About a year ago, I suggested a feature to the Traktor team which they quickly implemented much to my joy. It was instant deck duplication to and from any deck. Even though this is great for the obvious application of freeing up a deck its also turned out to be good for many other creative uses. Lately I have been getting into juggling opposing copies of the same track with different treatments and cue points tricks. Lets walk through 5 fundamental techniques and then roll them into one routine:

Watch this video and follow along bellow:

1) Phasing doubles

This one was demonstrated in detail on the video bellow a few weeks back. Its simple, you start any track, set a cue point on the down beat and then use deck duplicate to copy the other track over in time. This duplicates the track and the last temp cue point. Now use play to re-start both songs at the same point and since you will be slightly off every time, they will always phase in interesting ways.

2) Beat repeat

This is an old turntablist trick which builds on step one. once you have both songs in time you off set the 2nd one behind the first by a half a beat. Then use the cross fader to switch back and forth creating a fill effect. This can be accomplished 2 ways:

• the old school: re-start the song a half a beat after the first
• the easier way: use beat jump back 1/2 to offset the 2nd track

3) Snare Fill

you can drop and set a temporary cue point anywhere in a song. in step one we set a cue on the downbeat and the duplicated in to both tracks. Do then same thing here, except drop a cue point in the 2nd deck on a snare or fill. Now this is your fill track and you can rhythmically cut it in over the first deck without ever loosing the master rhythm.

4) Drum Solo

Now that you have access to a kick on the left and a snare on the right, you can use the pause buttons of each deck to sample those sounds and drum away to your hearts content. The pause lets your use space and timing to create more musical voicing than just re-triggering the start point.

5) Half time fill

Instead of using the right deck to create fills using a cue point dropped on a snare. We are going to rhythmically drop cue points and re-sample them in time to essentially cut the entire rhythm in half. Then after 2 counts drop it back into the left deck and never miss a beat.

I spent all of 10 minutes working out that routine in the video, so take these techniques- make them your own and upload a better video that blows my stuff away!