until the DDJ 1000's successor is released, that is.
Over the years I've owned the Numark NS7 (Serato), the Traktor S4 MK2, S2 MK2, and S4 MK3 -- the Pioneer DDJ 1000 is the elder wand of DJ controllers!
The only sub-satisfactory facet of this piece of equipment would be the cheap feel that the jog wheels have -- I suppose they feel like plastic bands wrapped around an LCD display because...they are plastic bands wrapped around an LCD display. I imagine if there was no display they would have a more solid feel. That being said, I quickly got used to them and this aspect doesn't at all detract from the usability of the jog wheels -- and the LCD displays are absolutely awesome.
Speaking of the displays, I find they make mixing much more enjoyable as I don't have to look at my laptop unless it's to browse my library. Tracking BPM, tempo % adjustments, key, time remaining, and hot cues is easy to do, but my favorite thing about the displays are the phrase meters. When I'm mixing techno/techhouse, I can more-or-less EQ/FX adjust the tracks to accentuate or diminish the phrase changes in the tracks, but being able to see my hot cues (which I set up to mark drops/builds) in the phrase meter makes it easy to set up seamless transitions. When it comes to mixing bass, I find the phrase meter nearly essential -- I like mixing bass really aggressively/fast and the phrase meter allows me to set up the new song's build precisely and within the short few second time window I have after mixing out the last song effectively stacking drop after drop without missing a beat.
All the knobs, buttons, pads, faders have a really nice feel and the unit, in general, is of solid construction and feels/looks great. The tempo sliders have a nice notch in the center so it's simple to locate and lock in a track's native BPM. Functionally, the only thing I don't like interface-wise is the need to hold shift for tap tempo -- it's a feature I use rarely enough (mainly when trying to determine a song's BPM when the analysis messed it up) so it doesn't really bother me that much, but I can see why it might bother those who use tap tempo as a performance feature for their FX usage.
Segue into the FX...
I looove the color and beat FX...after coming from using the S4 MK3 where the color FX had a kind of abrupt activation/deactivation point, these sound so smooth and graduated. The filter sounds fantastic and I'm finding that using FX is much easier and more utilitous than it's ever been for me before.
The audio interface portion of the unit sounds great and the headphone amp is nice and loud! The S4 headphone amp was way too weak -- you forsure wouldn't be able to hear your cue in a club setting, but that won't be a problem with the DDJ 1000.
One last thing about the controller that's really cool -- it has two USB B ports so you can mix b2b with a friend who also has a laptop with Rekordbox on it (or a DDJ 1000 controller mapping with Traktor/Serato/etc.). I had the chance to use this feature this past weekend and it was a blast.
This is a review for the DDJ 1000, not Rekordbox, but I believe the software is a really important aspect of controllers and, if you're new to Rekordbox like I was, ignorance about what the software is like might steer you away from a controller like this. I haven't used Serato in about a decade so I can't really speak on a transition from Serato to Rekordbox, but I can honestly say Rekordbox is way better than Traktor. NI laid off a bunch of employees recently so there probably won't be any patches to fix that bug riddled piece of garbage any time soon. Traktor does have a leg up on Rekordbox when it comes to their analysis algorithm, but that's about it. Using Rekordbox gives you access to:
* USB exporting for interoperability with club standard pioneer gear (yay, I can mix on my friends' gear now)
* paging for hot cues (I generally only use 8 hot cues, but there are some bass tracks I mix that change tempo so many times that I need to use the extra page of cues...I plan to, for all other songs, use my second page of hot cues for finger drumming)
* dynamic beat grids -- holy camoly is this useful -- again, so many of my bass tracks were previously a minefield to mix as the beat grid goes off as soon as the tempo changes or because that trickster of a producer changed the time signature or dropped out a beat -- now I can confidently use my entire library without worry!
* pad FX are dope
One caveat to the switch over was the library maintenance required...and can be a process.
I used this tool to convert my Traktor library file into a rekordbox.xml file:
https://github.com/digital-dj-tools/dj-data-converter
It did a pretty good job but I had to use a text editor to do a search and replace on all the track paths because they were all wrong (but at least uniformly which made the search/replace task pretty easy).
Rekordbox forces you to reanalyze tracks even if you import from a properly formatted rekordbox.xml because Rekordbox stores beat grid and BPM info (and maybe some other stuff?) in .DAT files as part of its database...this reanalysis was not much of problem for my techno and techhouse tracks, but it messed up at least half of my beat grids for my bass music -- I just finished a two week phase of beat grid correction for my nearly 1000 bass tracks!
Anyway, this controller is probably the best on the market and I'm super happy with it. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is intermediate level and above.
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