Pitch riding with 10 % pitch range

S

staticnoise

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Joined
Feb 27, 2013
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Austria
Hey guys,

Another thread about that beatmatching thing...
I try to ride the pitch for nearly as long as im DJing now (~5 years DJing, ~4 years riding). I don't try it everytime I mix though and never really tried 100 % riding during a gig. (too afraid to f*ck it up :/)
Most of the time I ride the pitch only to find the right spot/percentage for the fader but when I'm in the mix, I feel like it's nearly impossible to keep both tunes in the same beat and they often drift away from each other, which I often can't correct confidently (if you know what I mean). Because of this, I feel more confident to manipulate the platter when in the mix... which is pretty much the exact opposite of where pitch riding has an advantage (as you don't hear the corrections).

Now I don't know why I'm so incompetent to keep these tunes in the beat with riding the pitch. I have Stanton T60's which have a pitch range of 10 %, which I think could be the problem.

TL;DR
Does anyone have experience with 10 % pitch range or with higher pitch-ranges than the standard 1210's 8 %, and can confirm that it's harder to pitch ride with them?

...or should I shut my mouth and stop complaining/continue practicing?

cheers and thx in andvance
 
Personally, if you have to touch the platter, the speed is wrong and your trying to adjust it manually, but only temporarily.

Imagine your in a car on the motorway, theres average speed cameras all over the place. ur doing 74mph... What do you do?
Stick your arm out the window and use the friction from your hand and the tarmac to slow down?
No, of course not, you'll hurt yourself. And once you let go of the road the accelerator is just gonna push the car back to 74mph again.
Yes its a bad analogy but the pitch is really all you need. Its the brake and accelerator you'd use in your car.

Some tips I think might help you.
Headphones; use them. Make sure you can easily tell both tunes apart, get your volumes right in your ears between both tracks, any clangs will be heard in your headphones much easier and sooner.

Don't be afraid to be a bit rough with the pitch. Lets say you have it roughly in time but on +4 its starting to slip, you want to rub you fingers on the platter to slow it down, don't bother. Grab the pitch, slow it down to +1 (or even -4) quickly (very quickly) then back to +4 but minus a lil bit.. Still needs slowing down, rinse lather repeat. This is pitch riding. Practise and you get a real feel for it, you start to use instinct for how much to move it and beat matching becomes second nature.
 
Teddy said:
Personally, if you have to touch the platter, the speed is wrong and your trying to adjust it manually, but only temporarily.

Imagine your in a car on the motorway, theres average speed cameras all over the place. ur doing 74mph... What do you do?
Stick your arm out the window and use the friction from your hand and the tarmac to slow down?
No, of course not, you'll hurt yourself. And once you let go of the road the accelerator is just gonna push the car back to 74mph again.
Yes its a bad analogy but the pitch is really all you need. Its the brake and accelerator you'd use in your car.

Some tips I think might help you.
Headphones; use them. Make sure you can easily tell both tunes apart, get your volumes right in your ears between both tracks, any clangs will be heard in your headphones much easier and sooner.

Don't be afraid to be a bit rough with the pitch. Lets say you have it roughly in time but on +4 its starting to slip, you want to rub you fingers on the platter to slow it down, don't bother. Grab the pitch, slow it down to +1 (or even -4) quickly (very quickly) then back to +4 but minus a lil bit.. Still needs slowing down, rinse lather repeat. This is pitch riding. Practise and you get a real feel for it, you start to use instinct for how much to move it and beat matching becomes second nature.
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Ermm... thanks. But I know how to pitch ride and I also know why I want to be able to mix this way. As I said I've been doing/trying it for around 4 years now.
Also I use my headphones pretty much all the time while I mix - switching between cue and master.

My problem is that I often can't keep the tune in beat, which may or may not be because of a "high" pitch range of my turntables.

What I intended to hear were confirmations or disconfirmations of my hypothesis regarding the turntable's Pitch range, coming from people who have had experience with both 8 % range as well as 10 % range.
 
Oh sorry pal. I didn't mean to offend. I thought you were a noob that couldn't beat match.
I didn't realise you had 4 years experience.
 
One thing i think you might be missing is the fact that even 1mm of movement on the pitch will effect the syncronisation of the 2 tunes. Your decks and their range have nothing to do with it. I used to pitch ride on some turbo fag belt drives with a tiny pitch fader; it's all about tekkers.

Another thing that helped me when getting shit locked was to just forget about actually mixing just stare at the pitch and make tiny movements until the tunes were perfectly sync'd. Use 2 simple liquid tunes or something
 
Nothing to do with the pitch range, probably more to do with the quality of the pitch fader. If you were using a high end set of turntables and the range was 10% it would be fine.

I learnt to pitch ride on Numark TT1625s which had 10% pitch range but, if I moved the pitch fader to the same spot between -3 and +3 the speed of the platter would never be exactly the same.
 
RUSSLA said:
One thing i think you might be missing is the fact that even 1mm of movement on the pitch will effect the syncronisation of the 2 tunes.
Click to expand...

I don't think that I miss this fact... or I just doesn't understand what you mean with that.
I understand pretty good how a (analogous) pitch fader works and therefore it's pretty obvious for me that even the tiniest movements effect the platter speed and also the current tempo of the track. However, if I move the pitch for 1 mm on a 10% pitch range it changes the speed/current tempo more than it does on an 8% range - the total length of the pitch fader (from +8/+10 to -8/-10) is 10 cm, on a 1210 (<-- afaik) as well as on the Stanton T60 - resulting in a "more inaccurate" beatmatching, if you know what I mean.

I thought that, because of this fact, pitching on 10 % range is more difficult as you have to move the pitch much more precisely to get the same result as on a 8 % range.
Seems like I was wrong - as no one can confirm. Which feels pretty bad as I just can't ride this sh*t with pleasurable result... for YEARS :(

Your hint though: staring at the pitch - Thanks! I already do that occasoinally though ;)

ScottyEightSix said:
Nothing to do with the pitch range, probably more to do with the quality of the pitch fader.
Click to expand...

Quality of the fader: Now that could really be the problem here as the Stanton decks aren't quartz-driven. I just tried to do my research in this case and activated the Tempo-display (both normal and stable) in Traktor to check if the percentage is the same when I speed it up (or slow it down) a bit and then go back to the exact same position. In short: most of the time it wasn't... off by up to 0,2 %, which is a lot actually.

Damn... sorry for this novel - once again.
 
Back to your OP, you saying you can get it locked fine when using the platter? If so, then there's nothing wrong with the pitch faders not staying locked, it's simply that you can't pitch ride :teeth:
 
RUSSLA said:
Back to your OP, you saying you can get it locked fine when using the platter? If so, then there's nothing wrong with the pitch faders not staying locked, it's simply that you can't pitch ride :teeth:
Click to expand...

Slight pitch adjustments in one direction will be fine, when pitch riding you tend to move in both directions of where the pitch fader originally lay. Unless you have decent pitch faders the majority of the time this will result in subtle differences even if you end up in the exact same position. Only problem is as you have moved the fader in either direction the speed could be marginally slower when you needed to speed up the current track.
 
ScottyEightSix said:
Slight pitch adjustments in one direction will be fine, when pitch riding you tend to move in both directions of where the pitch fader originally lay. Unless you have decent pitch faders the majority of the time this will result in subtle differences even if you end up in the exact same position. Only problem is as you have moved the fader in either direction the speed could be marginally slower when you needed to speed up the current track.
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I kinda of see what you mean but I never had trouble pitch riding on any decks i used, shitty belt drives or Technics. The fundamentals are the same so it's totally possible. Sounds like excuses to me personally, it might be more difficult yeh but not impossible.
 
RUSSLA said:
I kinda of see what you mean but I never had trouble pitch riding on any decks i used, shitty belt drives or Technics. The fundamentals are the same so it's totally possible. Sounds like excuses to me personally, it might be more difficult yeh but not impossible.
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completely agree, it will probably take your a few more attempts to get it locked than it should but it is still more than possible.

I was just explaining that this is probably the thing that is causing him issues rather than the fact the pitch faders cover a larger range
 
RUSSLA said:
it's simply that you can't pitch ride :teeth:
Click to expand...

Haha... Obviously.

Well I think that it may be excuses but I still feel more safer riding with 1210's - at least the few times I tried it. I just tried to figure out why.
I have a gig on saturday where I'll try it again and see if I can nail it.. or completely f*ck it up. We'll see ;)

Either way thanks guys :D
 
The two things that I started doing when pitch riding on CDJs were to look at the actual amount you are moving the pitch on the digital display - it's essentially the same as looking at the numbers on a Technics pitch. The other thing was to not move the pitch up or down as much while riding once it was close to being beatmatched, because once it's locked on a CDJ, it's pretty much locked.
 
DJDeeeNBee said:
The two things that I started doing when pitch riding on CDJs were to look at the actual amount you are moving the pitch on the digital display - it's essentially the same as looking at the numbers on a Technics pitch. The other thing was to not move the pitch up or down as much while riding once it was close to being beatmatched, because once it's locked on a CDJ, it's pretty much locked.
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You guys must have some crazy vision because for me, it's so hard to tell at what value the actual pitch is at on a 1200. Especially if the tables are higher or lower up, then the perspective reallly makes it difficult, so unless I'm staring at the deck directly above it then it's hard to tell where I'm at. Am I weird to just want to slow the platter down with my finger and make the slight adjustment on the pitch instead of going up and down with the pitch hoping that I actually make it back to where the pitch was, + or - the adjustment? Riding the pitch to me for very minor adjustments always seemed like way too much work with way too much margin for error (mostly because of having bringing the pitch back to where it should be). Or maybe I should keep messing with it? I usually pitch ride if, say, I'm mixing track 1 in at 87 bpm and track 2 is at 90, to get it up to speed quickly. From there I always want to touch the platter for those micro adjustments.
 
DEF:STAR said:
You guys must have some crazy vision because for me, it's so hard to tell at what value the actual pitch is at on a 1200. Especially if the tables are higher or lower up, then the perspective reallly makes it difficult, so unless I'm staring at the deck directly above it then it's hard to tell where I'm at. Am I weird to just want to slow the platter down with my finger and make the slight adjustment on the pitch instead of going up and down with the pitch hoping that I actually make it back to where the pitch was, + or - the adjustment? Riding the pitch to me for very minor adjustments always seemed like way too much work with way too much margin for error (mostly because of having bringing the pitch back to where it should be). Or maybe I should keep messing with it? I usually pitch ride if, say, I'm mixing track 1 in at 87 bpm and track 2 is at 90, to get it up to speed quickly. From there I always want to touch the platter for those micro adjustments.
Click to expand...

Nah if you want to mix like that that's fine. It's not as noticable on a CDJ when you nudge the jog wheel as if you touch the platter. I just personally keep my hand on the pitch as that is what I'm used to.
 
Lets say you ride the pitch and you are closely beatmatched. You mix the track but you want to let the mix ride out for a while (say you're doing a 3 deck mix). When the mix starts to fade slightly do you guys who pitch bend still use the pitch to correct or do you just use a quick nudge to get them back? I can't imagine using the pitch for such minuscule adjustments is as accurate as just slightly touching it..?
 
Depends on what you feel more comfortable doing, on my decks at home I would probably give it a quick nudge because the pitch can be a cunt from time to time but when I used to do radio and mix on 1210's I always used to ride the pitch and never touched the vinyl unless I was throwing it in. Also I find it a bitch to pitch ride on CDJ's so I would always give the jog wheel a bit of loving when mixing on them (which is very rare) at the end of the day as long as the mix is smooth it doesn't matter how you get there
 
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