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Hey everybody, DJ Brandon here with Pioneer DJ. Really looking forward to this demonstration of Rekordbox. This is at the heart of the ecosystem for Pioneer DJ. It's a software program that allows music to be exported out for CDJs, XDJ, or used with GVs and turntables as well as fully controlled by a lot of our own controllers. Offers a lyric program where lyrics can be played back to external monitors or projectors around the room from the tracks that are actually playing. We also have a lighting program that's built into it. Each song will have phrasing and allow for lights to be manipulated with different colors and programs based on the song you're playing out of Rekordbox. There's a lot going on with this software and there's a great reason why we have this guy coming up next, Pulse. He's going to do a deep dive into it and give you a great demonstration. So please stay tuned and Pulse, take it away.
Thanks, Jay. And welcome to the Rekordbox Masterclass. I'm going to teach you as much as I can in 55 minutes. So let's put a counter up here and buckle in. We're going to learn everything from beginner through pro. You can download Rekordbox at rekordbox.com for free, and that's the first way of using Rekordbox. Now, it used to be you needed to have a license or subscription to get into the performance mode, but we've made that available for free as well. So starting with export mode, because this is the most common place people are starting when they're using a CDJ or an XDJ or just want to manage their music collection. This is what you'll see, except I've already got 55,000 songs imported here. So how do you get music into your collection? Well, there's a couple of different ways. The first is by importing a song either through file and import, or you can browse your explorer to see what's already in your music. Or my preferred way is to bring in an explorer window or finder window and drag and drop. Now, here's a pro tip for you. You can take a folder and if you drag and drop that over to the playlists, it will create a playlist from that folder only. So you'll see here, 202011 Rhythm Radio is the folder I just brought in. Now, it's doing the analysis. The analysis is an important step because it's not only going to analyze the song to build the beat grid, which is necessary for beat syncing and all those fun things, but it builds a waveform overview and also brings in the additional metadata. But what else does the analysis do? Let's check it out in the settings here because I'll show you one of the important things to check. If your analysis is going slowly, you might be set to normal processing mode. If you go to performance mode, you'll use as many cores as your computer has available to you, as well as hyper threads to analyze the song simultaneously. So it could be 16 or 32 simultaneous analysis tracks. But there's different modes as well. You have normal and dynamic. And the difference is that normal is for consistent tempo songs like modern dance music, whereas dynamic is for rock, disco, anything that has a varying tempo. It allows Rekordbox to analyze the song and create a micro-adjustment beat grid that changes as the song does. So it dynamically plays back at different speeds depending on the size of the grid, so it keeps it in sync as you play. The analysis options you'll see here also include key, phrase, and vocal. We'll talk about vocal a little bit later, but the key is very simple. It's the key in which the song is performed. The phrase tries to analyze, try to analyze the song and break up the intro, the verse, chorus, break, bridge, that kind of stuff. And that is also important for lighting and some other stuff we'll talk about later on. The analysis mode for auto and whether or not it sets a memory cue at the first beat of the track when analyzing. I recommend you enable this if you don't already have it turned on because this will help put a marker at the beginning of the track. So when you load it up on a CDJ, it will try and put a cue point at the first beat of the song. That helps the player cue to that point as well.
So once the analysis is complete, you've got the song in here. There are a couple of ways of showing it, and I should have left this open here. If we go to view, you've got your standard blue waveform, which is very old school. It's hard to tell any of the bits and pieces apart. You've got RGB, which shows lower frequencies in red, higher frequencies in blue, and the mids are sort of in between. This really doesn't help you because you can't tell if there's some overlapping frequencies that might be together. You can't tell which one is the more powerful one. Enter the three-band waveform, which is new to Rekordbox 6. Here you can see the bass in blue, your mids are in orange, and your highs are in white. So you can see exactly where the overlap is for each frequency, how much energy they each provide to the whole value of the wave. Now, there's a few different ways of showing your songs within Rekordbox in export mode. You've got a single player, a double player, which is not designed so much for DJing, but more to preview two songs together to see how they would sound together. You have a simple crossfader, looping and pitch control, as well as sync controls and beat jump. You've also got the simple player view, which really collapses it down to just the player with the play button and the eject, and then a full browser view for if you want to see nothing but songs and aren't interested in actually playing anything. But let's go back to the single player because this is where we do most of the work when editing a track. And I'm going to go into the grid mode because I want to make sure that this grid is bang on, and it looks like it actually might be slightly off. Indeed, it is. The first red bar is down here at the end. So I'm going to bring it up to that first one. I'm going to zoom in to make sure I get this right on the right spot, and I'm going to click the red and white button here, which is the set downbeat. So clicking that, I can now see I've got my downbeat there. I'm going to zoom back out and check further down the track and make sure that the grid is in the right place. Looks like it might be slightly off, but this could be one of those songs that's got a bit of a swing beat here. I can see my downbeat looks like it's pretty accurate, so I don't need to change anything. If you happen to come across a song that's twice as fast or half as fast as it should be, you've got controls here to adjust the grid, and there's a metronome so you can even check it against a constant beat. Sometimes I find if my dynamic analysis or my analysis range is set wrong, I might get some hip-hop that's too fast or drum and bass that's too slow, and you can always change it there or re-analyze it with the correct range.
I can also go ahead and set hot cues and loops directly from the player. So with the player head here, I'm actually going to set, let's put it at the F. So just a matter of clicking any of the hot cue buttons. Now, these are to play from that spot. And while it's playing, it'll actually continue playing. While it's stopped, it'll stay stopped. That's known as a gated hot cue, that's in the preferences. There's a pro tip for you. The other thing I do is set one down at the end here, and I'm going to do an extra step. I'm going to set a 16. Now, let's set an eight-beat loop here. So I've created a loop, and I'm going to store that to H, and you see it stores with a little loop icon. The other thing I'm going to do is actually click memory. Memory puts a memory point over here. Now, these are typically used for referential use only. They're not performance use. You can use them as markers in the track to know where you're going to mix out. But what you can do is click on that loop to turn it red. That's the active loop. So what will happen there is if I turn this loop off and I come back, I'm going to check this little menu here to see that my active loop playback within Rekordbox is turned on, which it is. Now, if I play this song, when I get to the end of the track, it automatically enables this loop. So if I were playing on a CDJ, this would engage itself automatically when I get to this point of the song, which is wonderful to have on almost every track you've got, because that way you'll never miss the mix-out point, because it will end up looping for you. So that is a hot loop. Let me go back to the beginning of the track, and I'm going to store another loop point here. And you'll notice that my playhead was slightly off of where the beat grid was, but it still snapped to it. That's quantizing. That's this little cue icon down here. So anywhere you put the, as long as it's within a certain range, depending on what you've got set in the preferences for your value, the quantized value, it will snap to the grid. If you're performing and you want to be able to do finger drumming, that's not necessarily tied to the beat, you don't want it to be snapping all the time. Turn off quantize for the hot cues. That's a preference in the settings.
All right, so now I've got these set here. I can see in the tracks where I've got hot cues because they get shown on this preview. Now, the preview is a wonderfully powerful thing because not only can I take a look at it and see what my song looks like, I can actually click on it and listen to the song without having to load it to the deck. And what's even cooler is when you're linked to a player or a DJM that supports Q-Link, the preview cue, you just tap that button on the mixer and it comes up in your headphones. We'll talk more about link a little bit later. But what's some of the other information we have here? Well, we've got the hot cues showing what you can see with these colors. You can jump directly to them, so it's very easy to jump directly to that. There's the stop button was to the left, but there's also these other columns here. So the two columns to the left are administrative columns. It's like the system information. You've got the first column will show what kind of song it is, so if it's a video, if it's a streaming song source, source song, if it's an edit, we'll talk more about that one later on, the cloud sync status, and then whether or not it's got phrase, vocal analysis, cues set, that kind of detail is shown. But the metadata and the artwork are also super powerful because if you right-click on any column header, there are 41 different columns you can show. That's 41 different criteria for that track. You can choose them just by clicking on that. Let's show the, unfortunately not alphabetical comments here. So now I can scroll all the way over. I don't need location. Let's sort by date added and remove location. All right, so where did my comments go? Down here. Want to reorder them? Drag and drop, easy as that. Okay, so these ones, they've all got all this extra information. Well, how do I clear some of this out or make changes to a track? Click on the 'i' on the right side. This is the information panel here. You can see I've got the artwork tab open, but I can click on the summary to see more details about the song, the size, the bitrate, encoder, location. I can go to the info tab and change any of the criteria that I have for the metadata, including the rating. I can change the key here if I wanted to, but don't recommend that. But I want to change these comments because I know where it came from. But you know what? I want to change it for a selection of these songs. I don't want it for, let's just say any of these guys. So I'm going to show you how to edit multiples all at once. I've selected several tracks. Go into the info, clear out that comment, and hit enter. And now it has, where'd they go? Oh, it's sorted by comment, that's why. Let's go back to date added. All right, let's clear out these guys here. Let's clear all those ones. Info. There we go. Hold that first one through that one. Go to info, and I want no comment. As long as you don't change any of the other fields, those ones will be the, oh, that's the only field that will change. So as you can see here, classic house stayed, the artist name stayed, the song name stayed, nothing else changed. So that's an important one.
Additional ways of sorting and finding songs. So there's more data that you can add to your songs using a Rekordbox exclusive feature called My Tag. So the My Tag allows you to create four different banks of up to 50 tags to provide additional sorting and drilling down into the specifics of the music. Now, I've got a whole bunch of my drum and bass here that has got specific tags added. So here I can see gritty is more of a sub-genre than an actual genre because the tags have drum and bass. I know this is drum and bass, but this is a gritty drum and bass track. It also has explicit vocals and some vocal samples. I can choose other ones to know that there was a piano or a rap. This one has a vocal. And one of the other things that I use is a maintenance tag. This is a pro tip for you. The maintenance is a series of tags I've created to give me information about my own collection. So here I can see that in collection, it's just a general one, that's fine. I use that to provide a counter to a negative search, which I can show you later on. And then I add, yes, I've done the rating, I've given the analysis is vocal, the grid is okay. But if I'm out playing and I notice that I've got something wrong, the key is off, I need to check it. I can come and check this checkbox and then use that criteria later to create an intelligent playlist to say, show me all the songs that have got a grid check or grid adjustment needed. And then I can go through and filter them. Likewise for if I need to double the analysis or cut it in half because the BPM is wrong. So these do provide you with a heck of a lot of additional sorting, and we'll get into these a little bit more when we do an intelligent playlist, so I'll show you that shortly.
So speaking of playlists, if we want to create a playlist, you've got over on the left side, the playlist panel. I'm going to right-click and create new playlist. As I already showed you, you can create one from a folder. Let's call this one Master Class. Now, from here, I can add songs to it by dragging and dropping. So now I've got this one sorted by, who knows what. Let's go up to drag and drop. Let's go by date added. I want the newest at the top, and get some of those ones I just imported, Rhythm Radio. Here we are. Okay, so I'm going to grab, I want some with the artwork. Let's do this one. I'm going to drag and drop a couple of tracks. But this is awfully slow to do. There's an easier way to handle this, and that's open up the sub-browser panel here. I can go to Master Class, and now I've got the ability on the left side to go through and find the tracks that I want and just drag and drop from window to window. I don't have to hit that tiny little line. The other thing I could do is to right-click on one and say, add to playlist Master Class, and it'll appear over here. It's a bit of a pain. That's right-clicking on things to move them is a bit short. I'm going to do this one, and I'll show you why I'm going to do this one. Add to playlist Master Class. Let's collapse that side. Now, this side window remembers everything you said about it, so the position, the contents, next time you close it and open it back up, it will stay where it was. So that's, that's kind of cool if you like to have an additional browser view open with specific columns there. So I'm going to hide that one and show you what I wanted to about this particular track. It's how to find what playlists a song is in. Now, this one I know is in a couple of different playlists. I've got it in my edits as well as in the history. So it's just by selecting a song, you can click on there to see that it's in another playlist. So if I went down into this Breaking Me track, it's only in the Dance 2020. If I go down to Savage Love, it's also in Dance 2020. So obviously a filter has put those ones into that particular playlist.
So if we go into the playlist and wanted to add some more songs, let's actually use some other filters. This is the, which one is this one? This one is the category filter. The category filter gives you genre, artist, and album. You can sort by one or all three. It actually cascades. So if I go to find dance, dance, you see it narrows down only the dance artists and albums. So if I click on Two in a Room, I've only got one track. Oh, Wiggle It, what a classic. Let's add that to the Master Class. To clear that, just go back up to the top and hit all. And here you can actually see the collection of seven tracks. So it counts them and shows me what's in the playlist for this particular one. So that, that's again showing you the playlist for Wiggle It. If I go over to this one, this is the category filter, no track filter, sorry. I can never remember the names of these. This allows me to provide specific criteria for filtering down the songs in the view. My collection was 55,000 songs, but using, let's say, a hundred plus or minus six percent, all keys that have, I know I don't use these for a lot of my things. So let's say a key of 6A. I can see I have 496 tracks that meet that criteria. And from here, I can select the ones I want and drag and drop them into the Master Class. So that's adding music to the playlist. But if I look at this playlist, I might not like how it's organized because my BPMs are all over the place. I might want it to come up with BPM descending, and that's fine. But this is not going to be the default order of this playlist if I were to put it onto a CDJ into a USB drive. This is the play order here, and you can see 6154, it's out of order. If I want to reorder this, click right-click on any column header and select renumber track order. It will now set that in the order that it's shown in, which happens to be BPM descending. Now, when I load this up, this is the default sort order. So it makes it really easy to renumber the tracks just by right-clicking. But if you want to have a playlist that automatically populates itself, you can make an intelligent playlist. You can do this by right-clicking on the playlist thing and say, create new intelligent playlist. A window pops up, and you give it a name and select some criteria. I want, I want the genre to be dance, and I want the tempo, so I want BPM, I want that in the range of 120 to 128, and I want the year to be greater than 2018. And there's 498 tracks. If I add anything else to my collection that matches this criteria, this playlist automatically updates itself. And you can tell that it's an intelligent playlist by the little gear icon there. At any time, if I wanted to change the criteria on this, I can just go and edit, and then I can change it to say, well, you know what, I want to be newer than 2019. I want to narrow that down a bit. So now I've got a more limited selection.
This one is really cool because I can export it, and it'll be a snapshot of when I export. It won't update itself once it's on an export device, but it'll have all the songs that are in there when I export it. If I export it again later to the same device, it will add the new content. It just doesn't show as an intelligent playlist on your device. So before we do an export, I want to show you related tracks. And what's cool about this is it will find songs that are related to a song in your collection or something that's on a playlist. So if you're looking for more to expand. So let's go over to the related playlists panel on the right side here. So I'm going to select, let's select this Rockstar track, and I'm going to go with a criteria of BPM plus key. And I'm going to look in my list, and the list happens to be, sorry, that's the source is the list, and I'm going to look in the entire collection. So the criteria BPM, oh, and actually has a key is unchecked. Let's go with key, current key plus or minus two. I don't want my tag. And let's go, okay. And so here it's looking in the entire collection. I could actually narrow this down and search in a specific playlist, but I'm more wanting to search the entire collection for it. And it's found a whole bunch of different tracks that are compatible. Those are 90. Now, those actually look a little bit high. Let's check that criteria. Oh, here we go. Within the following range, I want no current track plus or minus four percent. Ooh, four percent. Okay. Now, it did say double or half. So let's take that one off. I only want exact plus or minus four. So now you can see I've narrowed it down. And from here, I can even add songs in from the related tracks directly back to this. Now, it's taking this off the list for what I have selected over on this side. So if I click, select a different song, the criteria changes in this. So the related tracks is not like an intelligent playlist that it will always update itself. This one is dynamic. So the intelligent playlists will be, here's my criteria, find new songs that have been added to my collection anywhere in my collection and show me those in this playlist. The related tracks shows related to something else, and that something else can either be the list or the master deck or one of the players. So this is super powerful when you're connected to a CDJ in Pro DJ Link mode, because that can be the master deck, and this is where it shows up.
So now that I've got a playlist created, I've found some cool tracks, I want to export this. So I'm going to right-click and select export playlist to my USB. Now, I already had one in there from a demo earlier, so I'm going to overwrite it. It's going to warn me about specific export types, that's fine. Now, the export speed of the USB is entirely dependent on how fast that USB drive is. So we recommend buying the best one that you can afford. So if it's a cheap 64 gig, that's fine, get the best one you can afford, because the faster it is, the less time you spend waiting. And it's going to remove some old tracks, that's great, manages it for me automatically. All right, so now I can check on the devices, see my USB has my playlist, and there's my Master Class, it's all there, and it's in the same order that I gave it before. But there's more we can do. This USB drive, before I eject it, click on USB, the name of the drive, and here you can actually give it a name. Now, the name in the finder is not Pulse USB, it's Transcend, it's the brand of drive, so I know when I'm plugging them in which one it is. Here you can set the background colors. When you plug it in, you can visually identify it. When you're linking, you can set the waveform color, whether it's a half or full overview waveform. And now, here's an important one. A lot of DJs ask, pro tip, how do I get the key to display properly? Because in Rekordbox, it's set for alphanumeric, but on the CDJs, it's showing up as a classic key notation, C flat. What is that? Well, you come in here and you set it to alphanumeric right within the CD, the USB drive settings. You also have a category display option. If you plug in your drive and you want to be able to go in and browse by the original artist, or by matching, matching is not related tracks, talk about that one later, or you want genre, okay, well add that to your criteria and move it up the list. The ones that are in gray are the defaults, you can't remove those. You also have the ability to sort. Once you've loaded a playlist and you want to sort it by key, for example, let's add that column that's shown next to the track on the CDJ. You can choose from any of these ones. I prefer BPM color. If you use a color tag on any track, for example, your red or your hot tracks, you can rename them here so you can see them when you're browsing by color. There's my hot tracks, they're red. Now, my settings in here is super powerful because this you take to your CDJs and you can have it pull up all the preferences for your play mode, whether you want it in vinyl mode, the disc eject lock on, you want the tempo range to be six percent or ten percent. This will show you what the settings are. If you want to actually change the settings, you need to go into the preferences, and here you'll go over to the DJ system and go to my settings, and now you can make the adjustments here. And when you set this on a USB drive, it will actually take these preferences as your device settings if you click that box. So now I click the eject button, it's written out the database and everything is good to go. So I can now take this and plug it into a player and I could browse those songs immediately.
So one other way you can actually use the CDJs in conjunction with Rekordbox is with the link, the Pro DJ Link. And I've plugged in a device, so it thinks I want to go there. Let's go back over to export mode. So Pro DJ Link is by connecting your products with USB or Ethernet, depending on the product you've got, and click the link button. Now here you can see I've got three CDJs showing up. So I can go from anywhere in my collection, let's take this guy here and play something on CDJ number two, which happens to be this guy. And I can see the play status. I can also browse the contents of Rekordbox directly from the CDJ on the display. So that's a simple way to not look at the computer screen. But the computer offers so much more, like I've already showed you with the related tracks and all of the additional sorting and search features, that this becomes an intelligent hard drive or an intelligent USB drive for your CDJs. So why not consider that option? Simply by linking them. And as I mentioned before, if you're using a link-compatible mixer as well, the preview will be sent directly to the headphones on the mixer. Great way to do it without having to load a track to a deck. As I mentioned before, in addition, you've got the ability to use the master deck. So in this case, this track is the master deck. Now I can use traffic light as well as the related tracks and I can match them to the master. So one thing I mentioned just a moment ago was the matching. Now, matching is if you've got two tracks that you've said are a match, even though they might not match in any other criteria, maybe it happens to be a half-tempo track that you use as a sample. You can click on this related track marker down, yeah, this little link chain link icon. This appears both in export and performance mode, and this will then pair those two tracks together with a link so that next time you're looking for matching songs, that will be one that will come up.
Let's move on now to performance mode, because that's a perfect segue from using the link is using hardware. So as I mentioned, hardware does unlock performance mode. And for most users, the hardware unlock of Rekordbox will be all they ever need. There's no need to get into the Creative or Core plans, which do provide some additional functions such as DVS, the editor, the video. I'll talk more about those features in a bit. But performance mode is really where you would come to DJ and actually play. Export mode is to prepare music for use on the player, whereas performance mode is actually playtime. So one thing I should note is this is available for free. You can do this with a mouse and keyboard. Just come on in here, open up the mixer panel, and you can mix to your heart's content. But if you are wanting to do it with hardware, which is a much better way, you've got direct access to all of the controls directly from a knob, a button, a slider, the jog wheel. And when you connect the hardware, you've also got an audio interface, which is typically better than the audio interface of your computer. So let's talk about the layout here. You've got two-deck mode in all of your standard play for performance. But you can also expand this. You've got two-deck horizontal waveform view, two-deck vertical waveform view, four-deck horizontal waveform view. So let's throw a couple more songs in here, and then four-deck vertical view for those who are looking for that punishing four songs at a time. And then of course, there's a browse mode. This collapses everything down, a little bit like the simple player in export mode, just to show you the very simple. But there's also another trick I want to show you. If you go to view, you can also show and hide the pad and player to keep an extended waveform view at the top, so it doesn't collapse it down to just that small view. So here you've got your ability to perform and show the waveforms, but you've hidden your platters and the pad controls. Now, in addition, if you're performing outdoors and you can't see anything on your screen, go to view, skin, and light. And what this will do, instead of inverting your entire display, a lot of DJs used to do this. Actually turns the essentials white, so you can actually read your text. The hot cues, the colors of the waveform, all that remain the same color as opposed to being inverted. So it's really easy to use this in daylight for those bright outdoor events.
One of the other things you have in performance mode is the addition of several other music sources. As I said, with export mode, you can get music into your collection from your finder, so your files that are local. You can also bring them in from iTunes, provided they're not the Apple Music streaming songs, if they're locally on your hard drive. But now you can also bring them in from other sources such as Inflight, which is the record pool, SoundCloud, Beatport, Beatsource, and Tidal. They all have trials, so I recommend you give them a test run to see how they integrate. Personally, I've got Tidal and Beatsource here, thousands and thousands of songs available to you. And with Beatsource and Beatport, you can actually take songs into your locker if you've got the right plan that allows you to play if you're offline. This does not allow you to export them, just take them offline, so you don't have to be connected to the internet as you play these songs. One of the advantages of Rekordbox is that you've got mixed media and mixed content playlists. This was new to Rekordbox 6. Before that, people complained that videos and songs were separate. Well, they're now all mixed together, and you can see from the icon on the left, these ones are videos, these ones are songs. This one happens to be on Beatport. And load them up to your player, and you'll see the beat grid is already there. Any hot cues that I save are actually stored locally. So the grid, hot cues, any additional data is stored locally. So the next time you call up that song, all it has to do is download the audio, and you're ready to stream it again.
All right, so let's talk about the different functions available to you in the player. This is a lot like a CDJ or any of our other DDJs, because we want you to feel comfortable moving from product to product, even in the software. So the layout has your playing queue, your pitch and time information is here. You've got your standard controls for slip, cue, quantize, the master tempo, your beat sync, the master selection, key sync, as well as a key selection, and then the player's overview. And then of course, the pads. The pads play a huge feature of Rekordbox. So I'm going to quickly go through those. You've got your hot cues, which allow you to jump through the song anywhere in the track. You can make a hot cue, as we already showed. And of course, within the performance mode, you've got access to more hot cues. That's right, you've got 16 per track here. Remember, only eight will export to most players because of what's limited on the deck. At CDJ 2000, you're limited to four, so keep that in mind when you're creating your hot cues. You've got pad effects. There are two banks of 16 effects here. So you've got the ability to load up beat-linked effects, and you can change these by customizing them. Click the gear icon and change the effect or the parameter just by hitting a pad. You're enabling the effect. The slicer allows the track to be chopped up as you play through. So each bar, right now, is given a one-bar segment, and you can add a little roll. So you can decide if it's going to be chopping up the song by hitting the performance pad. So as it plays through, it would actually, let's fire it up here. [Music] Let's go to a quarter beat, and as you hit the button, it will jump to that particular bar, and it'll move on to the next one if you have it set to not loop automatically. Next up is the beat jump. Now, this one I use all the time on the hardware for when I'm setting my hot cues. So I'll usually set the first one at the first beat, beat jump down 32 beats, and then set the second hot cue. Go to beat jump again, and jump down another 32, and set another hot cue. So it makes it very quick to jump through specific timings in the song. And you can even do this while you're playing. So if you need to jump around 16 or even just one beat, like you were trying to mix, but you missed the point, so you can actually have it beat sync and then jump ahead or back. Beat jump is very powerful. The beat loop is a direct access to a specific loop value. Here you can see on the player, we've got the looping, but it's already set for eight. But if you want to change it, you have to use these. If I wanted to set a 64-beat loop, I could just tap this one or hit that pad, and there's an instant loop of that value. The keyboard shift, the keyboard player is for if you have a sample or short sound set to that particular spot. So let me just grab a sample here, and if I go and select, I need to set a hot cue because it plays from where the hot cue is. So now I go to keyboard, and I have it on this one here. Keyboard, and I'm going from hot cue A. D, D, D, D, D, D, D, D, D, D, D, D. So you can hear it pitches it up and down. I can go up to 12 semitones positive or negative. And now this is a lot more fun if you're playing with an instrument that you can then play it like you're playing a keyboard, and that's why it's called the keyboard. You also have the key shift. So if you're playing a song, then you can take that song and actually shift the pitch of the track up and down, up to 12 semitones. So if I'm playing this track. [Music] So here I'm plus three keys, plus three semitones to a key of 10B, or reset it back down to 1B. So this one would be useful if you're trying to key match between songs, but this one isn't particularly harmonic with another song. Come into the key shift and away you go. Sequence call is used if you have a sequence that you've stored from the sampler. Now, this feature is only available with the Creative plan, which we'll talk about a bit later on. The active censor is a cool way to create a censor effect on a track. So let's load up Wiggle It and see if I can find height. [Music] Okay, so getting sound because the sound's just your type. Let's let's edit that. I don't want it to say just your type, I want to say just your. Okay, so now we're going to create this censor here. I'm going to mark the end point, and that's about the out point. I want it to be a reverse roll, and that is an active censor that's now set, which you can see from the white mark. Now, if I turn it on, it turns yellow to indicate that the active censor is there, and you can see it in the track as well. So now, if I play, it's going to engage this automatically when it hits that point. It'll be a reverse roll. So here we go. So this is useful to create a clean version from a song you don't necessarily have a clean version of, or there's something objectionable you want it to mute. You have four different effects that you can enable, and you can set any number of censor points in a song as long as you want. You just choose the effect, and once it's turned on, it will actively engage. So there's the ability to jump through your song and actually get to these points to make the adjustments or to remove them if necessary. And the last one, of course, memory cue, as we already discussed, is to set and clear memory cues. You can do that directly from here.
Moving on, if we look at the various panels that are available within Rekordbox, they are numerous. First, we've got an effects panel. So the effects that are available to you depend on the hardware and the routing as well. Here you can see the SFX, which is slider effects. It happens to be because I have an XP1 connected up here. But the effects are set in a beat-matched way, so they'll always be in time with the tempo of the song you're playing. You've got a triple effect method with a release effect and a single effect. The single effect having additional parameters to control that particular effect, so it becomes more powerful than the single effect, but you only have the one. The next row here is the color effects. These are typically the filter, as on our DJMs, that's a very popular control. You can set it to a single filter type, so here you've got several. You can add in more effects available with the Creative plan, of course. Or if you go to a multi, you can select a different type for each knob, so each channel can have a different color effect. The last of the effects here is the merge effects, which is brand new with the release of the Flex 6. I recommend you check out Jay's video about that, because he goes into more depth. But the overview here is that you've got four banks of different merge effects that you can customize and layer together to create unique breakdowns or buildups that do multiple effects all in one quick action. Great for changing genres or to really spice up your performance. Now, these ones are limited to these the hardware that support it or the Creative plan. So if you don't see that one available to you, try in your settings or make sure you've got the correct hardware or plan activated. Next, you've got the sampler, which is a 64-bank sampler. So you've got 16 on each times the four, that does give you a lot of options. And as I said before, you can even store a pattern if you've got the Creative plan, so you can record a series of snare hits and claps so you can play along with music, or you can even take a sample of your own track. So let's grab an eight-beat loop here, click on the scissor icon, and drag this sample down into this slot. So slot number eight on the left deck. Now, the pads work together. You can fire from either deck, and it will go to the output that's selected here. So in this case, it goes directly to the master, that's because this hardware only has the master output. But on some, you might have a specific sampler output volume control where you can adjust that. So I'm going to edit this and turn it into a loop because it is a looped track. So that means it's just going to play back over and over. And so if I now play that track, that is going to, let's master. And now this will sync to that. So 95 BPM will sync to the original tempo. [Music] So if I played the top of Wiggle It, let's actually loop this one so I don't get into trouble with the copyrights. Let's turn that off. Now I can go to the sampler, and it's going to be in sync with this one. And because my quantize is on, it will automatically snap to the grid as soon as I fire it off. So here we go. Oh, horrible, horrible execution. I think it's possible that that top track is not actually at 95 BPM. Anyway, I'm not going to worry about that. Let's move on because there's so much more to capture, and we've got about 15 minutes left.
So the sampler, we've talked about. The record mixer panel. Now, there's a couple more I want to show you if you don't already have them enabled. The lighting function, the lyric function, the video function. Now, you'll see we've got several more panels here. That's okay. They are going to, we will cover some of these in the unlock and how they work, because they may not be available to you. Lighting definitely is. This is available for everyone for free. The only thing that's needed for output is this R B DMX 1 box. This one is what sends the DMX signal out to your lighting fixtures. But anyone can create and edit lighting, and we'll show you that in a bit. But how that appears within your panels is this simple little strip here. And what's new about this is we've added the ability to do manual overrides. So you can come in and do direct DMX settings for up to 12 different fixtures, or it could be 12 different parameters that you're sending. So it could be one fixture that's getting all 12 of these. So for example, here I've got set confetti cannon. If it used channels 1, 18, and 35, and it needed these particular values, all I would have to do is to click that to turn it blue, and it would trigger that DMX signal to go out. Same thing with uplights. If I were using uplights on those channels, and that was the on value of 45, maybe it's a program that's running, you can now do those. There's also the ability to go to an interlude, which is a macro that you've set in the lighting panel here. It will run those those sequences directly. We've also got in automatic and manual controls, as well as direct controls.
For the particular mood, uh, the color, and the strobing, as well as a blackout button. So let's get rid of that one. And we will, before I get into these ones, let's, I should mention the recording panel. So the recording panel is simple. Depending on the configuration of your audio device, this can record the mix directly within Rekordbox. Very simple to use. You hit the recording button, it starts recording up to three hours, and then it saves the file. And it'll actually store it in Rekordbox, so you can see your recordings there for playback later.
So the video, DVS, lyric, those are special functions that are available within the hardware unlock or a subscription plan. So a hardware unlock, as I mentioned before, we have 25 compatible devices at this time, with more on the way. And there are 26 others that require a subscription. Now, we're talking about hardware that dates back, uh, as early as 14 years ago. So, um, something such as the CDJ 400 can still be used with Rekordbox. Now, these are great as additional controllers. Let's say I've got my DDJ 400 and I want to add another CDJ control for another channel. Well, I've got the ability to do that right here, connected by USB. And with those other devices connected, that's unlocked the hardware already. This will be a controller. But if I didn't, if I just had this as my hardware, I could buy an unlock plan. So the Core or Creative plans are both available to, uh, to give you additional functions and unlock those performance features. So with the Core plan, you get HID and MIDI control, DVS. So those are the, the main features there. With the Creative plan, you get additional RMX effects, the video unlock, lyric, vocal detection, which I'll show you in a second, edit mode rendering. Uh, edit mode is free, and we'll talk about that in a second. And then cloud sync. Try and cram all this in in 10 minutes. Let's see what we can do.
Okay, so MIDI mode. Now, this guy is a, uh, where you come in to customize your controls. If you have a third-party MIDI controller or a Pioneer product that you just wanted to custom tailor some of the pads. Let's say I don't use that keyboard mode on the pad mode, but I wanted to change it up to be my lighting controls. Well, you can come in here and do that by going to pad and then remapping some of those features. So the DDJ 400 pads, you then go and find the ones you want to remove, add some new ones. But if MIDI is a bit too complex for you, some of our hardware also features the pad mode editor. So this one is really cool because you can come in and tailor this again. If I don't want hot keyboard, I want to change it to user one and customize this myself. I want combination one of hot cues, samplers, beat loops, and pad effects. I can actually change these ones. So I don't use pad effects. Let's go with lighting. I want lighting to be interlude one. I want lighting to be the blue control. I want lighting to be, let's say, club one. And then the pad effect, whatever. Now I've saved those as the pad modes for that particular mode. So if I hit the, the shifted mode from the hot cue, I'm going to get user one and I'm going to get these as my pads. So the pad editor is super powerful, again, limited to certain hardware. Check it out on the website if you have any questions.
Let's talk about the video functions. So video does give you the ability to play videos. This is available for every customer, but the ability to export videos is limited to the Creative plan or the DDJ-RZ. So here you can load videos to either deck, and you've got the ability to show them here. Now, this is only two decks. It's not four decks worth of video, unfortunately. It's just not powerful enough to do that. You can see if you did this, you would just be limited to audio for the other two decks. And when you play the videos, you've got the ability to do not only the video, but you can also run a slideshow of photos, you can do text overlays, photo overlays for a logo, as well as live camera. So there's a lot of additional inputs you can provide for the, the video. And it's not just limited to that. Let's say you're playing a song and you're doing a video set, but you don't want to have a blank screen. There's a built-in visualizer as well. This is not new to Rekordbox, but it's definitely a powerful feature that a lot of people will forget about. And don't forget as well, there are three different touch effects banks. So you've got effects that are available that will override. So if I turn this on, this now becomes an audio video effect specific to the video. I can still use other effects on top of this.
Now, another cool thing is the lyric mode. So lyric is something that if you have, let me load up my lyrics here, if you have a track that has, uh, some lyrics you want to play, you can fire this off and it will actually show the lyrics for the song. These are dynamically generated. It analyzes the song, matches with the database, and then pulls the lyrics down so that you can have lyrics on screen. Now, this is another cool way to do a video, and you can actually use these with the video as well. So let's take a look here. So this is dynamically generated. This is not, um, something that's built in. And I'm going to mute that for a second. Again, don't want to get copyright strike. You can actually change the colors. So there's more colors here. And I'm going to change the motion, which is the, oh, actually, I want to show you something there, uh, where'd it go? I'm going to miss it. Uh, you can change the, the pattern style. And so you can see it actually mutes out certain parts that would have contained bad words. That's where the asterisks come in. So definitely worthwhile, uh, if you're playing for a clean crowd. But let's take a look with the, uh, do I have lyric on, uh, this one? So, now you might notice that the, uh, the lyrics are not in sync with the, the visuals. So let me just make this a little easier to see first. And I noticed that the, the lyrics start, uh, and, you know, I'm gonna show you one more thing while we're doing this. Let's go to view and I'm gonna show vocals. And now I can actually see in the song with the vocals where they start. So let's go to the first vocal here. Okay, so the vocals are offset by 10.3 seconds. So I click ABC, go to motion, and my delay compensation is going to be 10, 300 milliseconds. Now let's back the video up here. I would say that's much more accurate now. So you've got the ability to customize the timing, the overlay, and like I just showed you here, it's even on top of a video. It is super powerful, a lot of fun to play with, and definitely worth checking out.
The lyric deck, the vocal detection, as I was just alluding to, shows you where in a song a vocal will appear. This is again something that's in the Creative plan, but it is really cool because you can now load up songs that you don't really know and have it show you the detection. So let's take a look at some of the ones that I just loaded today. Ah, there happens to be a break in the song here. So I can see the stronger the blue is, the more likely it is there's a vocal there. There happens to be one here, but because of how it's, how it's actually positioned in the audio, it's, it's a pretty accurate guess, but it's not quite bang on. But it does give you a good representation of where the track is, uh, where the vocals are within a track. So that even if you've never played the song before, you can tell there's a breakdown in here.
So, uh, Ableton Link is another great feature that we've added in Rekordbox 6. This allows you to synchronize Rekordbox's beat grid with outboard hardware and software. There's a lot of products that use this. It's very simple to use. You click the button, and it will then allow you to make adjustments to the tempo here. And the phrase information is synchronized to the players, to your MIDI stream as well. So you can use this with the DJS-1000, for example, using an iPhone app. So you're able to do it over the air. That's how I integrate it into my sets. It's a lot of fun. More information about this on the website, of course. As we're running tight on time, I want to make sure we get the edit mode in. So I'm going to disable Ableton Link and come into the edit mode. And I'm going to pull up this track that I've selected for editing by going to the browser. And here's my edit. And I'll hide the browser again.
So the editor works on your beat grids of the song, giving you the ability to edit a track within Rekordbox without dumping the song to a DAW, doing your edits, rendering it out, and bringing it back in. The other thing you're going to gain here is the, the ability to keep the hot cues that you've got, the beat grid, any other information is already here. It stays in the software. So let's create an eight beat. That's a little bit weird, but it started back here. Okay, well, let's go from, uh, beat number one. Let me try and, whoop, I don't know why it's put his playhead there. Let's try from there. Eight beats. There we go. Okay, so now we've got an eight beat. I'm actually going to take this, the first thing I do is going to drag it up to this here. This is the palette. So you can hold information from this song only. Unfortunately, we can't currently copy and paste data between tracks. There's no mixer, it's just for splicing your song to make an extended intro, extended outro, or for cutting stuff out of the middle, which I'll show you in a second. So I'm actually going to hit clone, and now I've got a 32 beat, or sorry, a 16 beat intro on the track. So let's back it up here and hit play. And I've lost my audio. Let's get that back. So I've now got that extended intro on the track. And I want to actually take that and dump it down onto the, actually, what I want to do is I'm going to grab from beat, the B hot cue, I'm going to grab the first eight beats here, put that into the palette, and I want to add them to the end. So if I'm going from here, I want to get a little bit more on the beats on the way out. So I'm going to take at 4:41, I'm going to take the beats that I took from the beginning and drop them in here, and it splices in between. So now I'm going to take, uh, let's do it twice. But I also want to cut out this middle break here. I don't like this one. I'm going to zoom out so I can see a little bit more. Uh, so this whole thing, I'm going to drag select that entire bit and I'm going to delete it. So I just seamed it right together. And now I can play, and it sounds as if nothing's missing. Perfect. Now, if I were on a free plan or the Core plan, and I didn't have the ability to render this out, I could save this and actually come back and work on it later. And it's okay. Or if I do have the Creative plan, I can actually save this and render it out. If you came to this page without the Creative plan, you'd see a little lock icon. So here it says Homer said edit. So that's fine. I know that it's going to be an edit. But it'll also do another thing. So when I render this out, it takes me back into my collection. Here we are. And now I can see this cool little edit icon at the top. All the information I have from the track, the, the hot cues, the beat grid, all the file information is all stored here. So that is, uh, that is the edit mode. Uh, very quick and dirty. Uh, there's more information about this on our YouTube channels as well. And we are done here today. Unfortunately, we didn't get everything into this master class. Cloud sync and lighting could be master classes of an hour on their own, and we definitely look forward to providing you with more information about those topics. So check our YouTube channel soon. That's it for me today. Back to you, Jay. Thanks, Pulse. That was awesome. Love the look at Rekordbox, the heart of the ecosystem for Pioneer DJ. If you want to learn more about this and everything else that is Pioneer DJ, it's simple: pioneerdj.com. And for social media, all the same address: @pioneerdjusa. Stay tuned.