A controller and its software, for a first-timer

0:00 Pioneer DDJ-RB

Right guys, Jonathan here, The DJ Tutor, and in this video we're going to look at the Pioneer DDJ-RB. This video, by the way, is exclusive for Get In The Mix, which is based in Colchester and the United Kingdom. If you want any more information on Pioneer's, at the moment, September 2016, entry-level controller, the DDJ-RB, then check out the link to Get In The Mix where you can get info on the RB as well as all of the other products they sell. Now, the RB is bus-powered. What that means is that the power from the laptop is used to power the RB. Two points here. One is if you're going to say go over to a mate's house and you want to play with it for an hour or so and have a bit of a mix, then make sure your laptop is fully charged if you do not want to take the charger with you.

Alternatively, if you're going to use the DDJ-RB at a gig, I highly recommend that you plug the charger in. You don't want to plug the charger into your laptop because you do not want to go halfway through the gig and realise you've got 10% left and try and fanatically find your charger and plug it in and mess around. You don't want that hassle. Plug it in at the beginning of a gig, you're good to go. All right. Now, the DDJ-RB, at the moment, as I said, is Pioneer's entry-level controller. There may be other controllers that come out in the future that are slightly more cheaper, better, who knows? But at the moment, this is a very good controller for the price. Now, the DDJ-RB comes with software from Pioneer known as Rekordbox and it will come as standard.

2:25 Firstly, how to load up the DDJ-RB

Now, on the screen at the moment, I have Pioneer's updated Rekordbox software which is their video mixing software. Now, if you do want to video mix, you will need to pay a little bit more but let's go back quite a few years. If you wanted to be a VJ, a Video DJ, you would have had to pay a lot of money. Nowadays, you can buy something as simple as the DDJ-RB which is very inexpensive. Update the Rekordbox software and buy video files and you're good to go as a Video Mixing DJ. And yes, Rekordbox can do video mixing. So, here we go. This is the DDJ-RB. In this video, I'm going to show you a couple of things. Firstly, how to load up the DDJ-RB. First, I'm going to import a track. Very simple. Top left-hand corner of the Rekordbox software, we have an icon called File.

What I'm going to do is scroll over that with the mouse and click down. Below that now, we have a word Import. I'm going to move over then to a new box that says Import Track or Folder. Now, I've got two options. I can import a track or I can import a folder. For this instance, I'm going to import a track. Click on that. Now, we're going inside the computer and now we have an option of or we have the option of finding the tracks so this is where you know your laptop. You know where the tracks are. You go and find them. OK, so I'm going to highlight over a track here. I'm going to click on it and now I'm going to click the Open icon and now that track would have been imported into the lower part of the Rekordbox software.

All I need to do now using the Arby is top center. Use this dial and as you can see on the program, I'm now scrolling up and down through the files. Once I've highlighted the track I want to play, I can now load it to the right hand deck or the left hand deck. In this case, I'm going to load it to the right hand deck. Press down. Press play. And we're good to go. We're now playing that track, by the way. This is a track from Mr. Lenny Fontana from Karmic Power Records. There will also be a link in the description to Karmic Power Records. OK, let's have a look at these pads here. Now below each of the turntables, the platters, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight pads. In this video, we're going to look at the hot cues.

4:51 Pad effects one, two, three

So I'm going to press one of the hot cues there. What's happened is it set a cue point during the track. When so, for example, while the tracks playing when I press that hot cue, it will set a cue point at that precise point. And when I press that pad again, it will go back to that cue point. Now you'll notice it's highlighted in red. Now if I want to remove that hot cue, all I've got to do is press shift while my finger is pressed down on shift. I press the pad again and now we have taken away that hot cue. So I can press the pad again and now we have recorded a new hot cue there. Let's go to pad effects one, two, three and four. The top four pads now will slice up the track. The first one on the left hand side will slice at 1 16th of a beat.

The next one, 1 8th of a beat. The next one, half a beat and the next one, one beat. Now at the moment it's also in slip loop mode. What that means is that when you press either one of these pads, it will slice up the part of the track when you start to press. But the underlying track will carry on playing. Now below those four top pads, you have four underneath. Now at the moment, the one on the left is set to slip roll. The next one to delay, the next one to robot, which is quite a nice kind of grimy sort of effect. And the next one, the one on the right far right is backspin.

What you heard there was me using the backspin but also the filter, which is just below the low, mid and high. One of the I would say personally, one of the best effects of all time. OK. So that's it for this video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please hit the like button and don't forget to subscribe to our site here. Video number one for getting a mix on the DDJ-RB. Check out more videos to come and I'll finish off with practice and enjoy. And a big shoutout to Karmic Power Records. Thank you very much.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.