While using a DJ controller (USB or standalone) users may notice that their pitch and volume faders may not respond right away. This is a function called "soft takeover" and it's completely normal.
"Soft takeover" occurs when there’s a discrepancy between the pitch/BPM/volume setting of a deck and the physical position of the fader, leading the software or OS to temporarily “take over” control of the track’s BPM until the pitch fader is returned to its previous position. This prevents sudden, extreme tempo changes when adjusting your tracks’ BPM.
In this video, we'll demonstrate soft takeover, why it is activated, and why this is important in nearly all DJ software & hardware.
Full Transcript:
Hello there! This is Riley at inMusic, and today we're going to take a quick look at the concept of “soft takeover”
and how it affects your DJ controller’s pitch faders.
What is soft takeover?
First, let's define exactly what “soft takeover” is. Think of soft takeover as a fail-safe feature in your DJ hardware & software;
it prevents sudden, drastic changes to the BPM of your tracks by forcing you
to move the fader to the correct position before changing their tempo. Soft takeover is built into virtually all DJ software,
and most popular DAWs, for this very reason.
How soft takeover affects using SYNC
So let's see how soft takeover affects your pitch faders when DJing with SYNC. Here, I'm using a Denon DJ SC Live 4. So I’ll load a track on Deck 1, this one here with a tempo of 127bpm, and turn on SYNC…and on Deck 2, a track with a tempo of 124bpm, and I'll also turn on SYNC on that deck. As soon as I start playing the Deck 1 track, you'll see that SYNC changes the tempo of the track on Deck 2 to match it.
Next to the pitch fader on Deck 2, you can see that the center pitch light is now turned off, despite the fact that the pitch fader is still in center position. If I want to manually change the tempo of this track with the pitch fader, you can see that when I move it, no adjustment is made to the track's tempo until the pitch fader reaches the place it would be if I'd manually adjusted it to 127bpm, then I'm free to adjust the tempo however I want.
What you're seeing here is soft takeover in action. If soft takeover didn’t do this, the tempo of this track would jump back down to 124bpm as soon as I moved the pitch fader and overrode SYNC mode, which would make it very difficult to DJ.
How soft takeover affects DJing using four decks
Let's check out another example. Here, I’m using Serato DJ Pro with a Numark NS6II, which has four decks. As you can see, there are only two physical decks on the unit, but each one has a DECK button for switching between decks 1 & 3 and 2 & 4. This means that if I'm DJing using all four decks, I'll be sharing all of these controls (transport the pads, pitch, FX, etc.) between two different decks on each side.
To show you what I mean, I'll load a track on Deck 1 and another one on Deck 3. Switching back to Deck 1, let's say I want to change the BPM of this track from 132 to 135. I'll just move the pitch fader until it's at the tempo I want. Now, if I were to switch back to Deck 3, you can see this little arrow light illuminate.
This is telling us that soft takeover is active on this pitch fader. If I try to adjust the tempo of this Deck 3 track using the fader, nothing will happen until I move the pitch fader back to center position. And as you can see, as soon as I'm back at 0%, I can adjust the track's BPM freely.
Now, if I want to adjust this track's tempo to say, 130BPM, when I switch back to Deck 1, you'll see that the tempo is still adjusted to 130BPM on Deck 3, but soft takeover is now active on Deck 1, and I won't be able to change this track's tempo until I move the pitch fader back to where I'd previously adjusted it.
Without soft takeover, I would have experienced noticeable tempo changes when switching between these decks, simply because the DJ software would have taken the pitch fader’s physical position at face value.
Final thoughts & further support
So that's all for this video. I hope you now have a more solid grasp on the concept of soft takeover and how it works to your advantage while DJing.
For more information and further support with using your hardware or software from Denon DJ, Numark, or Rane DJ, check out the links in the description, where you'll find each brand's Knowledge Base and portals to reach out to their dedicated technical support teams.
Thank you as always for watching, and I'll catch you next time!