Serato has today released an update to Serato DJ Pro, which means its new Scratch Bank feature works with Rane’s Seventy, Seventy-Two, and Seventy-Two MkII mixers.
Scratch Bank has been a much requested addition to the Rane mixers since its introduction with the Pioneer DJ DJM-S11 mixer last month.
Rane Seventy users can use Scratch Bank once they have updated Serato by simply tapping the Sampler pad mode button twice.
If you are a Rane Seventy-Two or Seventy-Two MkII user, you will need to update your mixer to firmware 1.6. To access Scratch Bank on these mixers, you’ll need to tap the Sampler pad three times.
• More info on the latest version of Serato DJ Pro from Serato’s website
What is Scratch Bank?
It’s similar to a sampler in that when you click on Scratch Bank in the Serato software itself you get a series of boxes, one for each pad (there are eight slots and four banks for a total of 32 pads).
You can load whatever you want into each of these slots, be that complete tracks or individual sounds.
The really clever bit is that in each of these slots, you can decide what is going to be played when the pad is triggered, by setting either the start of the track or a particular cue point.
Learn to scratch with Digital DJ Tips: Scratching For Controller DJs
So for instance, you could have, say, four scratch sentences (ie four full tracks of scratch sounds) loaded across the banks, each with eight cue points at your favourite scratch sounds.
Effectively, this would give you 32 scratch sounds available on the pads per deck – and the really cool thing is, as soon as you press a pad, it knocks out the track currently playing on that deck and loads that particular sound, so you can scratch or cue juggle. Pressing Shift and any pad will instantly “unload” the track and return to what was playing before.
Read this next: Beginners Guide To Using Your DJ Software’s Sampler
Another cool thing about this is that whatever configuration you set up here is still there when you quit out of Serato and come back – so you can work on banks of samples etc for you, and always have them available.
Phil Morse
