Jogwheel beatmatching

Hi there,

Hopefully you’ve been practising and are able to release a track on time. If you found yourself making corrections with the jogwheel then be happy to know that you’ve already begun the beatmatching process. Today we will expand on this idea further. Don’t forget to watch the video as it makes life a lot easier when you see me do this for real.

Let’s go back to our car analogy from last time but with a difference.

Here we have 2 cars with beats that aren’t aligned. We’ll call the left car track 1 and the right car track 2. This time track 1 is travelling faster than track 2.

We can nudge the jogwheel backwards to slow down track 1 temporarily. They will then be in sync.

Because the BPM of track 1 is slightly higher than that of track 2, it won’t be long before we are in the same situation again with track 1 ahead of track 2.

If we have to continue to slow down track 1 via the jogwheel again and again, this tells us that track 1 is travelling faster so we must reduce the BPM of track 1. Once this is done, we can again monitor the situation and make jogwheel adjustments. If we still have to slow down track 1, reduce the BPM even more. Keep on going until we no longer need to make adjustments.

If we go too far by making track 1 slower than track 2, moving the jogwheel backwards will worsen the situation (you’ll hear more galloping). In this case you’ll need to nudge the jogwheel forwards, indicating that you must also increase the BPM.

This my friends is beatmatching.

Beware of syncing the wrong beats

One thing to note is that you need to make sure you keep the correct notes in sync on both decks. In other words, the 1st beat of the bar in track 1 should play at the same time as the 1st beat of the bar in track 2. Let’s say you release track 1 early or track 1 is playing slower than track 2. In either situation you hear the galloping effect and you must accelerate track 1 to catch up with track 2. However, if track 1 ends up getting further behind, the galloping will go away and it will sound like the beats are in sync again. They aren’t, we know have the 1st beat of the bar in track 1 playing at the same time as the 2nd beat of the bar in track 2. Although the beats are in sync, the bars aren’t. Only through practise will you know when this is happening.

Until next time….

Practice this but keep the tempos of the tracks close together so you can learn the technique without making it too difficult for yourself. Next week we will go a little deeper and match tracks that are at completely different BPMs.