Dubspot

In this video, Native Instruments DJ product specialist and Dubspot instructor DJ Endo shares a quick tip on how to use Traktor’s built-in auto gain feature to make DJ mixes in Ableton Live. By using Traktor to detect volume differences between tracks in a mix, this method allows you to create smooth transitions between tracks in Ableton, eliminating the guesswork and the need to make detailed gain adjustments. We’d like to know if these videos were helpful to you? Do you have questions? Let us know by leaving a comment below!

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A Lot of professional DJ’s today use Ableton Live to produce Studio DJ Mixes and mix compilations. Ableton Live is great for arranging your DJ mixes and doing creative re-edits of your tracks so each mix drops exactly the way you want it to. Ableton also allows you to EQ your mix, and then go back afterwards and draw in your EQ curves so they are perfect, and also has some great effects that you can use to polish off your mixes with.

One thing that’s very important in a DJ Demo is that every track you play is played at the same volume (gain). If your volume levels are all over the place, the person listening will have to keep turning their stereo up and down, and it will annoy them.

In Traktor Pro there is a very handy feature (called “autogain”) that will make sure that every track is the same volume when you load it into a deck. This is crucial for digital DJ’s since most tracks are mastered at different levels. With Autogain turned on, you can set the gain (volume) of each channel on your DJ mixer to the same level, and not have to touch them all night.

One thing that Ableton is missing is an autogain feature, which makes it difficult to get the levels for every track equal when doing Ableton DJ Mixes. I have found a great workaround for this using Traktor Pro’s Gain recognition.

When Traktor Imports a new track, it scans the track for overall volume (gain), transients and BPM (Beats Per Minute).

In the Traktor preferences, there is an option to turn on “Autogain” so that every track you play is the same volume.

With Autogain enabled, Traktor will automatically raise or lower the gain knob when you load into a deck, based on the gain value it detected when analyzing the track. This way, all of the gain adjusting is done in the software, which is about 1/3 of the battle when DJing.

There is actually a column in Traktor’s Browser where you can see the exact values in Decibals that Traktor will have to adjust the gain of each track so they are the same volume. The column is called “Analyzed.”

To show this column, right or ctrl click above the Traktor browser in a grey area and choose to show the “analyzed” column. This column contains all the autogain values.

You can even print out these values in an html style list by right or ctrl clicking on the playlist and choosing “save as webpage”.

Make sure that the column called “analyzed” is checked.

Depending on which categories you selected your list may look something like this.

You can see the column on the left is the track title, and the column on the right tells you how many dB Traktor will adjust each track so that they are equal in volume.

Now when you go into Ableton, drop your songs into the arrange window, and adjust the “clip volume” for each track to the autogain value that Traktor came up with.

Now all of your tracks in your Ableton DJ Mix will be the same volume when you play them, and your mixes will have a more stable volume level throughout the mix. Happy mixing!

Article written by Mike Henderson aka DJ Endo – Endo is a DJ and product specialist for Native Instruments and lives in Brooklyn. Listen to mixes from him at www.djendo.com.