Pitch riding

Hi all,

I hope you’re well. This week we’ll be talking about another way to beatmatch. In fact, this technique can also be used to make corrections if you release too late or too early.

Let’s recap

So far we have learnt to beatmatch using the jogwheel. We make little adjustments forwards or backwards to work out whether we need to slow the track down or speed it up. Once we make the corrections we change the tempo in the same direction using the tempo slider (also known as the pitch slider). This process is repeated until the beats are no longer getting out of sync.

We also made an analogy to cars. If track A is slower than track B then we need to accelerate it so it is travelling faster than track B. Once A catches up with B we can slow it down to the same speed. It was the jogwheel adjustments we made that were accelerating and decelerating the track.

So what is pitch riding?

This refers to making speed adjustments solely using the pitch slider. In other words, we won’t be touching the jogwheel throughout the beatmatching process. The idea is that if we know track A is slow, we increase its tempo to be faster than track B until it catches up and then we slow it down. It is the same thing we did with jogwheel adjustments but this time we use the slider to do it. Here is the step by step process:

• Track A is playing slower than track B.
• Release track A and listen to the beats getting out of sync.
• Speed track A up with the slider quite a bit until the beats are in sync again.
• This tells us that track A is currently playing faster than track B since it caught up, so quickly slow it down before it goes too far ahead. We don’t want to slow it down to what it was before, just a little faster than that.
• If we slow it down too much, then speed it up again until the beats sync up and once again slow it down a little bit.
• If we don’t slow it down enough and the beats go ahead of track B, do the reverse, i.e. slow it down quite a bit to decelerate track A and then speed it up.

If the above is confusing, watch the video and you’ll see what I mean. The idea is to speed up and slow down until you find the perfect tempo. During the process you’re reducing the range within which you speed it up and slow it down as you fine tune the match.

Until next time….

Well guys, that’s it for beatmatching so let’s put it to the test. Next time I will review everything we’ve learnt so far and beatmatch a few tracks together.