Traktor Pro 4 Flexible Grid ideas

DJ Bobby Tables

I've read quite a few discussions recently on the flexible beat grids around resetting grid down beats or the start of a bar and thought i would add my ideas here.

Personally, I've found them to be very useful and pleasantly surprised by how good they are but annoyed by the bug around the beats to cue display treating grid markers as cues.

I like the idea of a down beat marker (a special type of grid marker), especially if the first grid marker is automatically a down beat marker. Existing grid markers from Traktor Pro 3 could automatically act as down beat markers to preserve existing functionality.

It would be good if a down beat marker also dictated the time signature e.g default to 4/4 or common time but also allow say 3/4 for example. Then if you had a song in 3/4 you wouldn't need to reset the grid every bar. I know this is probably only going to be used by very few people but since traktor already has to count to 4 beats in a bar, it makes sense that somewhere in the code it knows that 4 beats are in a bar.

The UI could just allow values other than 4 so you could have 2,3,4,5 etc. Any bar that is marked as 4 beats that has a down beat marker after 3 beats would reset with out having to specify 3 beats in that bar if it was a one off within the song which would satisfy the needs of most DJs with songs that just have non 4 beat bars every now and then but mostly 4 beats to the bar.

Another useful idea for the UI as I was confused by this to start with, is when adjusting the bpm between two grid markers where it snaps to a bpm which is a whole number of beats, is to show the number of beats next to the bpm. That way it would be easy to see on longer tempo zones (the part between two grid markers) exactly what is happening. E.g. it might say 33 beats when you know it should be 32 so it would make it easier to visually confirm when you have it correct.

Finally, I don't know if anyone would use this but, say you had a transition track that went from 100bpm to 130bpm steadily over a number of bars, instead of gridding each bar, you could specify start and end bpm. Traktor could just treat that section as having lots of implied grid markers where there position is just calculated automatically.

Anyway, those are just some ideas. Probably need fleshing out but it's just my programming mind going to work :)