the two waveforms of the currently loaded and playing tracks, and this is information about them. So, there's two panels here of identical information. At the top here, then, let's talk through one of them. We've got the deck number: deck one, this is deck two. The USB is the source of the current music, so this is going to tell us where that track has come from. The key information is here, and we can alter the key of the track up or down like this, and reset it like this. Info about current beat jump and quantize settings is here. We'll talk about these later on.

Across the top, then, two deck and four deck decides whether down here at the bottom we see two or four of our decks. If I tap it now into four deck mode, we see less information, but we also see decks three and four, which I currently don't have songs loaded on here. We have Single or Continue. This is basically an autoplay function to decide whether the music stops or the next track plays. Here is Smart Cue, Auto Hot Cue, and Auto Cue. These are all things that we'll talk about later on, but they are all playback features.

So, down here, we've got this little arrow here, and this hides and brings out the beat effects area here. This is giving us information about the beat effects down here, and it allows us to change things about them as well. This little cue to the left of the BPM of the effects is quantized for the effects. Again, we'll talk about this later. And then we've got the BPM itself of the effects. So, this is the tempo of the currently selected beat effect. Auto or BPM at the top here is whether that is decided by the software listening to your music, or whether you get to set that manually. And you can use the tap function to set that, which is this little button here. Again, we're getting to all this stuff. I just need to talk you around everything so that you know what we're talking about when we go into a little bit more detail later on.

Here we have some extra parameters about the currently selected effect, and these zoom and grid buttons here decide what happens when we turn this. It's currently set to zoom, and that means if I turn this, I zoom in and out on the waveforms. You see this happening here. But if I set that to grid, it will let me alter the beat grids on these, and this flashes to tell me that we're in beat grid mode as well. You can also switch between those modes just by holding down on this button here. Zoom is the one that you will live in here.

These panels here, there's two of them, are telling us what the pads are currently set to for each of our decks. So, the pads here are set to Gate Cue. That's what this yellow button means here, and so on. On the left-hand side here, these pads here have got the word Gate Cue written on them, and it gives us extra information about the pads as well. For instance, you can see this one here is lit up. It's got the letter H and a number, and it's also lit up here because there's something set on that pad. All the rest are empty, and they're also empty here. So, if we look back to the display here, you can see that all of these pads are showing empty, but this is giving us extra information that we can't see by looking at the pads themselves. You'll notice that what we're seeing on the screen is often a mix of display information and information that you can change.

So, now we're going to move down to these deck areas here. These are the overall waveforms. It's a high-level view of the whole track. This is a zoom-in of a part of the track. This is a zoom-in of the part that's marked by this line here, which is where we're currently at on that track. So, this is the beginning, and this is the end. And the same with this deck here: beginning and end. So, the area that's grayed out is the area that's been played, and the area that's not grayed out is the area that's left. The white line there will change depending upon whether you've got the time set to remaining or to the amount that you've currently played of the track. So, currently it's set to remain, and this is the amount remaining. Now, the white line is showing us the amount that we've played. The colors at the bottom are phrases of the track. It's Rekordbox's attempt to divide our track up into chunks which could be useful to you when mixing, and it's using different colors to show those to you. This is something that you can adjust if you'd rather have it just showing you chunks of time, which it can be set to show you every 30 seconds of the track, which may be quite useful because if you've got a short track here and a long track here, then that's going to make it very clear to you which one is which.

Also down here, we have information about things like cue points and loops and so on. You can see this little letter H here. Remember, down on this deck, I had a hot cue, a gated cue set here? Well, that's telling me that that's where it's set on the track. And finally, for our whistle-stop tour, let's look at the display on the jog wheels. This tells us information about the currently playing track. It tells us whether or not we've got slip mode turned on, whether or not the jog wheel is set to vinyl mode, any looping that's set, not only the fact that it's set but the number of beats it's set to loop by, whether the sync is on for this deck, and whether this deck is the master sync deck. And this orange circle here is to do with the slip mode. If I were to turn the slip mode off, then that orange circle would disappear. These little dots here are designed to help us understand where we are on the rotation of the jog wheel, and that will go round when we're playing and backwards. We move the jog wheel back to give you that feel of using something that is motorized, even though the jog wheels are of course fixed.

Now, we've had a whistle-stop tour. Let's get into actually using it. So, the first thing, and this is going to save you so many problems, is to make sure you've got the current firmware on your unit. So, the way we do this is first check what firmware is installed on the unit we've got. If you hold down the Menu button just for a second, you're going to come to this page here, and click on General. We're going to go through everything in here later on. Click on General, and this is where we can find our firmware, and it's version number 1.01 on mine. This is a very early model, and I know that the firmware is now higher than that.

But there's an easy way of checking the firmware, and that is to go to the website, go to Support and Downloads, and find the downloads for the XDJ AZ. There's a download link here for the latest firmware, which indeed we can see is at 1.05. You can also download instructions, but essentially, what you're going to do is put the firmware file that they give you onto the root directory of a USB drive. You can use the same one that you use for your music, but the important thing is to open the USB drive and just drag it in there. Don't change its name, don't change anything about it, and put it on there. Once you've done that, make sure any computer leads are unplugged from the unit itself, and turn it off.

Now, we're going to do something that seems a little bit strange. We're going to hold down the two buttons here where my fingers are. They're actually labeled Beat Sync and Master, but you can't really tell that when the unit is turned off. Basically, the two buttons at the top in this little panel here, we're going to hold them both down, and we're going to turn the unit on. What we're going to see next is the screen will ask us to insert a USB into USB 1. There we go. So, once it's told us to do that, we're going to follow its instructions and put the USB that we prepared into there, and then you'll see that on the screen it starts to check and update the decks and the mixer. And when it's done all three things, the firmware on the unit is ready for you to go. Power the unit off, power the unit on again, and now you will have solved so many little niggles that might save you hours of time wondering why the hell your unit is not behaving in the way it should.

Now, just as with any gear like this, from Pro DJ gear all the way down to the RX3 and the Omni Duo, anything standalone requires you to prepare the music that you've got on that USB on Rekordbox software on your Windows or Mac computer. Rekordbox software is free for you to use, and the workflow is to prepare your music in here and then to export it from here onto the USB drive in order to DJ with it. Yes, you can just drag files onto a USB drive and plug them in, the unit can cope, but you'll get nowhere near the experience that's intended, and that's absolutely the wrong way of doing it. It's a very outdated way of going about it. So, your job is to get the Rekordbox software on your computer, get it installed. If you're using Windows, get everything else it asks you. With a Mac, you don't need to put anything else other than that software on there, and get your music onto the USB the way that they recommend.

And if you want to know more about using Rekordbox, not just for this, but for all the other things it does, like its Performance Mode, and its Edit Mode, and its Lighting Mode, and all the other cool stuff it can do, do check out our Rekordbox Made Easy course. It's well worth getting if you think you're going to be spending the rest of your DJing hobby, career, whatever, using this platform, because it's bigger than this individual unit.

That said, there's something really cool I'm going to share with you now. Because when you're DJing at home, it can be a little bit annoying to have to export music onto a USB drive to plug into your DJ console, such as your AZed, just in order to DJ, right? It makes sense if you're taking it with you on this USB drive. It's a very cool way of carrying your music around, but if you're DJing at home, then why, why bother? Surely you can just plug the unit into your laptop? Well, you can, and there's a couple of ways you can do that. The first way is a way we're not going to talk about this second, but we will before the end of this tutorial, which is effectively using Rekordbox as a full-on software platform. The AZed is just controlling the software. That's not really what this was intended to do, although it can work that way. However, there is another way, and this way is the intended way, and that means that you are using all of the functions of this just as if you had a USB drive plugged in, but you've got no USB drive plugged in. There's actually three ways. I'm going to show you two of them now. The second way in particular is absolutely awesome.

Plug a lead into the back of the XDJ AZ and then plug it into your laptop. What will happen then is on your laptop, you'll see this little link symbol appear at the bottom here. You have to be in Export Mode at the top, and you might have to restart the software in order for this to show. When it does show, click on it, and now at the bottom, we've got four decks, and these four decks correspond to the four decks in our software. And you can see on the screen here now, I've got Phil's MacBook Pro. If I click in there, this is my library being read directly from the computer software. In other words, this here is now behaving as if I was reading the music directly from a USB drive, but I could eject that USB drive. It's not being used. What's being used is the music on the laptop itself. That's the library that I'm currently accessing on here. That's the library I can work through and load tracks from and so on. Indeed, if I chose to load a track, and we'll talk about loading tracks and stuff, so on, but for now, let's just press button there and load a track. And this is what happens when you load a track. You'll see on the laptop screen that it's reflecting that at the bottom. This is a great way of DJing with the laptop connected directly, but it's only the first of the three ways you can do it.

A really nice way of doing it is just to kill that cable entirely, because as long as your DJ unit is on the same Wi-Fi network as the laptop, then they'll see each other without the need for a cable at all. And again, it's pretty easy to do. You just head into the menu, which I've already shown you. Once you go to Network, you go to Wi-Fi, you set up your Wi-Fi in here on your current network, turn it on, and log into my Wi-Fi. And now, with no connection at all between the laptop and the unit, they can see each other. And at the bottom of your software screen in the unit, you'll see the link button again. And on the unit here, you'll see your MacBook's Rekordbox library ready for you to go.

The final way you can do it, by the way, is by using the traditional Pro way of doing this, which is the same way that is done on this gear in the pro booth with a proper network cable using Pro DJ Link at the back here. So, you use this network connector here to go into a router, and that could indeed be a Wi-Fi router, meaning you wouldn't need to have any network connection to your laptop. But traditionally, that's the way you would connect up if you're going to add extra players, which we're going to get on to. But just to let you know, there's other ways of getting music into this. I think it's one of the strengths of this unit. There's just so many different ways of getting your music into it, and we've only just touched on it. There's more to come.

Right, for now, though, we're going to go back to using our USB drive in the time-tested way, and we're going to continue to look at what we do with music, loading it and playing with it on the screens in order to get it ready to DJ with. So, actually, the first and most important thing you need to know about the USBs is how to take them out. If you just yank this out, you're likely to corrupt it, which you don't want. So, this button here is the right way to do it. You hold it down, the light will flash, it will flash a bit harder, and then it will go off. Then you can pull this out safely. And now we're ready to get going. If you had a track loaded while that was happening, you were playing a track, and you did that, ejected the USB, and pulled it out, the track will continue playing because the unit takes it into memory, which is nice to know. Anyway, now we've got a completely virgin, if you like, unit. It's not plugged into anything. It's ready to go, but we have our analyzed music on our USB, and we need to get it going.

So, to start with, push it into the slot. Either slot will do. And when you've got it in the slot, it will start flashing here. It will start flashing here. Then, when that's happened, and then at that point, you'll be able to select the USB. Click on the USB, and click on Local Library, and you're good to go. The music is up. Let's meet the rest of the controls around here that we haven't formally met yet. So, we've already looked at these ones: different ways of viewing what's on the selected source. Search will give you a keyboard that lets you search for individual tracks, and as you start typing, they appear. Menu will give you any menu items associated with where you are, but also, as we've seen, if you hold down Menu, you get to this utility menu here. Down the side here, Back is a physical button for moving back, as we did earlier using the touchscreen. Tag Track and Remove or Add and Remove tracks from the tag list. That's what this button here takes you to, which is where you can put temporary tracks so you can quickly find them in the middle of a set. This will help you to choose tracks to play next. I'll show you this a bit later on. And Shortcut brings you to a special menu, which again, we'll look at later on, that makes life easier. And these four buttons, as we did touch briefly on, for loading to decks 1, 2, 3, and 4, and they're color-coded to help you there.

So, when it comes to picking a track, you go into the menu that suits you at that time. In this case, we're just going to go straight to the Browse menu, and I'm just going to click on Track here. We looked at these earlier, didn't we? Different ways of viewing the music on the USB. Here are all your tracks. So, this knob here, we did actually meet this earlier because I was holding it down to move from waveform to beat grid edit, but you can use this to move up and down. In this instance, through here, because that's where the blue is, the blue currently selected color. But if we go to, for instance, Track, and then press it, now we've moved the blue to here, and now it'll move up and down through the list here. We can also do this on the touchscreen to move up and down. So, different ways of doing that to find the track you want.

And so, this is the track I want. And so, once I've selected it, in order to load it, I can do two things. I can press that, and then it'll ask me which deck I want to load it to, or I can just press a deck button here. So, for instance, if I wanted to load it to Deck 1, I can press Deck 1 there. It loads to Deck 1. The screen switches to the display where we can see the waveforms, and we're good to go. Let's load a track on the other deck now using the search function. So, I'm going to start typing what I want, and there we go. I wanted "Give Me The Sunshine." As soon as I got the "S N" of Sunshine typed in, it had reached the track that I was looking for. Press the other deck's number, and it loads onto Deck 2. And again, to eject a track from a deck, just click the Eject button there, and it'll okay that with you, and it will remove it.

Search is a very powerful way of finding tracks across your USB if you're really not sure where it is, but you know you've got it with you somewhere. But if you're in an individual playlist and you just want to quickly scroll through that playlist to find the track you want, there's a couple of other functions that make it a little bit quicker than using the knob here, or you're flicking with the finger as I was showing you earlier. So, we go back to Browse here, and I'm now in this track list here. So, in order to move through this, if it's in alphabetical order, which it is now, if I hold down on this knob here, see, we get the letter A, and then I can move very quickly through the different letters of the alphabet, and it will jump so that the first track beginning with, in this instance, L, is at the top, and so on. So, I can quickly find the letter I want. So, if I wanted one of my tracks beginning with S, that would be the way I'd get to it quickly in this instance.

Now, you don't have to have your tracks in alphabetical order like that. There's different ways of sorting them. So, this will let you choose whether it goes from A to Z or Z to A. But we could sort them, for instance, by BPM. It's a very common way of doing it, because the tracks that are close together in BPM are generally going to be ones that are likely to mix well together. If you've got it sorted like that, and you hold this button down, then it goes up and down a page at a time. So, you can see that we're moving up and down here, and you can see that the blue bar, which is telling us the currently selected track, is moving up a whole page every time. And so, this is just a way of moving more quickly through, but obviously, it can't do it by alphabetical, so it just does it by a full page of tracks, whatever you've got selected. The number of tracks that show, remember, is based upon how you have this set. You can have fewer or more depending upon the font size.

One of the powerful features of this system is the Track Filter. Track Filter will filter the music on your USB or on your source, depending upon what you tell it. In other words, I want all the tracks that are close by in BPM, or I want all the tracks in a similar musical key, so that my mixes sound nice. It's very powerful because it allows you to quickly, without really spending any effort, find tracks that are likely to mix really nicely with the current one, and it's a feature that DJs do enjoy. Let me show you how to set it up first, though, because until you set it up, it's no good. So, it's worth pointing out now that everything I'm about to show you, you can do ahead of time on your USB drive, and you set that in Rekordbox, and then when you put your USB drive in and load the settings, as I showed you earlier, everything I'm about to show you is already prepared for you. If you want to know more about how to prepare music in Rekordbox, again, do take a look at our Rekordbox Made Easy course, but you don't need to do that. You can set it quite quickly in here, and let's have a look at that.

So, to get to the screen that lets you do that, hold down the Track Filter button until it switches to this screen here. Here we can say, okay, what I want you to do is, for instance, find me all the songs that are within 6% BPM of the currently set value, 109 BPM. In other words, everything that's likely to mix with a 109 BPM track. 6% is 102 to 115. If that's too big for you, you can use the slider to move to something that is more suitable for you. So, this is now between 105 and 112. But this number here tells you how many tracks suit this criteria in your collection. So, obviously, as we move down, you'll see the number of tracks on that number is reducing as we get lower and lower. So, you can change this master number, in other words, the number that it's looking above and below from this 109, by using these here. So, you can move up and down by one or by 10 BPMs there to set the master number that it's searching up and down from. So, currently it's set to just the one. Let's set it to 3%. Right. So, now it's going to filter my collection by all the songs within 3% of the currently selecting song, 109. And that means that I'm likely to be able to beat mix them nicely.

Key is the next one. By tapping on Key, you can choose a musical key, and it will select songs that it thinks are likely to mix well with that song as far as harmonic mixing is concerned. So, if I want the songs that are within 3% and that also mix harmonically, then this will let me do it. Notice the number here has dropped, because out of all the songs that are within 3%, only this number are likely to mix harmonically. We have Rating. Some people use this for energy level. Color. You can set the color of tracks inside Rekordbox, and some people like to have different styles of tracks, different feelings, with different colors here. So, that's something that you can set there. And also, you can set Tags. Now, Tags are a very powerful feature. Again, it's something you set ahead of time in Rekordbox, and Tags will let you sort by genre, by components, in other words, has it got a saxophone in it? By situation: back room, main room, peak time, warm-up, whatever. And even acapellas. So, this is again very powerful stuff, and it's stuff that you have to do ahead of time in the Rekordbox software. But for now, we're just going to concentrate on BPM and Key. These are the ones that most people use most of the time.

Right, so at the moment, I'm telling it the BPM and I'm telling it the Key. But the best way of using this, and the way that most people use it, is to set and forget it by pressing Master Deck. Master Deck takes the track that's currently playing. So, if you remember, I, uh, at the very beginning of this section, I loaded a track onto the left-hand deck, and you can see the track's waveform on the left-hand deck here. And so, this track on the left-hand deck is at 108.7 BPM, and it's 8B key. Let's go back to our Track Filter. Notice now, with Master Deck turned on, it's set the BPM to the closest BPM number to that track, which is 109, and it's set the Key to 8B. So, what this is now doing is looking at the track that's currently playing and saying, I'm always going to select a set of tracks based upon the one that's currently playing, that's close by in BPM, and that's got a compatible or similar or or identical musical key. And that's the most powerful way of using this.

So, if we were back on our collection, these now are the tracks that are within the BPM and within compatible key. And the reason that these are being displayed is because of what what I've just set up. You can toggle from the main collection down to your filter once you set that up by tapping Track Filter. There's my main collection. Track Filter is not engaged. There is the Track Filter tracks based upon. Hold it down the criteria that are selected here.

Let's look at another cool way of selecting a track to play next, and a couple of other little tricks as well. Assuming you're actually playing a track, we're not playing a track now, but if we were playing a track, this is the screen you would see. The screen with your waveforms on it. Tap the little I at the top here, and this will give you the currently playing track's information. We have actually looked at this very briefly. Now, from this screen, you can do a couple of cool things. Let's just show you one of them first: Edit the Rating. So, by clicking on there, I can choose a rating for this track like this. So, if you are using this for energy level, or for how much you like or dislike a track, and you make your mind up as you're DJing, well, there's an easy way of doing that.

So, here on the main screen, we've got lots of information about the track having tapped that little I button, and some of these things will take us straight to our collection to find other tracks that match that criteria. So, for instance, if I wanted other tracks in the same musical key, I could tap the musical key here, and this little arrow appears. So, now it takes me to the Key screen, and you'll notice that's been selected down here for me, and it's given me my options for musical key: the same key, very close, or quite close, and I can choose them that way. Let's go back then into the information screen here. Now, some of these things won't work, some of these things because there aren't anything to select, they won't let me do it. So, for instance, other tracks at 5 minutes. Well, it's not letting me do it. I don't have any other tracks at 5 minutes. However, for instance, if I tap on the album here, well, this will take me directly to the other tracks in that album, and you can see it's selected album here, and there's the title of the album at the top. Let's go back to the information screen here and look up something else. Another good way of using this might be for all the tracks that you've uploaded on a certain day, right? So, you've added a load of new music. You're playing a new song, you think, what about the other song I uploaded today? Well, there's all the tracks that were added on that particular date, and so on.

So, you've used one of these features to find the perfect track to play next. Or is it the perfect track to play next? You can preview in your headphones to check without loading onto a deck. So, here's how you do that. In order to do it, you have to turn on this button here: Link Cue. Without that turned on, this won't work. Make sure that's turned on, and then hold down the waveform of the track you want to preview at the place you want to preview it, which is quite cool. So, if I want to preview this track here, "Bunk Up," and I want to preview it at this breakdown here, I hold down there. It's now playing in my headphones, and if I hold them next to my microphone here, you might just hear what I'm hearing when I hold them up to here.

So, no prizes for guessing the next bit. We've already done it once. Let's load the track that we've just selected onto a deck. So, let's load it onto Deck 2. So, now I've got a track loaded on both decks. You'll notice that the screen jumped back to this main waveform view when I did that. The track will not start playing automatically unless you have Auto Cue turned off. If you want it to play automatically, press this button here, Auto Cue, and turn it off. If Auto Cue is turned on, it will wait for you to press the play button, and you can't load onto a deck that's already got a track playing on it unless you have another setting changed, which you can change in the utility menu here. I will show you all about how to do those things when we go through the utility menu a little bit later on.

One of the nice things about digital is that you've got a history of everything you've played from the browse window. Tap History here. Now, my history is currently empty because I haven't played anything. However, as you play sets, if you play more than a minute of a track, it will remember that, and they'll all be listed here, and you can go back to sets you've played in the past, you can delete them, or you can refer to them and load tracks from them and so on. It's a useful feature because it means that, for instance, if you played a set last week that worked really well, you can base this week's set upon what is effectively another playlist available to you in the settings.

So, another useful way of replicating what DJs used to do with records, right? In the old days, with records, we'd pull records halfway out of the box, go through the box and say, I want to play that one, that one, that one. We'd have half a dozen songs that we were really interested in playing. You can do the same thing on here. It's called the Tag List, and if you use DJ software, you might be used to a favorites list. It's exactly the same concept. Let's look at how that works. So, uh, here's my music. I'm in my track list here. I can move through these tracks and I can say, look, the one I want to play next is this one here. Let's put a tag on that one. You notice there's a little tick been added to it. I also want to play that one soon. I want to play that one soon. Uh, you keep moving through your playlist, selecting all the tracks you're quite interested in playing in the next little mini-set or whatever. Then, when you tap Tag List here, all those tracks are there, and so you can work from little mini-sets that you select on the fly, rather than working from your main collection. You can delete a track from here by pressing and holding that button there until it disappears from the list, as those two tracks just did there. If you tap the Menu button while you're in here, at the bottom here, we can remove all tracks, or we can create a playlist from the currently selected tracks. Two useful features. And the first time we've seen this Menu button here, that brings up extra parameters for wherever you happen to be in the operating system.

I mentioned it earlier, didn't I? Tapping Playlist takes you to your playlist screen, and you can also get to the playlist screen when you're in the browser menu by tapping Playlist here. Same screen. Here we'll see a list of tracks that are in our currently selected playlist. I've only got one playlist on here, and this is called Drive Speed Test. I was testing out the speed of our USB drive just before starting to film this tutorial, hence that's the playlist that I have currently selected here. So, in Playlist, then, we can select from the playlist on our USB drive, and typically you might have several playlists on your USB drive here. And when you do select it, you're into a very familiar-looking screen. It's got a playlist at the top here, the name of the playlist, but you've seen all of this stuff before.

As with all DJ systems, as you play tracks on this system, it will mark them as played. And the way it marks them as played is by making them a, a kind of like faint green color. So, in your library, as you're scrolling through, it's easy to see what you've already played in the DJ set. That happens automatically. As soon as you play the track for a minute, it will happen. But you might want to change that. You might want to, for whatever reason, mark an unplayed track as played, or mark.

A play track as unplayed, and this is how you do it. It's another use of that menu button. So here, we're in the playlist. I'm going to hold down the menu button to get to here. So we've got this played and unplayed here. So this track that's selected in the rain, I go like this. That's now be marked as played. And if I move away from it, you'll see it's gone to that green color. But I want to take it off so that it's unplayed again. I can tap that and it goes back to unplayed. And this works in other menus as well, not just the playlist menu.

Now, there's things you can do with your playlist on the system as well. I'm going to go back. Remember to go back, we use a little arrow here, or we can use the back button. And this is the playlist list. I've only got the one playlist, remember, selected here. Once I'm here, by tapping menu, I can either delete the playlist or delete all the playlists. Now, you might want to do this if you're making temporary playlists using the tag function, for instance. I think usually you'll be dealing with this stuff inside Rekordbox. However, those functions are there.

Maybe a more useful way of manipulating playlists is by setting shortcuts to them. Tap the playlist button at the top here. You'll see that the playlist list is here. I've only got the one playlist, but usually you'd have more, of course. And down the left-hand side are these playlist banks. So I can save up to four playlists in these banks, so I can get to them very quickly. Again, if you had 30 or 40 playlists, having your important ones here would be very useful. Here's how you do that: with a playlist selected, you tap on an empty bank. So I'll just tap on bank one. Now, bank one is a shortcut to that playlist. So if I am elsewhere, I'm DJing, I'm playing away, and I want to quickly get to playlist one, I just tap playlist and tap bank one, and I'm into that playlist. You can erase playlists from banks by tapping the bin, but then you have to tap the little X by the playlist itself, just to make sure that you want to do that so you don't do it by mistake.

So now you know about your library and about loading tracks. It's time to spend some time looking at the decks themselves. So, of course, there are two decks. They're identical. We're going to talk through all the buttons, what they do, where they are, very, very quickly now, and then we're going to come back to the most important ones and spend some time looking at how they work. So let's start in the top corner. So these are our in and out and in and out adjust buttons for looping, and this is our exit button for looping, and also can send us back to the beginning or reloop a loop that we've set before in our track.

Moving across, these are the buttons that decide whether this whole deck controls deck one or deck three, and they correspond to the blue and white colors on the load buttons as well, to help you differentiate easily visually between the two. Moving across, these Q Loop and Call buttons are for memory cues and memory loops, which is one way of remembering loops and points in tracks, which we'll be looking further into. It's the older way of doing this. And then we've got the buttons next to them for deleting and for saving our cues and loops that we control with these first two buttons here.

Back over to this side, then, talking of loops, here are the Auto 4 and 8 Beat Loops. Touching these will set one of those, and then we've got half and double as well. These are the two white symbols underneath, telling you that if you hold down the shift button, that's always what it means underneath. If it's in white, if you hold down the shift button and tap these, it will half or double the currently set loop length. Here we have beat jump, which will move by a set number of beats forward or back in the track. Slip mode is a performance mode, which is similar to slip reverse and reverse. All of these will treat together when I show you how they work shortly.

This is the shift button, which we just talked about. But if you double tap on the shift button, you can change what shows in the middle of the jog wheel. We'll talk about this a little bit more when we come back to looking at the jog wheels properly. Here is where we can choose from tracks in our playlist. Moving back by pressing the left button will take us to the beginning of the current track, and again will take us to the previous track, and the same in reverse with the forward button. These two buttons on the other hand are for searching through the currently playing track.

The Cue and the Play and Pause buttons are what's called the transport controls. These will let us move to a temporary point in the track and play and pause the track from that point, or any other point, again looking more at this shortly. So moving over to the other side, this set of controls here are for the jog wheel. We'll move on to these later. But back to the deck controls, this is the beat sync control for telling the system you want to sync this deck with something else. If the master is also activated, then everything else will sync with this deck. That's what master deck means. This is a key sync button for syncing the musical key of the track, so you can sync key as well as beat.

Moving down, the tempo adjust here decides that when you move the tempo fader, how much it slows down. And strangely, if you're new to DJing, pushing up will slow the track down. How much it slows down or speeds up the track when you move this fader or slider. And so it's, it's currently set to 6%, which you can see on the screen. But if I press the button, it cycles through 10%, 16%, even 100%. But back to the middle will always take it back to the middle. Master Tempo will keep the pitch of the song the same when you're moving the speed. So it can be playing slower or faster, but it won't get lower or higher if this is activated like that. Tempo reset will turn off this slider here. So even if you're all the way down here somewhere, you press tempo reset, and the speed of the track will return to as if the slider had never been used in the first place.

Now you know the names of all the different buttons. Let's take a look at what some of the most important ones do, starting with the play pause button. Tap it to play, and tap it again to pause. If you're in vinyl mode, which we are now, and that's what this lit button here is telling us, when we pause, it genuinely pauses, and we can't hear anything. If we're not in vinyl mode, then it plays the point that it's paused at over and over again, like this. When that is happening, you can use the search buttons to move very, very slightly backwards and forwards, and you can hear the difference. This is how DJs used to control their music back in the days of early CDJs that didn't have the more modern vinyl behavior, and that behavior has carried across into modern gear, which is why that's there.

While the track is paused, you can move through the track by tapping on the overall waveform here, and when you get to a point, it'll pause there once your finger leaves the waveform, and you can use the play button to start and play from there as well. If the track's playing and you want to do that, you don't have to press pause. You can also just tap the top of the jog wheel and hold it while you do the same thing. You can even play the track backwards while it's playing. Holding down slip reverse will play the track backwards. Keep an eye on the main waveform. When you take your hand off slip reverse, the track carries on playing where it would have been had you not done that. The main use of this is to stop curse words coming out through the speakers, because you can press this just before something you don't want your audience to hear, and when you take your hand off, the track will carry on as if you hadn't done it at all. However, if you want to lock the track into reverse, then you can hold down the shift button here and press the reverse, and then it will be locked on. And then when you press it again, it'll carry on playing forward from where it left off, playing backwards like this.

If you're playing from a playlist, pressing track search back and forward will move you first to the beginning of the current track, and then to the previous track, and the same in the forward direction with this one. The most useful way of using these buttons for me is just quickly tapping this one to get to the beginning of the current track, like that. Search on the other hand will literally search through the current track. So it's another way of skimming through, a bit like I was doing on here, but you'll hear it as it does it. We already know what this is going to do, but let's have a demo of it now. Slowing down, speeding up, and let's set it using this button here to a very high wide range. Slowing down so much, it actually stops the track. And this will reset it. And now it's not doing anything. Remember, if you don't want the track to get higher or lower while you are moving that tempo control, then the master tempo button will lock the lock the pitch while the tempo moves. So it's like this.

Remember that link cue button that allowed us to listen to tracks without loading them? You can use the same button to listen to a loaded track while it's playing, which is pretty cool if you want to figure out how to mix out of that track, for instance. So this track here, because it's now playing, when I touch this waveform here, it won't jump to it, but it will jump to it in my headphones. You'll notice when I touch the waveform here, it pauses, but in my headphones, I can hear the point I touched, and I can move my hand left and right through the track, and so I can find what's coming up and get some ideas about my mixing. And the audience doesn't hear any of it. As you can hear, the track just carried on playing to the audience as if I wasn't doing that. Pretty cool feature.

Now, as soon as you've mastered loading and playing tracks, you're likely to want to record what you're doing. And so let's look at how to do that. Tapping the mixer settings button here brings up this menu here, which we'll talk you through in detail later on, but for now, this is where you set your recording. So on the top right-hand corner, there are the record setting buttons here, and you choose a USB drive. So I've got USB1 selected, and that's because the USB 1 is the only one I've currently got plugged in. But I could plug a USB into the other slot there, and then I could record onto another USB. It is completely possible to record onto the same USB that your music's on, as long as there is room, of course. So with the USB set, in order to record, I just tap the record button here. While I'm recording, I can tap the track mark button, and it will put a split in the recording, and so I'll have a separate track at that point. So you can divide your recording up into individual tracks, which when played one after the other will reassemble themselves into your finished mix.

Let's look at the jog wheel then. So the jog wheel has got two parts: the edge and the top, which is a plate that you can press down. I'll show you how this works in a minute. It's also got the display, which we've already met, and it's got this jog feel knob here as well, which is a mechanical knob. It literally applies a brake and makes the jog wheel stiffer or looser, so you can set that to how you like it. So when you are using the jog wheel, the edge does something different to the top. When you're in vinyl mode, in vinyl mode, the edge slows down and speeds up the track, whereas the top is like holding a piece of vinyl on a normal record deck, and it allows you to treat the whole track as if it were a record, giving you the best of both worlds, if you like. If you're not in vinyl mode, then the whole jog wheel is that nudge feature. Doesn't matter what part you press.

Remember the search functions? You can do that super fast by holding them and turning the jog wheel at the same time. And with track search, you can search through huge playlists in the same way. And just look at the difference between light and heavy. It's a totally different feel. Good control, this one. Notice how the track is starting and stopping absolutely instantly. A lot of people like that, but a lot of people are used to using turntables where that isn't the case. There's a small speed up and a small slowdown when you press start and stop, and that's what the vinyl speed adjust button gives us. This allows us to set our deck to sound a little bit more like traditional DJ gear. So in order to use the vinyl speed adjust button, we need to set it. And in order to set it, I'm going to use a menu we haven't looked at so far, which is the shortcut menu. I'm going to press shortcut here, here, which gets us into this menu here. The area in this menu we're interested in is the vinyl speed area here. So touch is the slowdown, release is the speed up, and touch and release is both. We want touch. We want to make the track slow down in a realistic way. These numbers here are the amount. One is a short amount of slowdown, and you can see this little display fader here moves up as I move through these numbers. Five takes a long time for the track to slow down when we stop it. I'm going to set it to three for a nice happy medium there, and we can get out of that menu now.

So with the vinyl speed button on now, because I only set it to touch and not touch and release or release, it will still start instantaneously, which is for most people probably the best. But it will stop with that bit of slowdown. You hear that? Which just sounds just like vinyl should sound. Again, if you did want that to be on startup as well, then you can set those settings accordingly. Unfortunately, you can't have a different value for startup and slowdown, you have to have the same one for both, which is a bit of an oversight, I think. But hey, that's how it is.

Now, one button we haven't looked at yet is the Cue button. That's this button here. And of course, here on the other deck, when the track is paused, the Cue button will set a cue point right at the point that we paused the track at. I use the jog wheel to find the beginning of a nice beat and press Cue. That's now set a cue point there. On the screen, you can see a cue point's been set. If I move it slightly aside, you can see there's a little triangle there where that cue point has been set. And that means that when I'm playing the track, I can then press the Cue button to get back to that point. Now, jump back to that point. Just remember, when the track's playing, it will jump back when you press Cue. And when the track is paused, it will move the cue point to wherever you happen to be set on the track. So this is a temporary cue point, a temporary way of getting back to a place in the track.

Now, because the behavior is when you're playing, it will jump back. If you did want to set a new temporary cue point while you were playing, you can use these buttons here to do it. So the in Cue button is the one you want, and that's now set it to that new position there. When you're actually waiting at a cue point, you've got two choices: Play Pause or Cue. If you press Cue, it'll play just for as long as you hold the button down. As soon as you take your hand off, it stops. If you press Play, it will play onwards from there. If you press Cue to check a cue point and you're happy with it and you want it to carry on playing, tapping the play pause button while the Cue button is pressed will make that continue, like this.

The next thing we're going to show you, most DJs don't use anymore because it's a legacy feature. Again, it's something that was on this kind of gear way, way, way years ago before any of the modern features like hot cues and so on arrived. It's still here though, and it still works, and there are DJs that use it. So if that's you and you want to know how to save memory cues and memory loops, we're going to start looking at that now. The way to save a cue point that we have set, so we've got a cue point set there, right? We've set this one here on that beat. The way to save that cue point is by pressing this memory button here. The word memory came up on the screen, and that cue point is now saved. Let's just do another one. Set one maybe there somewhere. Let's save that one as well. Memory comes up again. I've now got two saved cue points. Now I can actually take that track off the decks now. I can take that track off and unload it again later, and when I do, I can get back to those cue points. Here's how you do that: you go up to these two buttons here, Cue Loop and Call, and I can jump through the cue points. You can see the cue points here and here moving, and then I'm ready to press play.

To delete a cue, you go to that cue point, so there's two on that track, that one there and that one there, and you press delete. Now it's deleted that cue point. There's no only one on that track. Remember I told you about the auto cue button up here earlier and said if this wasn't turned on when you load a track, it will play instantly that you load it? Well, this has got a purpose which we haven't discussed yet. With auto cue turned on, when you load a track, it won't play, but what it will do is jump to the point where the first audio can be heard. So auto cue is doing what it says, it's literally automatically queuing the point up at the beginning of the track somewhere useful to you, and then waiting for you to to do something else. It's nice and useful if you've got pauses, bits of silence at the beginning of tracks. Uh, it'll just cut past those.

Now, there's a way of setting how much audio has to be in the track before auto cue decides it's at the start. So if you've ripped a load of vinyl and it's got rumble and stuff, but it's, you know, you're finding the auto cue is queuing you up when the needle hit the vinyl rather than when the music started, that's kind of an edge case that I can think of that this might be useful. There is a place where you can tweak how sensitive that is here. How to do it? Go to the utility menu by holding down menu again. We'll look at this in more detail later on, but in the first menu that you come to, there's a menu called Auto Cue Level, and you can tap in there. And there's lots of different values here. There's also memory cue, which will set it to the first set memory cue, and hot cue, which will set it to the first set hot cue, or upon load. And we'll talk about memory cues and hot cues a little bit more. We've already talked about memory cues. We'll talk about hot cues a little bit more later on.

Before we do that, though, I want to talk to you about loops, because you can set loops in tracks as well. You can't just set cues, you can say, I'd like this loop to be remembered too. So let's set a loop. To set a loop, we're going to use these buttons at the top here. That's the start of the loop, and that's the end of the loop. You can see the loop on the screen showing me what where I've just set it, and these are flashing to tell me we're in an active loop right now. Exit will get me out of the loop. And an easy way of setting loops, or making sure that they're nice and tight, is to use these buttons here, which will set an automatic loop either four or eight beats. So on the screen there, you can see that is a 4-beat loop that's been set there. I can get out of that by pressing that, or I could set an 8-beat loop. Let's just set the waveform so it's a little bit more showing on the screen. You can see that that's looping around that loop there. While a loop is active, and if it wasn't clear from the overall camera angle there, this is a tight zoom in. You can see there's a loop active. That's what this brown area here is. We're literally in the loop, and you can again see that beat flashing here. While the loop is active, we can adjust the in and out points of the loop by touching these buttons here and moving the jog wheel. I want to adjust the out point of the loop. I'll tap that, and now the loop is frozen on here. We can still hear it, but it's frozen. And the reason it's been frozen is so that I can use the jog wheel to adjust it and see what I'm doing on the waveform. And if we take it all the way to the beginning, we get an effect which is quite commonly used by DJs as a creative feature rather than as a strict way of just simply looping part of the track. Again, to get out of a loop, press exit.

Let's do another one. This time I'm going to set a 4-beat loop just by tapping the four beat button. Now I can half this loop by pressing the button again and again and again. Exit will get me out of the loop. I can double the size of the loop by pressing the two times button. If you have a loop that's playing and you want to jump to the beginning of it while it's playing, let's say you've got quite a long loop playing and you suddenly want to be right back at the beginning of that, then by holding down the shift button and pressing the in button, you can do that. Let's have a look at that feature. Set an 8-beat loop. So if I want to jump back to the beginning of this loop before it loops around, like that, it loops around there, right? If I want to just jump there anyway, hold down shift and press this, and it'll jump to the beginning of that loop. And remember, you can always get out of a loop by pressing reloop and exit.

So how do you save a loop? Well, the old-fashioned way is exactly the same way that we used to save cue points. You set a loop, and then with the loop set, you press memory. Says memory on there, and it's now set in one of those memory slots. And I can record the loop by using the cue loop call, even when I reload the track, having had it off the decks and having had something else on this deck in the meantime. That's jumped me right back to the beginning. And I can save several. So I could be cycling through them by using these two buttons. To delete the loop, just press the delete button when you've selected a loop, just like we did for the memory cues.

Let's look at the beat jump then. Useful feature for moving around a track while it's actually playing without your audience necessarily noticing. To use beat jump, we press the beat jump forward or back while the track is playing, like this. Now, have a look at the waveform here. I'm moving through the track, but you can't really tell. And that's because it's moving through by a set number of beats. Could be four, could be eight, could be 16, could be 32, could be two, whatever. But it's a number of beats which makes sense. And that means that it sounds very natural when you move forwards and back through the track using beat jump. You can change the number of beats that it does that by by holding down shift and pressing beat jump forward and back. So shift and beat jump forward and back will alter the number of beats that that's going by. And here on the screen, you can see that. See where it says beat jump? So off camera, I'm doing that now, and you can see I'm going all the way down to half a beat and all the way up to 64 beats. You have those different choices available to you there.

Bit more info for you now about the quantize button. Remember earlier I said it makes you sound good, basically by making sure that things like cue points and loop points and hot cues are always on the beats? It keeps you in time, and it means that when you're setting these things, they snap to time as well. It's a useful button. This is the on/off, but you need to set it to the value that works for you. In other words, you need to say, look, are you going to jump to the nearest beat or half beat or quarter beat or whatever? You do it by tapping shortcut and going into the quantize values here. It's currently set to one, but you can set it to half, a quarter, and an eighth, and so on. Up here, if you tap the quantize button to turn it off and on, that'll do it for everything. If you hold down the shift button and tap it, it'll do it for the deck that you've got the shift button held down on. So that lets you turn it on and off for different decks, which again can be quite useful should you want to turn it off because you're DJing with an acapella with cue points all over the place, or whatever. This is all DJ stuff we're getting into now. The complete DJ course is your place to learn about all of this and an awful lot more. But if you are new to this, just know that these features are great. These features make digital DJing a lot more intuitive and a lot more fun, and let you do a lot more than you could with vinyl. But they do have a certain learning curve attached to them. However, once you know this stuff, you know it, and it's all there on the unit.

Before we move on to the big one that digital DJ brought in, can you guess what it is? We'll cover this one off here: slip mode. Slip mode is a great feature that lets the track continue playing while you do something else quietly in the background, and then when you're finished, it jumps back to where it would have been had you not done it. You can use it for scratching, you can use it for hot cues and loops, even for play pausing the track. Let's have a go. I want to turn slip mode on. So now when I do something like, for instance, scratch, the track will let me scratch, but then it'll carry on from where it would have been had I not done that. When you turn it off, you're clear to carry on DJing like you were before. Just make sure you turn that off when you finish, because in my experience as a tutor, nothing confuses students more than wondering why their gear is not working properly when actually all they've done is got slip mode stuck on.

Right, that big feature, of course, it's sync. Right, sync is the thing that has totally changed DJing for the better. And so where is it? How do you use it? The sync buttons, we've already spotted them. They're here and here. You need to use them together, otherwise there's no point. You sync one thing to something else, right? We've only currently got one track loaded, so let's go and load another track. Let's load this one here. Let's something a slightly different BPM, that one there. We'll do. Let's load that onto deck two. So now on deck one, we've got a track which is 107.8 at the moment, and deck two, 105.2. In other words, these two are not synced. They will not play nicely together when we mix them. Simple solution then, tap the beat sync button. So when I tap the beat sync button, this deck here moved to this deck here because this deck was set to the master deck. In other words, this deck was the one that copied what was going on over here. They're now both at the same BPM, which means they're going to be much easier to beat mix.

Now, you may ask yourself, if the sync button is changing the tempo of the track, what happens to the fader? Because the fader doesn't move, right? And this does bring in an issue, because if you turn sync off and you want to control the deck manually, then it's not going to, it's not going to play ball. The fader is in the wrong place. So the second you touch it, who knows what's going to happen? They've thought about that, and this is the way you get around that. So on the deck, we're going to turn sync off. So sync's no longer engaged on this deck, but the fader is not where it's should be for the 107.8 BPM that has been matched to this one. So in other words, nothing's going to happen. See, we're moving the fader here, but nothing's happening. And the reason for that is you don't get a big jump in the playing track, you don't want that. So we need to move the fader to where it would have been had we set it manually to this BPM, which is a bit past the original BPM is down here. So a little bit higher. Bang, you see, all took over there. Now I've got control again. So if you're finding that your faders are not working, and you've had sync on but you've turned it off, then the reason is that you need to move, move the fader of the deck to where the BPM would have been had you set it manually with the fader and not used the sync button to do it. I hope that makes sense. Again, there's a lot more in the complete DJ course about using sync and about using quantize and about using all of these digital features. This is where they, I'm showing you where they are on the unit, and I'm explaining things that people always worry about and think is broken because it's not always intuitive how this stuff works.

Right, so let's move on to a feature called instant doubles. Instant doubles will take a track you're playing on any deck and put it onto another deck instantly doubled up. In other words, the same speed, the same place, the same everything. It's the same track, it's a body double of it, playing at exactly the same time. It's a useful creative feature. It's very easy to do. Let's get this new track playing that I loaded, because the old one's very near the end. So this is my new track that I just loaded, but I wanted to play this track on this deck, and I want it to be playing the same speed in the same place. To do it, I just double tap the deck I want it to be on. In other words, in this case, we set to deck one here. So if I double tap deck one, you see that it's now loaded and it's playing at the same speed. So I've now got two copies of that track playing, and there's one, there's the other, and I could start to do creative stuff with two copies, which again is DJ stuff, not gear stuff. However, that's how it's done. You can also get instant doubles by holding down the beat sync button. It does exactly the same thing. So whichever one is easier for you for the deck that you're currently on.

Now, the next feature we looked at a little bit earlier. Now I want to show you it. A lot of the things we just looked at, things like the sync button, things like loops, things like cue points, things like quantize, they rely on you having something called a beat grid on the track. Now, preparing your music in Rekordbox will give you that, but sometimes the beat grid isn't quite right. The beat grids are the lines that are drawn over the track. Let's have a look at a track here to see what we're talking about. So if I zoom in a little bit here, you'll see these lines that are drawn here, right? So let's just, let's just eject one of those so make it easier for us. So we just got one track here. So see these lines? These are marking the beats and bars. The line here that's orange, it's probably quite hard to spot, but this is an orange line here, and these are white. It's marking the beginning of a bar of music and the beginning of a beat of music. The important thing is that these lines line up with the beats of the track. So they're clearly do on this track, and most of the time your beat grids are going to be fine. Sometimes they're not, though. So there's a way of adjusting the beat grids so that they all line up, and when you press the sync button, everything lines up properly, because it's actually the grids that get lined up, not the actual beats. The software is only as good as the beat grids that you've got.

So here is how to do it. So you press down. This is a bit we've already looked at. Press down and hold this, and we go into beat grid mode, and we get these controls at the bottom here that let us adjust the grid. Turning the knob in this mode will move the whole grid left or right. You have to turn it quite a lot to get any movement, because these are always fine adjustments. But you can see the grid is now not on the beats. Right, the beats are represented by the louder bits, the wider bits on the waveform. So if you see your grid is slightly out, and if you press the sync button and it doesn't sound right, this could be the easy fix. Just head in here, and you can zoom in and get these nice and tight now. Now, also, we have half and double. So if your BPM has been guessed at double or half the BPM it should be, this is the main one. This is the main error that you get is that it thinks a hip-hop track is like a jungle track or whatever. So the way of correcting that is just to go in here and click that, and then they will all just double or half, and they'll stay on the beat. Everything will stay right, but it means that the BPM is now correct for that particular track. Snap is useful because it'll move the grids to a cue point. If you set a cue point in the track at a place that you on a beat, then snap will help you to do that. Shift is a complete mystery. I've asked Alpha Theta several times what this one does. Their instructions for the units that they manufacture are gobbledygook around this. I suspect it doesn't do anything, and they just won't tell me that. But don't worry about shift. There's no purpose I can find for that, and I can't make the button do anything when I press it. Hold down to get out of there. You don't want to be in there by mistake. Get out of there when you're finished.

So key sync is a way of matching the musical key between two currently playing tracks. So unlike in the track filter, where it will not give you the full range of tracks that could mix harmonically with the current track, for a completely unknown reason, I don't know why they don't do it. Unlike that, happily, the key sync button will choose from all the available tracks. What that means is you can be quite sure that when you press the key sync button on two tracks, it will move the key of the track that isn't the master track to something close by that's likely to sound good. It's kind of one of those features that generally does its job well enough. Let's get a track loaded on the other deck so we can demo this. Let's get something that's in a different key. That one there will do. So now I've got two tracks here in different musical keys. You can see 8A and 11A. Don't worry about what this means. The point is, when you press this button here, it will magically fix it so that they're both incompatible musical keys. Well, let's do it. This is the master deck, so let's press the key sync button on the other deck and get those keys synced up. It's now adjusted the key of this track to a different one. It's now 9A. Now, that is close enough. If the number is just one apart or the same, then these are likely to work harmonically. It's done the job for us. We can DJ away. Of course, if it doesn't sound good, we can reverse it. And the way to reverse it is by pressing the key sync button again, and that will take it off and put us back to the 11A. And another way, if the key sync button is on, is to press master tempo, which turns it off as well. We saw it earlier.

You can shift the key of a track as well. This is pretty cool. Let's jump to a point in the track where there's actually some music playing. Slowly but surely, if you think about it, that's doing the opposite of what master tempo is doing. Master tempo will let you change the speed of the track while keeping the pitch the same. Well, this way, you can keep the speed of the track the same while altering the pitch. It's a really cool feature, and this is the first standalone unit like this, apart from the Opus Quad, but it's the first standalone unit in the club layout that has had this added. It's been on CDJs since the CDJ 3000. It's never been on one of these. It was a big omission on the RX3 that I really wish that included. Well, the good news is that it's included here.

It's time to move on and look at the performance pads. There are curiosities on this unit because on the face of it, this unit is designed to be as close to club gear without actually being club separates as possible. And yet, on club separates, the performance pads or buttons are at the top. They're above the jog wheel, whereas on this unit, they are down here. It's kind of a hangover from the XDJ-XZ. This is, of course, the XZ, the follow on from that, and they've kept them, presumably because they didn't want to change something that obviously worked. Worked. Personally, I think it's fine to have them down here. Performance pads are a great thing. They are something that controllers got right, and they're a hangover from the controller layout that seems to have just stuck with this unit. Anyway, let's have a look at them closely and talk about what they do. The buttons you need to know first, these are the selector buttons that choose what mode the pads are using. Lovely, gorgeous colors. So you've got Hot Cue, Beat Loop, Slip Loop, and Beat Jump. But underneath, remember, anything written underneath is accessed using the shift button. By holding down the shift button, we can get the secondary functions. So this is Gate Cue, this is Beat Loop 2, this is Key Shift, and this is Beat Jump 2. So eight functions, but really two of them, three of them really are very close to the same function. Hot Cue and Gate Cue are very similar. Beat Loop and Beat Loop 2 is just more of the same, and Beat Jump and Beat Jump 2 is just more of the same. However, there's a few things we need to talk through here.

Let's have a look at what they all do, starting with hot cues. Remember I said earlier that the memory cues are kind of an old-fashioned way of setting cue points? This is the new way: hot cues, using these buttons. But they work in a very similar way. So let's go to the beginning of this track. Let's set a hot cue right at the beginning of this track. So on the screen, we've got a hot cue marker, but more importantly, down here, this is now lit up to tell us that there's a hot cue set on that particular button. So by pressing that button, I've got that hot cue waiting there for me to use. So I can set more hot cues. I could set a hot cue here on that one if I want. There's another hot cue. Go back to my first hot cue if I want. To delete my hot cues, I hold down shift and press the hot cue I want to delete. And just like the memory cues, these are saved with the track. When you load the track again, any hot cue work you've done will be there.

For loops, it's very similar. Let's go to a nice beat there, and let's set a 4-beat loop at that point there. There's a 4-beat loop set up here now. If I press a spare slot, then it will save as a loop. This time it's in orange rather than in green to tell me it's a loop, and on the screen it says beat loop as well. But this is now saved in just the same way. I can load the track again, and this will be waiting for me to use. So if I get out of that loop here, and press play to get back to the loop, I just tap on it. And I tapped on the hot cue to get back to the hot cue down there as well.

Now, did you notice that when I pressed hot cue, it started playing automatically from that cue point? I have to press pause if I want it to stop. What if I wanted to jump to that cue point and wait for me to do something else? Well, that is gate cue. And to get to gate cue, because it's a secondary function, I press shift and hot cue. It keeps the same cue points and keeps the same loop points, but now they're going to wait. In other words, they're behaving like the memory cues that we saw earlier behaved. And it means that if you do want to carry on playing from a hot cue in this position, you have to press play, like that. Unless the track is currently playing, in which case it will play from there. In other words, if the track's paused, the hot cue is paused, or the loop is paused. If the track's playing, the hot cue or loop are playing, as opposed to been playing all the time if you're set into this mode here, the normal hot cue mode.

Many years ago, this gear was very slow, and what that meant was that when you loaded a track, you had to wait for all the hot cues to load and all the loops to load. And there's a feature that kind of hangs over from that called automatic hot cue. It's turned on by default. Just don't turn it off. What that means is it's going to load all the hot cues when you load a track, which is exactly what you want, unless you're using gear that's years older than this, which you're not. You just have no need to worry about that. So if you wonder what that feature is, that's what it is. Don't touch it. There's no need to.

Now, there is a super cool feature on this unit, which is called a hot cue bank. A hot cue bank is where you have your favorite hot cues that can be across different tracks, loads of different tracks, and you can load a whole hot cue bank in here. And then instead of jumping around one track, you're jumping around various tracks. It's super, super creative. You can't do any of that on here, as in you can't set any of that on here. It has to be done in the Rekordbox software when you're preparing and when you're exporting to your USB drive. So if you want to know how to do that, again, our Rekordbox Made Easy course tells you how to set those. But if you're a DJ that likes to do mashups and likes to chop up and likes to use samples across.

Tracks that is a feature that you're really going to love using on these pads. So do figure out how to use hot Q banks in Record Box and how to get it onto your USB if that's something that interests you.

Once you have set them up, you access them from the browse window in the software. Back to the pads then, and Beat Loop. Beat Loop is a way of looping the currently playing track that's a little bit more intuitive than using the loop controls we've learned so far. Let's get the track playing and the Beat Loop function. That's set here is set for a quarter, a half, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32 beats. You tap any of these and you get an instant loop at that length. So let's tap this one to get a one beat loop on the currently playing track. So we can half that loop, quarter it, get out of it in the other direction, then four beats, eight beats, 16, and 32.

Now on the other setting, Shift and Beat Loop, we get some more esoteric ones. We can have a bit more fun with these because they are the kind of beat loops in between the ones we just heard. They can radically alter the beat because they use thirds and hars and so on to do stuff which is a bit more creative. So Beat Loop is generally, this setting here is going to be the most useful, but do know that there's another one there if you want to try something a bit more out there.

Let's look now at Slip Loop. So as you would imagine, you've got the slip, which we've looked at on the button on the unit already, and you've got Loop. They all exist in other areas. This is just another way of controlling them and a way that some people find more intuitive. Slip Loop is a way of doing cool things with loops while the track continues to play underneath. When you're done, the track will be where it would have been had you not done it. To go to Slip Loop then, we click the Slip Loop button here and it all lights up in blue. These are the main ones and it's telling you that these are going to do something a bit wackier, hence they're in a different color. So Slip Loop, like with the other loop controls, as you move along, you're getting double the loop value or half as you move this way. But there are smaller values to start with because that's the most useful thing for this particular feature.

So let's start a track playing. So with Slip Loop, this one here for instance, is a quarter of a beat and while I hold it, it will do a quarter beat loop. But notice the time of the track is continuing, the rhythm of the track is continuing underneath, and I can play with the others as well. And then these two are a little bit wackier. But notice how it's keeping everything really nice and tightly in time. A nice way of playing with intros and outros of tracks and bits where otherwise it might be, dare I say, a little bit boring.

Key Shift is similar on the pads to what you get on the screen, but it's not on the screen. The pads are a little bit easier to use than the screen and there are a couple of features that you don't get on the screen as well for creative purposes. They can be fun. Let's have a look at them then. So in order to get into that function from any other function, Shift and then press Slip Loop and you'll get into it here. So the first button, top left, is Key Sync. It will sync this deck with the other deck. This one at the bottom is Reset. It'll just set everything back to normal. So Key Sync on, off, and reset. These two are up and down a note at a time. Remember reset. These are musically relevant jumps, but big ones. So this is plus seven notes. Reset. And this is minus five notes. These can be fun to play with when you've loaded two copies of the same track because you can get some instant harmonies going on if you use instant doubles for instance. And these are even more extreme, a whole octave up and a whole octave down.

And finally, Beat Jump. Tapping this will get us into the first Beat Jump mode. The red, orange, orange, and red are just colored like this because they're pairs. So these are half a beat forward and back, one beat forward and back, two beats, and four beats. Press the second set and then we move up again, 8, 16, 32, and 64. So on the bigger picture here, keep an eye on the waveforms while I'm doing this. We're set to the really big ones now. It's going to jump forward and back by whole 64 beats or 32, 16. But notice how musically it still sounds good. And then we can tap that button again to get back to the much smaller amounts.

So with the music and getting it onto the decks and getting it playing all covered, we now need to move on to the mixer and how the music is routed through the unit and to your speakers. We'll also cover your headphones. Then we'll move on to things like having the microphone or microphones, because it takes more than one plugged in, and then we've still got to cover both types of effects, the Beat Effects and the Sound Color Effects, and all those settings that we've just glanced at. Still quite a lot to get through there and still quite a few cool features that I haven't been able to tell you about.

Let's start by looking at the mixer section then. So this is the mixer section. On the face of it, it appears pretty standard. It's very similar to the mixer that you see in DJ booths, the Pioneer DJ A9. However, inside this are a lot of things that have been hidden away in the settings. So as we go through this, I will talk you through those as well. The basics though, well, to start with, this is where the mix of settings are. It's a new button on this unit and we'll talk through what's in there shortly.

At the very top of each of the four channels is the trim control. Sometimes it's called a gain control. This is the input volume for whatever is coming through that channel. It's the initial volume and the idea is you use these to get the initial volumes level. You've got some quiet inputs and some loud inputs. This is where you'll balance them and then everything else is being treated equally from there on down.

So here are the EQs. These are like the bass and treble controls or the tone controls on hi-fi equipment, but you get three: a low, a mid, and a high. Now they cut and boost depending upon the settings. You can have them to set totally off like this, which is called ISO cutting or isolator cutting, and you can have them so that they've still got some audio coming through when they're turned down and not quite so much when they turn up. So there's two settings for those, but ultimately they're used to make the sound how you want it as it goes through the mixer channel with regards to the bass, the mid, and the high frequencies. These are for the effects. Get onto those later.

The Q buttons tell the system what to play through the headphones so that you can hear it when potentially the audience isn't listening to it. So when we move on to headphones, we'll look a bit more at that. So these are the channel faders. When these are down, they're off, and when they're up, they're on. And these are the overall volume as it leaves the mixer and heads off to the master output. This is the crossfader. Now this is set up usually so that anything to the left of it is engaged when you go like that, and anything to the right of it is engaged when you go like that. And they're all engaged in the middle. You can change the faders and indeed what happens when you do this along with many other settings here in the settings, and we will get on to those.

First though, let's move up and look at this area here, the master output, because this decides what your audience hears. So here we have the master level control. This is the output that decides how loud everything is that's leaving the mixer. This button here decides whether you hear what's going on here in your headphones. And nicely, we have a three-band EQ here as well, so you can equalize the output of the whole unit. And this is good because it means that if you're playing through a PA system that maybe hasn't got quite enough bass or sounds a bit shrill or sounds a little bit trebly or whatever, you can make the adjustments there overall for the system and you're not having to make them here and leave these sets somewhere that's compensating for the system you're listening through not being used creatively if you're mixing.

So there's meters everywhere for this. Let's just start a track playing here so you can see this meter here is telling us the level of the channel here before it leaves. So in other words, if I turn that down, even though we can't hear it anymore, it's still going on in here. But when I turn that down, notice the master one is off. That's the difference between the meters. You get one here for each channel before these faders, and this one here is all of the added up. Now if you push too hard, these will go into the red, and that's a warning to you that you should be turning something down.

Now we talked about the versatility of the inputs on the unit and that you can have lots of things plugged in in lots of different ways. So you may be wondering, if there's only four channels on here, how do we tell the channels what we want to be going through them? You might have remember when we looked around the back of the unit that there's different ways of inputting things around the back here as well. We can plug in record decks and we can plug in CDs. You might even know that record decks and CDs have got a very different level of output, with record decks having a much, much lower output than CDJs or other line-level inputs. So how do we tell the mixer what we want to go through each of these channels? That's all done in the mixer settings area. Now it's also possible to get to this by holding down this menu. When we talk through this menu later, I'll show you, but the easiest way of getting to it is just by tapping this button here. Once you tap that button there, you go into this screen here, which has got quite a few things on it. For now though, we're going to concentrate on the things at the top here for each of the decks.

So here we have the Deck Three Input Select. Deck Three is this number here, the outside on the left. And here we have Deck Four Input Select. Deck Four is this deck here, the outside on the right. This is quite standard, this idea that you have the outside decks is almost auxiliary decks, and the inside two decks is your main two decks. And on this unit, these the ones that you can plug things in around the back to use. And as we'll see later on, they're also the ones that you can use with external physical players if you want to.

So here we've got the options for deciding what goes through these channels. It's currently set to the computer, which is what the blue button here is telling us. But we can set it to a line input if we've got a line input in the back, which would normally be a CDJ or another line-level input. Could be someone else's controller that you're routing through here, someone else you're DJing with. If you've got record decks plugged in, then phono is the one to press. And it can also accept Bluetooth on these channels here as well. So if you wanted to use Bluetooth, that's what you do there.

So while we're in here, this is where you change the EQs. Remember I was telling you about how these can completely cut the frequencies in ISO or ISO setting, and they can also just be a little bit more subtle? Well, that goes on here. That's what we use to select that. And also, while we're in here, let's have a look at these because the faders can all be adjusted as well. So the way the faders fade the music in and out, and the way the crossfader switches between the channels can all be adjusted in here. It's called the Channel Fader Curve. And currently, it's set to the middle, which is a nice smooth fade on the upfaders on these faders here, so they'll go smoothly from zero to full. But you can have it set so that it takes a little bit more to get it to high volume, or you can have it set so that it gets to high volume very quickly. And the same with the crossfader. These are classic settings. If you're a scratch DJ, you're going to want it set where I've got it set here, so the crossfader acting more or less like a switch. As soon as you move it a little bit, both channels will be active until you get all the way to the other side. Or you can have it somewhere in the middle, or you can have it very smooth, and this is kind of for long house blends and that kind of thing. So most people would leave that set somewhere in the middle.

So using a combination of those things, you can craft your sound to your heart's content. Now, what about the headphones? What about monitoring what's going on? So the headphones have all their own controls. Let's take a look at those. Here we have the headphone section. We've already looked at Link Cue, which is how we can listen to songs ahead or behind where they're currently playing, or even when they haven't been loaded. But these are the main controls for the headphones. So the Mix decides whether what you hear is the sources that you've got a cue button active for, like this, only, or the master output only, or some mix of the two. Some DJs like to DJ with a mix of the two going on so that they can hear whether what they're bringing in is in time with what's going on in the speakers and what's going out to them, master output. Other DJs will have a speaker near them which they'll use to listen to the master output and so only want this set to Cue. So you then have a balance going on between a headphone, typically held on one of your ears, and the other ear listening to the speaker in the room. Whatever you set this to though, you're going to want a volume control, and that's what this is here, the headphone volume control, so you can get that how you want it.

And yet more DJs like to listen with something called Split Cue, which is available here in the settings. Mono Split will set the headphones so that you can hear the master output on one headphone and the Cue output on the other. So it's almost like when you're wearing your headphones, it's almost like you've got a speaker to your left and you've also got to the right what you would be listening to in the headphones. It's on pro mixers, it's often not on DJ gear like this, but it is on this being a high-end unit. So all the options that you would expect for headphones are there. And you might have spotted there where we were looking here in the settings that we also have the Link Preview volume as well. So when you're using that Link Preview feature that we looked at, you haven't got a volume control for it outside of here. You need to go in here and set it on here to something that suits you.

Now my headphones are traditional wired headphones here. You've also got a socket here for the larger plug if your headphones have that. But you also have a pairing button here, and this is for the Sonic Link headphones that are now being sold by the company, uh, by Alpha Theta. This is a pair of their Sonic Link headphones, the HDJ-F10, and this is the only unit at the time of recording this tutorial that works natively with these. In other words, by pressing the button on the front there, I can link to a pair of these and have extremely low latency, wire-free DJing, which is pretty cool. There's just a couple of things that you need to do in order to get that to work. Uh, and the main one is to go into the settings by holding down Menu and then to go into the mixer settings and make sure that you've got the Sonic Link switched on there. When the Sonic Link is switched on, if you've got a pair of headphones that you previously paired with the unit and you turn them on, it will just link. If not, you hold down the pairing button on the front here, and then you hold down the pairing button on the headphones themselves. There's obviously instructions provided with this brand of headphones. When it's paired, you'll never need to do that again. They'll always remember the unit and the unit will always remember them. It's pretty cool. It is a good feature of this and it's something that if you want something unique that's only on the XDJ, you might want to think about buying a pair of these as well, well, to complete your purchase, if you like.

So if you're DJing at home, you probably got your speakers plugged into these sockets here. But these sockets here are a professional master output for plugging into PA systems and so on. And if you are plugged into a PA system that's a little way away from where you're DJing, you're probably going to want to use these as well, which are the Booth outputs. These are the sockets that you'll plug in your leads for the speakers that are right there with you in the DJ booth, and they give you your own personal sound system that makes everything a lot easier when it comes to DJing, mixing, and so on. They have their own volume control, and their volume control is this one here, the Booth Level control.

If you have a microphone or microphones, because it can take more than one, well, they plug in around the back as well. This is a standard microphone cable, and that will plug in there. But you can also plug in TRS microphone cables there as well. That hole in the middle will take that kind of microphone. Either way, it needs to be a dynamic microphone because there's no phantom power there, and also condenser mics aren't the best for using with DJ gear. And in that kind of way, this is a classic Shure SM58 that I have here, and that I've had for decades. So your microphones plug in the back. Where are the controls? They are on the top left. Turn a microphone on or off like this. But you can also push to talk. Just keep it held, and it'll flash. And when you take your finger off it, it will stop. So you've got both toggle and momentary there. Talkover will dim the music when the microphone is being used, and when you stop using the mic, it will come back up to full volume. And you can adjust how much the music is turned down with this in the utilities, which we'll look at shortly. These tiny little lights here indicate a signal and also whether your signal is too high and therefore distorting. And these are the level controls that let you control this. And then you've got a low, mid, and high for each microphone as well.

One of the big issues with microphones in loud environments, of course, is feedback. Is that high howling noise you hear when a speaker is too near to the microphone? And there's an easy way of dealing with that in this unit. So you use the mixer settings to do that as well. Tap that button to get into them, and in here you'll see at the top a feedback reducer. So you can try light, and if that still doesn't do it, try heavy. Obviously, the more feedback reduction you put in, the more it affects the sound quality of the microphone. And while we're here, you can feed the microphone through the effects, which we're getting on to very shortly, and you can choose whether one, two, or both microphones feed through the effects. And you can decide whether the microphone output is recorded when you're recording your set. It can be really useful if you're recording a DJ set and you don't want all your shoutouts to the crowd to get in the way of what you're recording, you can just turn it off in there. Finally, for completion's sake, just while we're here, this is where you decide whether each of the individual channels bypasses the crossfader or goes to the left, which is A, or goes to the right, which is B.

So we reach the effects, always a favorite part of these tutorials. On this unit, we have two sets of effects. You have the Sound Color Effects, which are the ones that are switched with these controls here and then controlled with these controls here. And you have the Beat Effects, which are down here. We're going to start off by looking at the Sound Color Effects. So the Sound Color Effects are switched using these buttons here. The one that you have selected flashes. These knobs here control the effect in two ways. Moving to the left, it gives you one version of the effect. Moving to the right will give you another version of the effect. Leaving in the middle, where there's a click, will just leave the effect switched off. Whichever effect you have selected is going to be the same across all the channels. So the classic effect here is Filter. And if Filter is selected, then you'll have a filter control for each of your channels here. You can adjust them individually, of course, but it's the same effect for all of them. This knob here gives you even more control. Generally, it's an intensity knob. So if you have it down at the far left, you'll get less of the effect. If you have it up to the right, you'll get more. I've kind of simplified that a bit, but it has a click in the middle, which is a good place to leave it generally, and then you can play with that later when you get used to the effects.

Let's have a listen through them then. I'm going to start some music playing and we'll start off at the top with Space. So Space is giving you a kind of echo effect. In fact, it is a reverb, and it's giving you that reverb with a little bit more added to it to make it sound a little bit better than just a straight reverb. It's a popular one. The next one is actually my favorite, the Dub Echo. Dub Echo is also a reverb echoey style effect, but again, they've just messed with it a little bit to make it sound dubby and cool. Now, the important thing about these is because they are tail effects, in other words, they do something which when you turn the music down, carries on. You can do that because they're post-fader. In other words, they happen after the fader. So you can turn the fader down on some of these effects and it will carry playing, which is sometimes the best way to make them show in your mix rather than having them playing over the music.

So the next one is a Sweep effect. Let's have a listen to that. Now, this is a type of filter effect, and we have got another more standard filter to look at in a second. However, the parameter control here, rather than controlling intensity, controls the frequency of the filter. It controls whether it's a higher or lower part of the frequency range of the track that the filter affects. So let's show you that there. And the reason this is interesting is that you can set a filter to accentuate or to reduce certain frequencies in tracks. And so in routines where you've got certain sounds you want to emphasize or whatever, playing with this could be a good way of doing that.

So the Crush effect is a little bit like an old-fashioned video game. It gives you kind of like an 8-bit crushed sound. Let's over listen. Noise is the classic noise effect that EDM DJs love so much. And in this instance, you can use this as a volume control over it, basically to have it set to where you want it. And then finally, last but not least, the absolute classic Filter. So the difference between the Sound Color Effects and the Beat Effects is that these are designed to work with the beat of the music, whereas these are designed to work completely freestyle. It's up to you, you decide what you're doing with the effect using these controls here.

So let's talk through the controls on the Beat Effects. At the very top is the X-Pad or the Cross Pad, and this decides whether the effect is on or off. By tapping it, the effect is on. You can see this light flashing at the bottom, which is another way of turning the effect on. But then once you have turned it on, you can move left and right to make the effect do different things. So it's an intuitive way of quickly doing something cool with the effects. These two buttons here half and double the beat value that the effects are currently working with. So you can have this way down to fractions of a beat or way up to multiples of a beat. This button here decides whether this is doing it automatically by listening to the music, or whether you're deciding how often the effect cycles. And so by pressing this button and then using this button here, which is Tap, you can tap in the rhythm that you want the effect to follow. Quantize will turn on and off Quantize for the effects so that everything happens bang on the beat. And then down here, we've got Frequencies. So you can decide whether the frequency affects just the high frequencies, the mid frequencies, the low frequencies, or any combination thereof. This is the main effect selector. It chooses which effect we want, and you've got lots and lots to choose from here. This chooses where the effect is routed. In other words, what the effect is affecting. So Channel One, Channel Two, Channel Three, Channel Four, the microphone. These effects work on the microphone in a way that you don't have on the Sound Color Effects. The crossfader left, the crossfader right, or just the master output. This is fine adjustment of the beat time. In other words, you can set the beat here, but then you can adjust it finally here. And this is your main adjust. So with this all the way on the left, the effect is completely even if it's turned on. With this in the middle, you're getting half of the normal sound and half of the sound with the effect applied. And with this on the far right, you're getting the whole effect and none of the original sound.

Now before we go any further, remember that on the screen you can see a lot of information about your effect. So here we've got the effect that we've got chosen, so Delay. We've got the BPM. It tells us that it's automatically taking that BPM from the music and it's not using my tap function. It tells us the actual length in milliseconds of delay. Tells us what's going to happen when we use the crossfader or the X-Pad. So the X-Pad is going to affect the beat level there. And so it's good idea to keep an eye on this when you're playing with the effects to glance at it and make sure it's doing what you think it's going to be doing. You might want to keep an eye on the top of the screen as I talk you through the effects now, just to see what I've dialed in. Uh, that's something, as I say, you'll be doing anyway when you're using these.

So in order to, uh, to set one of these going, we're going to start some music. Make sure our level depth is somewhere in the middle to start with. Make sure we've got the effect we want selected. Make sure we're on the channel we want. And make sure that the beat value is set to something that we want. So I've got a two-beat delay set here, and that means that when I turn this button on, it's going to mix a two-beat delay in with the currently playing track. There's a two-beat delay mixed in there now. If I turn this all the way up, it's only the two-beat delay version we're hearing. We're not even hearing the original track. We're just hearing the track with a two-beat delay applied. And you can hear that if I turn it off, it took two beats to turn off. And I turn it on again, it took two beats to turn on.

Perhaps more useful than delay is an Echo. An echo is like delay, but it echoes out slowly. It's not, there's not just one delay applied. So this Echo is set to half a beat. Ping Pong is an echo that kind of ping pongs from left to right, hence its name. And Spiral is a kind of quite intense echo that tends to affect the high frequencies more, to my ears. So Helix kind of freezes the track. So on Helix, I've got it set to one beat here. It remembers what you've got set, by the way, for each effect. So you can set your favorites and then you can come back and it'll still be there. I've got it set to one beat and it kind of freezes the track while it's switched on, a bit like if you've ever used the, uh, slicer effects on DJ controllers, which is notoriously hard to use, but it's quite similar to slicer. Uh, so let's have a listen to it to see what that sounds like.

So Reverb is just a straight reverb. This one's interesting because it's an effect that doesn't actually have beat timings. These beat timing buttons here simply move up and down. And pressing them off the camera, move up and down the number of milliseconds that you're going to get on the reverb. So this one is the kind of, uh, the one that breaks the rule of what the beat effects are about. Now we move on to the kind of sweep effects, Flanger and Phaser. These always work well with quite high values set to the beats. So this is the Flanger and the Phaser. Next, we have the Filter. Now Filter, uh, again, is not like the filter that you have on here because the filter on here is tied to the beat. So if I tie the filter to say, every four beats, then the filter is going to come in and out every four beats. An interesting way of using effects is to turn off some of the frequencies so they're only affecting a certain frequency. So for instance, if I wanted to keep the kick drum going fine, and I wanted to keep the hi-hats going fine, but just have this filter affect the mid frequencies, well, I can do that by turning those off there and then switching it on. If I turn it down here, then I've got control over how much of the mid frequencies are affected, and I can use this control in a creative way, much in the same way I was using these creatively earlier.

Now the next one is simply the same effect, but in this instance, you get a more esoteric set of beat values. It's called Triplet Filter. Now, turn Triplet Filter on. Look at the top here. Look at the beat values that we've got to cycle through. They're not one, two, a half, and so on, but they are thirds or triplets, hence the name triplets. So if I move through these using the beat buttons, they're going to be slightly more interesting values, which is going to give us a more interesting sound. Could be fun to play with.

So the next one is a Transform effect. This is quite a classic. So Transform will cut the track in and out depending upon what's set here. Half beat is quite good to start with with Transform, and Quantize is a good one to use on Transform because this is an effect that really does need to be triggered bang on the beat to sound really good. And I think Transform always sounds best when you're somewhere just past the middle. Let's have a listen to it.

Now the next one, Roll, is the same as a Loop Roll that we've seen on the pads, very similar anyway. Uh, and again, we have got values that we can adjust up here on the screen that we're currently set to a half. But this is one of those that I think the X-Pad is a really good thing to use for, because generally with Loop Rolls, we want to play with the Loop Roll. So instead of turning it on here, I'm going to turn the Loop Roll on by pressing the pad here. And then we have a Triplet Roll as well, which again gives this the same set of slightly more interesting values that we saw on the Triplet Filter. And finally, it's kind of a trademark effect, the Mobius. This is one that just kind of goes on forever in rather an interesting way. If you've never heard it before, this is what it sounds like. And the kind of harshness of it is adjusted by the X-Pad there.

So now we've looked at all the effects. We've finished looking at the main features of the unit as far as DJing from a USB drive or accessing your Record Box collection over the network or over Wi-Fi is concerned. But there are lots of other ways of getting music into it. So now we're going to move on to looking at how to get music into it from Bluetooth. We're going to move on to looking at Cloud Direct Play, where you can have your own library streamed into it over the cloud. We're going to look at Streaming Direct Play, where you can use Beatport. We're going to look at using it with media players, having media players added onto the unit so that you can use them to control extra decks. We're going to look at using it with DJ software, Record Box and Serato. Only brief, but I'm going to show you how to connect it up and how you can use it effectively like a big DJ controller in the way you would use a standard DJ controller. And then we're going to end off with our index, where we're going to go through every single utility menu item and every single shortcut menu item to leave no stone unturned.

So let's get started then by looking at how it works with Bluetooth. You might recall earlier I showed you that in this menu here, which is the mixer settings menu, you've got a Bluetooth option for both channels. It's the same Bluetooth inputs, so there aren't two Bluetooth inputs. But if you want to stream something over Bluetooth, choose your channel, this one or this one, set Bluetooth on it, and then it's just a couple of other settings we need to do. So I'm going to hold down the Menu button to get to this menu here, the main menu, and I'm going to click Bluetooth here, and I'm going to click into Bluetooth settings. So you want to click Bluetooth on, and I'm currently paired to my iPhone. But if you're not paired to something, click on pairing, and it'll go through the usual, giving you a code in order to pair up with your device. Once you're paired up with your device, that's all there is to it, and you can get out of there, and you're ready to go. So on your phone, everything happens on your phone. Nothing happens on the unit other than using the mixer controls. So on your phone, you will trigger the music, and it will come through on the channel that you've chosen. And then everything is available to you, the effects, as if you were just playing it from an internal source. But of course, there's nothing on the screen because this is just being fed in effectively like a record deck or a CD, but it's a Bluetooth wireless source. It's a great thing to have for a backup music source. So if everything else goes down, you've got crashes, you've got USB drive issues, whatever it is you're getting your music from, then you can just quickly hit play on one of the spare channels and have something playing, a mix playing on there. Also can be useful for before you start performing, where you can just be streaming music to it before it's actually time to DJ. Lots of reasons why that's a good thing to use.

Now another thing you can do is have your whole library in the cloud. Why would you want to do that? Well, Record Box is a platform that's increasingly moving towards cloud. On all Record Box subscriptions, including the free ones, you get access to their cloud services where you use Record Box's own information stored in their cloud about your tracks. But the tracks themselves, your actual music files, are in your choice of storage, which is currently Dropbox or Google Drive. We haven't got time to go into that here. We go into it into a lot of detail in the Record Box Made Easy course. But if you've turned on cloud, that means that you can be working on your library anywhere, on your phone, at work, on your laptop, on your DJ gear, on your home computer, whatever. You can always be working on your library, you can always be adding music to it, and it will always stay synced across all devices. And now you can log into it from compatible DJ gear. So you can literally log into that collection without having your USB drive with you. I think it's a great way of having all your music with you if you haven't got all your music with you. So if you've got a big collection and you don't want to export everything to your USB drive all the time, but you want to know that should someone ask for something you forgot to bring, you can quickly log in and use it. Well, this is a great way of doing it.

How do we do it then? Well, we need to go back to our screen and set it up. This is how it happens. And in fact, there's a few things you need to do before you even get to the unit. So surprisingly maybe, you do need your USB drive in order to use Cloud Direct Play. Why? Well, if you remember when we're looking at our source, our USB source, I selected Local Library, right? Every time to look at our music, but there were other options, right? And there was this one here, Cloud. So this is something that has to be set up on your USB, because the login information is carried around with you on this. So in other words, you're not going to put your username and password directly into the unit. It's already set up and it's on your USB. And when you plug the USB into the unit, the unit will see that and allow you to log in. So why is this? I think it's because this is set up for DJs that maybe want to use gear like this in pro DJ booths, and they don't really want to be entering their username and password on someone else's gear. So then they finish DJing and walk away, and someone else can log into their collection. What DJs are always going to do at the end of their set is take their USB with them, right? So the idea is that your USB is acting as an unlock key to unlock your music collection in the cloud. And so we need to get our key onto there. So as I said a second ago, this is all kind of outside the scope of this, but I want you to be able to do this, so I'll show you how it happens inside the Record Box software now. But again, if you want to learn everything about Record Box, it's in our Record Box Made Easy course.

So let's head over to the laptop then. I'm going to eject my USB drive, plug it into the laptop, head up in Record Box to the cog at the top here, and on Cloud Library Sync is where you set up your Cloud Library Sync, which is necessary for any of this to work. And then click on DJ Equipment Linkage and make sure this is turned on. And when these two settings are turned on, you can get out of here. And then on your device, and this is the little icon for device here, this is our USB drive. I'm going to click Authenticate here, and it will say Authenticate this device. And now that device has been prepared and is ready for me to plug it into the unit itself in order to unlock my library. So I'll eject it from there, remove it from there, plug back into the USB. And now on the source here, you'll see that I've got the option to log in. It's not grayed out anymore on Cloud Library. So click Log In. And now you have to actually select the Cloud Library once it's logged in as well. So I'll click on it one more time. And now the music I'm seeing here is not coming from the USB, it's actually coming from the cloud. And you can see at the top, USB 1 Cloud. So this music has got everything in my collection, not just the playlists that I happen to have exported to the USB. And it's coming from, in my case, I'm using Dropbox. But as I said, the actual metadata, the actual information about the waveforms and the keys and the tracks and all the DJ stuff, is coming super quick over the Alpha Theta Cloud. It's a really clever little system. And as I say, it's a good backup. It's not perfect because you can't do things like use the track filter because it doesn't know enough information about everything in that library to be able to do that in the way it can do with a local USB. So I think this is best used as a backup, as kind of background access to all your music on top of the stuff you've already brought with you on your USB drive.

Right now, the other option on there that you might have noticed if you were being eagle-eyed in the sources was this one here. Lets you access your Beatport account. So if you have a Beatport account, then all your playlists and everything can be drawn in here. So you enter your username and password here. All done. Click Login. And you'll see this screen here. And so again, just because we logged in, it doesn't mean that that's the library we're currently using. We have to actually click it so that the Beatport library will show our source. So here we've got the classic Beatport top 100s in all the genres here. We do have the classic genres. This is all the stuff that you're used to seeing in Beatport, right? Beatport's own curated playlists, and also I've got my playlist with the same limitations that I spoke about for using your own music over the cloud, because it hasn't got access to everything. You do find that there's certain things aren't as good as playing with a local collection off USB. But again, you've got all your Beatport stuff there as an option. It can be just a great way of DJing at home for fun, just literally go into folders and start playing with other DJs' curated collections or whatever. It's a great thing to have on DJ gear, and it's a little bit behind the times with Alpha Theta gear, so good to see that they've added it to this unit here.

Right, so we've now covered the extra ways of getting music into the unit. But what about getting extra equipment plugged into the unit? Well, that is where using media players that can use Pro DJ Link, which this also has, is our solution. So you can use like, for instance, one on each side and have a full four-deck setup. Literally, my desk isn't big enough here to do that. So what I'm going to do is grab one of the media players from behind me and I'm going to put it next to the unit, and we'll just get one of them set up. But what I do is exactly the same if you want to use two. Let's do that. So I've taken the CDJ from there and put it right on the left-hand side here of the XDJ. The first thing you have to do then is get it onto the Ethernet network using a network switch, and this is what this cable here is doing. I've plugged it in. I've also plugged the audio cable in, which I've plugged into channel 3 at the back of here, because the audio has to be routed directly. It doesn't come across the Ethernet cable. Now the next thing we got to do is set up the CDJ so that it knows that it's going to be player number three. So turning on the CDJ and...

heading into its utility menu by holding down the menu button, just as we did on the XDJ-AZ. And then heading down into Pro DJ Link. Down here, the player number needs to be set to player three, because that's the one we want it to be. If you set it to player one or two, none of this will work, so set it to three if it's on the left, four if it's on the right.

With the player number set, back on the XDJ-AZ, we need to tell it that we want to use it with Pro DJ Link. You head to the deck utility menu, and at the bottom is this Pro DJ Link here. Make sure this is turned on. And this disables deck three and four from use with this unit and says, "Look, we're going to use these with external media players."

At this point, we can plug the network in here, and our XDJ-AZ will now send track information across to the external player or players. And by clicking Source on the external player, I've now got the same options. I can use my cloud library, or I can go directly to the USB via this one here, which is what I'm going to do. Here's the collection. I can pick a track I want to load, and again, it's all the stuff that we've seen. It's the same operating system, so everything's very similar. Load a track onto the player, and this is all coming over from the XDJ-AZ. And so I can click play on here. This is playing straight through this system here now. Now, we're not going to see here any of the waveforms from this one here, because it's now separate. Channels three and four over here are now operating with the external players, and so we're effectively sharing the library, but we're not sharing the operating system. We've got the little four-deck display at the bottom there that won't show, so bear that in mind. It's definitely best to have two, two, or none, because you don't get a choice of saying, "Let me keep three of the decks on the XDJ-AZ and have one external player." It's two or four. So if you're going to do this, use two. It's a little bit finicky the way it works. You have to get the order right when you're plugging things in to get the player numbers recognized and that kind of thing. And it's worth getting the extra manual, which we've linked to underneath this tutorial directly from AlphaTheta, that simply goes into all the different permutations for setting up Pro DJ Link.

If this is something that you want to play with, you can also DJ as if this was just a DJ controller, controlling DJ software in the same way any DJ controller can do. So this isn't just a standalone unit, it is also a DJ controller. It works with Rekordbox and with Serato, and the way you get it to work with both of those platforms is exactly the same. I'll show you on both of them, though.

So here's the procedure. So firstly, you're going to want to plug in a USB cable from the back of the unit into the computer. As soon as you do that, on the screen, you're going to see "Software Control" appear. Tap on "Software Control" and press the load button for the deck you want software control to work on. I pressed it on all four. You can see it said "Software Control" at the bottom there. So this is now a four-channel software controller. Of course, we need some software. So let's start off by loading Rekordbox on the laptop. This is the same platform we've been using to prepare our music, but now importantly, we switch to Performance mode, and that gives us the software control over here on the unit. So now I can see my collection is here, and I can browse through my collection in here. But if you look on the computer screen, I'm browsing through the collection on the computer screen as well. And as I load a track on here, that track loads not only on the deck here, ready to DJ with, but it's also on the computer screen as well. I'm effectively controlling Rekordbox software from the unit.

With Serato, then, it's exactly the same. Plug in your computer, you'll see "Software Control" appear on the screen in the Source menu. Tap on it. Tap on the decks you want to use. I'm using all four again here. And then launch Serato on the computer. You can get Serato for free at serato.com. Once you've done that, you'll see it on the computer screen. It looks like this, and you'll also be able to scroll through the library using the browse knob on the unit here. See your library, just as we did with Rekordbox. Pick a track to load. Pick a deck to load it on. It will look a little bit different to how it looks in Rekordbox, but essentially, you've got the same thing. You can DJ in exactly the same way as you would with other software, or indeed with this unit on standalone.

So we're nearly there. We just need to go through the menus so that there's nothing that you don't know about this unit. You're about to become a complete ninja, and I've figured out all the stuff that has you scratching your head, so you don't have to. Let's go into the main menu, then, by holding down Menu here. And the Utility Menu is what it's called. These are all the options we can choose from. So going through from the top, then:

From Deck Eject and Load Deck, Deck Lock or Unlock. This will stop you accidentally ejecting a playing deck or loading something onto a playing deck. Quantize Beat Value. We've already seen this. This is where we set the value. You'll notice that quite a lot of these settings, certainly in some parts of this menu, are now elsewhere in easier-to-find places, but this sets the fraction of a beat, or whether it's a whole beat, that quantize snaps to. Hot Cue Auto Load. We've already talked about. We'll skip over that one, just leave it turned on.

Hot Cue Color is an interesting one. If you set this to "On," if you remember earlier when we were looking at the hot cues, they were all one color, green, and then the loops were another color, orange. Well, you can have the hot cues be a different color for everyone, if you want. That's kind of how software does it, and you might prefer it that way. So with that turned on, the hot cues on a track are going to look like this. Let's just set some hot cues on this track randomly. See, they're all a different color now. That's because we've got Hot Cue Color set to "On" on the screen. If we turn that to "Off," then any hot cues we set won't be like that, they'll be in one color.

Override Current Cue with Hot Cue. If you press a hot cue when you're playing a track, this will set the temporary cue to that hot cue's position. Some people like that. We've looked at Auto Cue Level already. This is deciding at what point the track waits for you before the audio begins. Vinyl Speed Adjust. Again, we've seen that elsewhere. We've also seen Vinyl Speed Adjust Time elsewhere. This is about how the music starts and stops, whether it's instant, or whether it's got that slight vinyl feel to it. Play Mode allows you to go through a whole playlist continuously. It's a really good tip, this one, because if you're DJing and you don't want to actually be behind the decks, maybe you're just letting the music play while people drift into a venue or whatever, then this will basically play through autoplay on a list for you.

Jog Ring Brightness adjusts the brightness of this ring here around the jog wheel. Has it in different shades depending upon whether you're playing somewhere light or dark, basically. Jog Ring Indicator will flash that jog ring when you're getting near to the end of a track to give you a warning. And Pro DJ Link. We looked at a little while ago. We want this turned to "Off" unless we've got external decks plugged in.

The Mixer settings are nearly all the same ones that we've seen on this panel here. There's just a couple, I think, that are not on that panel. So let's have a little look at those. These are all on there. These are all on there. These are all on there. And for memory, I think the only ones that aren't on there are the Talkover Mode settings. So this is for the microphone. How much the microphone dims down in volume is set there when you talk into it. And Advanced and Normal. Advanced is going to give you a more natural response, but Normal is the way it's always been done. So you've got a choice there. Experiment with it depending upon how loud your voice is and the microphone you're using to find the one that works for you.

Audio Output lets you attenuate or automatically limit the highest point of your DJ set. So if you drive too loud and it starts to distort, then this says at what point it's going to start doing something about it. So Master Attenuator Zero is the highest point, and then they're a little bit more conservative. The other two settings. Master Peak Limiter is a complete peak cut-off. If you're going too loud, it would just, you won't sound very good, but it won't distort. You've got Mono or Stereo on the Master Output, because a lot of club systems are not in stereo, so no point having a stereo output to them. You can set that to Mono if that's the case there. You can attenuate the Booth Output. This is the same as we saw for Master, but for Booth. And again, you've got a Mono Stereo for the Booth Output there.

Display is all about what the display looks like. On Air Display displays on the small waveforms at the bottom here, a little sign that says "On Air" when the fader for that waveform is faded up, just so that you've got another warning that that's something you're currently playing. Waveform Current Position is an interesting one. So let's look at the waveform of a track with it currently set to Left. This is the current position of the waveform. Right, there's all this area here to come, if you like. So if we were playing that track, we can see one, two, three, four beats ahead. Now, there's not much behind it because that's already happened. So if you don't like that, if you would rather that was in the middle, then that can be changed on this part here by setting the Waveform Current Position to Center. So now that's going to be in the middle there. Some people prefer that. I'm not really sure why, because it means you've got less warning of anything that's coming up. But if you're one of those people, then that is the place that you change that.

Waveform Divisions. We touched on this earlier. The bottom of the waveforms, when you've got the main full waveform at the bottom here, is set to show you the parts of a track. But you can have that set to just show you 30-second intervals instead. So now see this little display down the bottom here. This is now marked in 30-second intervals all the way through the track. In fact, this is, uh, written in minutes, but there's an extra little 30-second one in between each minute. But you can again change that back if that's not something you like, and it will show you the phase of the track there.

So next, we've got the overall waveform display, whether it's four or two decks. That's currently set to four, as you just saw then. The Image on Jog Display will show you the artwork for the track in the jog wheel. Mine don't have ever have any artwork on, so you rarely see an image in my jog wheels, but you can put a custom image on your USB. So if you want to have, say, your DJ logo on the middle of your jog wheels, then you can do that by putting it on your USB drive, put it in the root of your USB drive, just in the same place that we put the update file when we updated the firmware right at the very beginning, and then you can use that on there by switching this to Custom Artwork here. Slip Flashing will flash the jog displays if you've got slip mode on, which means that you're not going to get caught out by leaving that on by mistake. And then we've got brightness here of the jog display and the main display. So you can set those depending, usually if you're playing indoors or outdoors, so that you can see what you're doing.

Network. We've already looked at. This is your Wi-Fi and your Ethernet stuff. Bluetooth. We've already looked at in general. Is just the stuff like language and power management, whether it turns off after 20 minutes or not, whether there's a screensaver, uh, and your version and license number, etcetera. So you can see if you need to update the firmware by comparing this number to the firmware that's currently shown as being the most recent on their website.

The only other menu we haven't formally looked at is the Shortcut menu, but most of the things in here we've already talked about. So the quantize values are in here. Touch Release or Touch and Release, and the Vinyl Speed Adjust. We've looked at that. Here's another place where you can change the Left and Center or Time Scale and Phrase Waveform Information. Another place where you can change whether it's artwork or custom image, and the brightnesses. This is an interesting one: Pad Info Display. So you can turn this on or off here. If I turn that on there, then in the middle of the waveforms, then we get that display showing us the hot cues, in this case, 'cause that's what I've got set on the pads, in the middle of there. But you can also get to that from the button here by just double-tapping that, so you don't have to go into the menu to do that.

I do hope you enjoyed this tutorial. We've really enjoyed bringing it to you. We have many tutorials just like this for free on the Digital DJ Tips YouTube channel. I've linked underneath so you can find the others. However, I did say to you at the beginning that I had something for you, a reward for hanging around to the end, and that's a free copy of our book, "Rock the Dance Floor," the Amazon bestselling global book on how to DJ. You know, we've been teaching DJing since 2010. We've taught over 40,000 people to DJ, and I'd love you to have a copy of this book as I thank you for watching this tutorial. Head over to digitaldjtips.com and click the "Join" link at the top. And as I thank you for joining and becoming a free member of our school, I will give you a book.

Now, when you're ready, do consider taking our Complete DJ Course. It's a phenomenal investment in your DJing, and it's helped tens of thousands of people just like you learn the five big areas of DJing: gear, music, mixing, performing, and success. The course talks you through everything from the beginning all the way through to playing and sharing your DJ sets. It's taught by me, and by the end of it, you will be able to DJ like a pro. Whether you're new to this, whether you've always wanted to DJ and never got around to it, or whether you're returning to DJing as someone just getting into it, and of course, all the gear has changed completely since maybe you last did it. Come and take a look at the Complete DJ Course on the digitaldjtips.com website, and I hope to see you over there in the course very soon.

For now, though, we're done here. You now know more about this unit than pretty much everyone who owns one, so well done. I want you to tell me what your favorite feature is. What have you learned here that you didn't know? What have you learned here that's going to change your DJing? Or what do you wish was on here that isn't? I'd love you to let me know in the comments. I do read and reply to pretty much everything that you say, and I'm really interested to know to help me make better tutorials in the future, and also to understand more about how you're using the XDJ-AZ. So don't be shy. I'd love to hear from you down there in the comments. But meanwhile, from me, Phil, here in the Digital DJ Tips School Studio, get good, get out there, make the moments, and I'll see you again very soon. Bye-bye for now.