A question about key lock: how many of you use it?

[racoon]

i have a CDJ200 since the beginning bedroom-dj days until today (just can't afford a good player until now ;D) and their keylock is SHIT

it makes jitters and fragments into the sound that sound weirder than the pitchchange that comes with pitching.

i never use it.

[3heads]

Made me laugh, i was thinking of someone lying on a sofa fucked out of their faces on md. listening to people mix going ahhhhhhhh mannn thats amazing your soooo goood. haa

[DJ MiCL]

I keep hearing about people slurring over transients and hating the sound of key lock, and despite the fact that I've never heard it, I thought that was what this thread would be about.

In Traktor I start hearing a difference from around +-7% or so. It's quite noticeable at values like +-30% but in those cases you're most likely doing it for special effects (like taking a house track loop down to 80 BPM and moving to DnB or something) so you would probably use key lock even if it was crappy... and Traktor puts up a pretty good fight there too.

A lot of vocals and loops are already time stretched in the production so it's really kind of silly thinking time-stretch can ruin the song... but I do understand those who stay away from it -- sort of like fearing something because their not sure... "Maybe it sounds just a bit worse than without key lock". I still get that feeling and am currently practicing to let go of that fear.

[racoon]

so it's really kind of silly thinking time-stretch can ruin the song

sorry but in my opinion you cannot compare the high-quality timestretching of SOME SINGLE ELEMENTS in a good DAW software with the absolutely LOL sounding timestretching of the whole track with a slutty cd-pitcher.

(as i said above, i only judge the keylock of my cdj200 pitcher and this one is CRAP ;D)

maybe my tsp2 have a better sounding one, never tried it ^^ maybe i should =)

[sebastiannz]

Made me laugh, i was thinking of someone lying on a sofa fucked out of their faces on md. listening to people mix going ahhhhhhhh mannn thats amazing your soooo goood. haa

same as what I was thinking. Even just when drunk, my mixing sounds way better, on drugs...well it's been a long time, but basically the same x a thousand.

Having said that, key lock ftw. I leave it on all the time and mix harmonically as much as I can.

Interestingly I was listening to a desyn masiello burning man set the other day and I notice that whatever he's using, he's turned key lock off because a track he's playing (which I've got) is down one key (or octave) forget the terminology. So there you go, not all the big dj's use it, or at least not all the time.

[sebastiannz]

i have a CDJ200 since the beginning bedroom-dj days until today (just can't afford a good player until now ;D) and their keylock is SHIT

it makes jitters and fragments into the sound that sound weirder than the pitchchange that comes with pitching.

i never use it.

The first version of traktor I got, which was just a couple of years ago, had a crappy key lock algorithm, anyone remember that? Glad they sorted it out quickly...

[johndavid]

Interestingly I was listening to a desyn masiello burning man set the other day and I notice that whatever he's using, he's turned key lock off because a track he's playing (which I've got) is down one key (or octave) forget the terminology. So there you go, not all the big dj's use it, or at least not all the time.

he's probably changing the key using the key knob.

There are some rare instances where I do that myself, but otherwise the decks in Traktor are keylocked 95% of the time.

[sebastiannz]

Key knob??

[DJ MiCL]

sorry but in my opinion you cannot compare the high-quality timestretching of SOME SINGLE ELEMENTS in a good DAW software with the absolutely LOL sounding timestretching of the whole track with a slutty cd-pitcher.

You sort of followed up by yourself afterwards but I never compared anything to a slutty cd-pitcher

And anyway, what I wanted to say in that line was that I should judge whether it sounds good or not based on what I hear, not my knowledge that key-lock is activated... that's all...

On a side note, you should check out the TP2 key-lock. They say the algorithm is that of a good DAW. I was skeptical but really, I'm not sure if I could tell on/off if I couldn't see the screen. Something changes, I can sense that, but it's not like I can say which is better than which. And sometime I think it just might be that my ears are not used to speed changing without the pitch changing together.

*There are noticeable artifacts when scratching by scrubbing the waveform. Probably a switch-over thing from maintaining the pitch to not doing so (scratching would sound wrong if the pitch didn't change)

[rgtb]

End of story...

. 2char