quad deck mapping, what's useful, what's not?

[ReggieUK]

Hi All, I've got a mixtrack pro II + a pair of custom midi-fighter clones and want to use it all on traktor with 4 decks. With the custom midifighters I've got a total of 48 inputs I can play with and I can add various combinations of pots, encoders and buttons. I'm new to traktor but not new to dj'ing, so I haven't really explored all of it's features yet.

I'm going to see if I can combine the 3 controllers into a single big map, which would also give me a lot more options, however, I do want to plan ahead to stop this thing becoming a monster.

I can see how to map most stuff, what I'm most interested in is what you guys find essential/annoying about your quad controller setups? If you've got missing buttons/knobs, what would you add to your re-map first?

The first thing I noticed on the mixtrack pro II as a whole was the lack of fine control on the pitch faders and gain pots. I'm looking to add the essential standard stuff first, so that would be the bass/mid/treble EQ pots, headphone cue buttons and level faders for Decks C/D and I'd really like gain pots for all 4 decks too. I'm thinking that having sync/cue/play/stutter for decks C/D would be sensible too.

[Scalage]

I would advise against putting all 3 controllers in one mapping. It will become very confusing very quickly. Not only that, you'll run out of modifiers before long.
I also own a Mixtrack Pro 2 (although I am fairly new to djing), and was also thinking about mapping decks c and d to it. One way I thought about was simply have the same controls for deck a and b, plus controls c and d when holding shift. Another way is using the scratch buttons. when they're on, controls are for the normal deck and when off for the c or d deck. The way I do it now is to use my X1 mk2 for some of the c and d tasks.
My mapping is not exactly the way I want it to but if it helps I'd gladly share it and explain what I did. I spent a lot of time on it.

[ReggieUK]

Hi, thanks for the offer, that'd be appreciated :-) I've been going through the existing mixtrack pro II traktor map supplied by numark, from what I've seen, there's a couple of completely unused modifiers (6 and 7) and modifier 1 and 2 could be merged into a single modifier freeing up a 3rd, this would be plenty of modifiers to add the other 2 controllers into the map. If anything, as I've studied the existing map it's got easier to see what's going on :-)

[Scalage]

I've done exactly that, bring modifiers together. I have 3 or 4 free ones in my mapping at the moment. Also, some things that are mapped are completely useless (like the 6th modifier, does absolutely nothing) or missing, like the difference between operation with scratch mode on or off.
What I do have that you might want to change are the sample slots. I've mapped the first two rows of the c deck to them, as I have an F1 for the d deck. But once you see the logic behind it, it should be doable to alter it yourself.
You can find it here: https://maps.djtechtools.com/mappings/2501

[ReggieUK]

I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of sample/remix decks, I see the power but not entirely sure I understand how it all works yet (so that can wait for the time being). I'll take a look at the mapping and see if what it's all about :-) I guess ultimately it's going to come down to me playing with traktor for a bit and seeing what I really find useful.

[ReggieUK]

I had a look at the mixtrack quad last night, with a standard mixtrack pro II, you end up really having to reclaim buttons to get modifiers to access the 'layers' feature (the other 2 decks) but we're also missing the cue/eq/upfaders, so they'd need remapping to modifiers to achieve that, however, I don't think it's particularly difficult.

I want to attempt to give myself a bit more than that though, my custom controller can give me all those missing bits, I wonder if you just need to import the mixtrack quad midi map and adjust accordingly.

[Scalage]

I don't think it's easier to remap the quad mapping, you only need to layer the controls with a modifier (for example the scratch one, which I've already merged into one modifier).

[ReggieUK]

it depends how closely the quad and the pro II are mapped with midi messages. If their maps are quite similar then it shouldn't be difficult. Just use one of the shift keys as a layer key. However, this is why I want to make a single map for 2-3 controllers, that way, all of the modifiers are available for all of the buttons and the extras that can be 'reclaimed' can essentially be a couple of buttons on my extra controllers. So hopefully, instead of having to attempt to reclaim too much, I can use a couple of buttons on the controllers as the the 'layer' modifier buttons.

I think I'm really still at the planning stage here though, I have so many extra inputs at my disposal, I can make an incredibly powerful control surface.

I'm still trying to figure out ways to get more resolution from the faders on my custom controllers, essentially, what I've got atm. is an idea about using an offset to give me a '0' point centred 14bit pitch value from whatever resolution is stable from the ADCs in my controller. as it's a 14bit number, that's 16383 values, with 8192 being the 0 point, if for instance I had an 8bit value that I wanted to output as psuedo 14bit, I would need to do something:
(8192+8bit value)-(255/2)

not 100% certain how useful it might be but I could also use a pot to dial in the large offset value, however, if I can get 14bit resolution out of the adc then it won't be an issue.