Tweaking the Tempo (Pitch control)

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Zot · #16 Post by **Zot** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 7:24 pm

Ron -- thanks. I've used ASD a few times for our troupe practices so far, and once for teaching a beginner class, and I've got to say it does a great job. As an alternative to having a pitch control knob on a ghetto blaster it's a far higher quality output, with more accurate control.

Given that I mostly DJ in these situations with my laptop anyway, what it allows is a fairly seamless means of 'getting a feel' for the melody and rhythm of a song without needing to be able to dance to it at full tempo from the start. In one exercise our performance troupe was attempting to 'brainstorm' ideas for choregraphy on specific sections of a song. At full tempo (I guess around 210 bpm) it was quite difficult to come up with well formed ideas, but when I took the tempo back down to around 180 we found we could keep the ideas flowing without needing to stop and restart the music so much.

nosliw · #17 Post by **nosliw** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 8:33 am

I've been looking into PCDJ FX which has the feature of changing the tempo while maintaining the same key. It looks pretty sweet. They have a free demo that you can download (limitations of 30 min at a sitting, or 20 songs before you have to quit the program and restart).

It's semi-pricey retail - 525, but can be had on ebay for about 250 along with a hardware digital control unit that can be mounted into a system and plugged into your computer via usb.

The prior version, pcdj Red, did not have this feature, only the standard pitch control.

http://www.pcdj.com

Spuds · #18 Post by **Spuds** » Sat May 01, 2004 6:27 pm

You can look at Traktor DJ Studio. It's for both PC and Mac. It has and excellent feature for pitch control as well as tempo control. The two are mutually exclusive (some call it time compression/expansion).

As for using it, I only do when I'm teaching a class. Not usually when I'm DJing a gig.

- M

http://www.nativeinstruments.com/

Zot · #19 Post by **Zot** » Sun May 02, 2004 11:03 pm

Thanks Spuds. I'll take a look.

JohnDyer · #20 Post by **JohnDyer** » Tue May 04, 2004 8:58 am

nosliw wrote:I've been looking into PCDJ FX which has the feature of changing the tempo while maintaining the same key. It looks pretty sweet. They have a free demo that you can download (limitations of 30 min at a sitting, or 20 songs before you have to quit the program and restart).

It's semi-pricey retail - 525, but can be had on ebay for about 250 along with a hardware digital control unit that can be mounted into a system and plugged into your computer via usb.

The prior version, pcdj Red, did not have this feature, only the standard pitch control.

http://www.pcdj.com

Beware on PCDJ FX. With Red you get a Recordcase player - you can preview any song out of your recordcase just by double clicking on it. With FX, they did away with the recordcase player. To preview any song you have to load it into player A or B, then "cue" it, then turn down the main out volume, then preview it. Biggest mistake on PCDJ's part ever. They may eventually add it back in since a lot of the PCDJ community went ballistic, but AFAIK they haven't yet.