Traktor Implementation
Plenty of controllers ship with mappings for Traktor straight out of the box, but 4Trak goes one further and can simply be plugged in and selected from Traktor’s setup wizard. If you don’t already own Traktor Pro, there’s a special ‘4Trak Edition’ version of Traktor in the box that has most of the features of the Pro version, save a couple of options for effects modes and, of course, none of the 2.5 remix deck goodness. For all Traktor’s advanced configuration opportunities buried in its myriad settings, having a piece of gear that feels essentially like a 1st party option is a huge boon for Numark and the 4Trak; both in control and audio settings.
If you’re planning on crazy remapping then you’re going to have to jump into Traktor’s controller manager and get your hands dirty just like everyone else, though, and of course that means all the pain and headaches that come with trying to edit a mapping that tallies up tons of lines of assignments and modifiers will be yours to endure just like everyone else.
Customising aside, the 4Trak has some of the best factory standard Traktor implementation I’ve seen from a 3rd party controller – if not the best. Everything’s laid out logically and works exactly as it should, and most impressively the jog platters are absolutely flawless – something that almost nobody else has done. Some of the controls on the unit, the throwbacks to the NS6’s Itch implementation, have been left unmapped – bravo to Numark for leaving them available rather than blocking them off underneath a revised faceplate.
Ergonomics
Moving from turntable and mixer setups to controllers seems to have meant, for many developers at least, that just because they can go smaller, that they should. Numark haven’t really signed onto that philosophy – on their pro gear at least – and it makes a huge difference to how the 4Trak feels. Being almost the size of a couple of CDJs and a four channel mixer gives everything room to breathe, and I felt much more like I was DJing the way I remember it; standing behind actual, honest to goodness pieces of hardware, rather than hunched over a piece of hobby gear and ‘emulating’ the DJing experience.
Most of the controls are vertically symmetrical, and this is something I’ve moaned about on controllers before. Essentially, designing controllers like this requires a user to learn the muscle memory for twice as many things, something that could be avoided – and in the process more closely follow the design principles of ‘classic’ hardware separates. That said, though, I don’t hate the design of the 4Trak by any means. Maybe I’m just getting used to things, but in some ways – the positioning of the pitch faders by the edges of the controller out of the way, for instance – it feels like the all in one design actually provides advantages.
Track loading, browsing, and so on is all handled out of the way in the top middle of the controllers, and the loop controls, which are the most likely (in my eyes) to be subject to some remapping experiments, are situated in an uncluttered area, a suitable distance apart. There’s no doubt that the large platters are a big selling point of the 4Trak, so they get central focus, but cue point buttons are placed below them in a similar style to NI’s Kontrol S4.
The big curio on the 4Trak is its tilted effects section, of course; round-up all the DJ gear ever made and I think you’d struggle to fill a shopping trolley with the stuff that uses more than one plane for creative controls. It’s so unusual that I was dead against it when I first got hold of the 4Trak, thinking that it would create uncomfortable ergonomic issues with wrist bending, awkward movement from the effects to other parts of the controller and so on, but those issues were allayed by some long sessions with it – to a large extent. There are the aforementioned issues with the 4Trak’s tilted effects, but they only really get in the way when you’re trying to do a million things at once. Realistically, despite all the crazy concepts and my previous mappings and examples of cramming commands onto controls to make more and more possible, in a two hour set both you and the audience tire of constant manipulation; long sets need a solid base unit.
Because the 4Trak has all of the basic, fundamental aspects of DJ application covered very well, trying to squeeze any button mashing craziness out of it without breaking its workflow is a little tough, but I really enjoy using it as a primary control surface – perhaps adding on pad, arcade button, and matrix controllers alongside it. This is the direction that DJing is necessarily travelling in anyway, with Traktor 2.5’s remix decks and inevitable replies from other developers; playing records will never die, and for new methods to emerge they have to be able to ape the procedures used to load and mix the records we know and love.