User Manual

Fig. 15-35 — The S and Q buttons allow you to activate/deactivate Snap and Quantize mode, respectively.
Depending on what you are about to do, you can decide to enable or disable them at any
time. Here are a few examples:
▪ If you want to set a Loop starting directly on a beat, activate Snap and press an Auto
Loop button around the desired beat.
▪ On the contrary, should you wish to set a Cue Point at the beginning of some backing
vocals that don’t necessarily start on the beat, deactivate Snap before pressing an unlit
Hotcue button.
▪ If you’re about to mix in a synched track and want the downbeats of both tracks to per
fectly match, activate the Quant button before you press Play (or some Hotcue button).
▪ On the other hand, if you want to jam around with a sample loaded on a Sample Deck
and make some stutter-like effects by pressing the corresponding Hotcue button re
peatedly, you might prefer to deactivate Quant to create repetitions shorter than one
beat.
Locking the Key of Your Tracks
When synchronizing tracks, you alter their tempo and, consequently, their pitch (or key).
Slowing down a track will cause its pitch to drop while speeding up the track will cause its
pitch to rise. For small tempo adjustments, this is not really serious. But when the tempo
is changed more drastically, the resulting pitch shift might get problematic: kick sounds
would lose their power, vocals would sound unnatural and silly, etc.
To avoid this, TRAKTOR provides you with a Keylock feature that uncouples the pitch
(key) and the tempo (BPM) of a track:
Tutorials
Synchronization
TRAKTOR 2 - Application Reference - 262