Before our Serato 15 Year and Christmas party kicked off on Wednesday, we asked some of the staff around the office about their favourite FX, how they use them and any tips and tricks they use. Check out what four of the lads had to say.
Logan D - Product Planner
You can use the Looper as a really awesome way of instantly halving the BPM/pitch of your song - to give a sort of 'Chopped/Screwed' sound.
Load up the Looper and set the wet/dry knob all the way to the left. Setting it here means it will perfectly halve the tempo of the current BPM (Setting it to the middle will keep the original BPM and setting it all the way to the right will perfectly double the BPM).
Now just set how many beats you want to be looped (I usually set to 2 or 4), then press ON on beat, and after 2/4 beats the track will half time perfectly.
You can watch me do this at 0.26 in the SDJ 1.3 FX video :
Sam GG - Product Specialist
Combo Tape Echo + Particle Delay. This FX combo works great if your track has a long vocal outro. When your last track is winding down, have both FX turned on with your Combo Tape Echo set at 12 o'clock and your Particle Delay all the way to the left with the beats set to 1.
As your outro plays out slowly reverse the positions of the two knobs, turning the Particle delay up to 12'oclock and the Combo Tape Echo to full left for a hazy, winding echo out with lots of white noise. Slowly turn the knobs back to starting position for silence and an epic ambient fade out, perfect at the end of a mix tape!
Matt Perry - Product Specialist
I like to use Epic Reverb bringing it up from 0 to about the 12 O'clock position. This adds a nice tail on mix outs and builds suspense in breakdowns. Its a nice option from the Delay and fills out the sound really well.
I also find myself using the Combo Fade/Echo a lot, leaving it at about 11 O'clock as its works in this position as a great "Echo Out" effect (which you'll be familiar with from ITCH/SSL FX). You can adjust it for a longer tail/filter out too.
Jason - QA Engineer
Usually my FX racks are set up and assigned to all decks so I can have 6 different FX ready to go for everything. I'm not sure whether many people actually do this but I find it easier to deselect channels when i only want to apply FX to one, rather then having to apply to the desired channel all the time, or only having 3 FX available per deck.
I'm a big fan of the Back Pack Expansion Pack when playing Dub/House/Garage/DnB. I always have a delay and/or tape echo set ready to dub out tracks (the new particle delay is dope for this).
I only ever go up to about 50% wet on these two max, I usually leave these sitting at around 25-50% and only apply in the sparse areas of the tune, otherwise the sound ends up quite muddy. I often use these two on breakdowns/vocal bits etc.
I always have some form of HP and LP FX set up and ready to go at 25% wet. All it takes is a click to apply and a click to stop or ride it down to 0% to bring it back to dry.
Visit the Serato website for more information about the Serato DJ FX expansion packs and how to get them for yourself.
Let us know how you use them in the comments too!
Sam.