In this DJ lesson, we cover the Slicer feature in Serato DJ. The Slicer, originally developed for the Novation Twitch and Serato ITCH, is a performance feature in Serato DJ, designed to slice up a section of your track into 8 slices which are then controlled using the 8 performance pads on your controller. It’s also available for the Vestax VCI-380, Reloop Terminal Mix 2, the Pioneer DDJ-SX and the forthcoming Numark NS7 II & Pioneer DD-SR / SP-1 controllers..
For those who are audio impaired, here’s a full text transcript of the lesson:
In this tutorial we are going to go over the slicer feature in Serato DJ. Up until real recently it was only available in certain specific hardware, but they just opened it up Serato Remote which is an App for the IPhone and the IPad Mini, so a lot more people now have access to this. So the first thing you want to do before you use this feature is, you would want to make sure your grid is set properly. Now the quick way to do that is to turn on the add-a-grid function and then find the first downbeat of the track and once you find that click on set. And it will automatically set the beat grid to your track. Keep in mind you can fine tune the grid if the automatic grid detection does not quite work to your liking.
Alright now once your grid is set, we can now engage the slicer function. So the way you do that is you want to open up Serato remote on your IPad and to the slicer tab. Now what the slicer does is take a section of your song and divides it into 8 different slices, which you can trigger at will, while the song itself continues playing in the background. Now you can play these slices in any order that you want, creating interesting new rhythms and combinations. Now right now I am adjusting the length of the retrigger when I press the slice you can set it to be as slow as 1 beat, to a half beat, to a quarter beat and an eighth of a beat as well.
Now the current mode of the slicer I am in the song keeps progressing down the track picking new sections to slice-up. If you want the song to stay on a particular section you can turn on the loop function and you will see it turns blue now indication you are the in the loop mode of the slicer. And the play head will just keep playing and cycling through that section. And in either mode you can select the length of section that is being sliced. Like right now I just went from 16 beats to 8 beats as well as adjusting the retrigger rate. So I am just going to go and play around with different slices in this section adjusting the retrigger rate and even the length of the actual loop itself.
Forgive me if everything seems to be going a little bit fast right now. But this is one of those things you just got to get your hands on and you will really understand it right away once you get it all loaded-up. And here we go switching back into normal mode, non-loop mode. And it takes a different selection of the track that is now being sliced. Retriggers it to a quarter note right now. Now this is really a unique feature to the Serato DJ., and I kind-of liken it to a more advance lubberly, function. So just a review of what the slicer does. Is that it takes a section of the song from as long as 16 beats to as little as 2 beats and slices that section into 8 different parts which you can then trigger in any order you want and you can also set how quickly it will retrigger a slice from as slow as 1 beat to as fast as 1/8th of a beat.
And add to that in the background the original song still plays while you still doing you are slicing so that you will never lose the original timing of the track itself. So those of you out there who do have access to IPad or a IPad mini I highly recommend downloading and purchasing the Serato Remote App and then using it with Serato DJ accessing the slicer function.