The absence of pitch faders rules out any serious beat-matching though. With the track playing, these become Pitchbend controls, which - to be fair - are surprisingly well implemented and can be used for basic, 'nudge'-style beat-matching. With a track stopped, these can be used to 'scratch' the current track, while holding down Shift puts them into Seek mode, allowing the user to jump to any part of the track. NI claims that the new touchstrips can be used in place of jog wheels and there's some truth in this. "The S8's intuitive control over Traktor's deeper features is absolutely unrivalled" It's not that Traktor's beat detection algorithms don't work - they're great, as are all the tempo sync'd performance features - but personally, this writer tends to get bored quickly if everything feels too 'on the rails'. This reviewier is no DMC champion, but he is the sort of semi-Luddite who will turn off sync when DJing with the S4. We like jog wheels, or more accurately, we like to have something spherical that at least tries to replicate the feel of a turntable. We'll lay our cards on the table - when we first caught sight of the S8, this was something of a concern. There is, however, a pair of very noticeable omissions from the S8's control set: jog wheels. Finally, along the very top is a row of four effects rotaries, plus an FX Select button, offering control over the software's effects. Finally, Freeze mode adds a feature from NI's iOS app Traktor DJ, which instantly 'grabs' a loop from the current track, slices it into eight and allows each slice to be triggered as a one shot sample.Ībove this sit four faders, which control the volume of the four Remix Deck slots, along with a large rotary that serves a number of purposes - it's primarily used for selecting and editing the size of loops, but also handles scrolling through the bank of Remix Deck samples, editing slices in Freeze mode and selecting a source for the loop recorder.Ībove this is a row of rotaries that control the Remix Deck filters, effects sends and pitch, each with On/Off buttons. In Remix mode the pads trigger eight of the software's 64 available Remix Deck sample slots. In Hotcue mode the pads are used to assign and jump between eight cue points, while Loop mode allows the user to create a loop and trigger beat jumps. Along the bottom of each is the transport section, with Play, Cue, Shift, Sync, Deck select and a button for toggling Traktor's beat-locked Flux mode on and off.Ībove this is a grid of eight pads, the functions of which can be changed via a strip of buttons along the outside edge. To either side of the mixer is a pair of deck controllers. The unit is centred around a four channel mixer that can control a quartet of software channels, act as a standalone analogue mixer, or any combination of these two options.įlipping between digital and analogue mode is as simple as pushing the Traktor Mode button located at the top of each channel and, with built-in digital vinyl support and an impressive range of I/O (see In & Out), this makes the S8 a truly flexible modern DJ 'hub'.Īside from the redesigned faders, the most notable feature of this mixer's channels is the addition of backlit on/off switches for each of the bi-directional filters something which was a notable omission from earlier NI controllers. Which is lucky, because the S8 really does have a lot going on. With its backlit controls, LED-lined touchstrips and hi-res displays, the controller really looks the business in a darkened club environment and proves easy to navigate under all lighting conditions.
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