As the revolutions in DJing slow down, in its place comes evolution, and a natural refinement of what already exists. And that’s exactly what the new Serato Flip is. Hot cues are awesome, but the buzz of sequencing is thick in the air, and while this isn’t quite sequencing, the Serato Flip expansion pack lets you record hot cue and censor actions live, and save them as metadata in the original audio file to recall later. That’s pretty cool in my book.
The teaser video is less tease and more giving the whole thing away, and here’s a bunch of words all about Serato Flip:
INTRODUCING SERATO FLIP
Serato is excited to announce Serato Flip. A new Expansion Pack for Serato DJ that allows you to create custom edits, extend and re-imagine your music.
Set for official release this September with Serato DJ 1.7 – Serato Flip allows you to record your Cue Point and Censor actions, which can be saved and looped, ready to re-trigger and start in an instant. Use Serato Flip to create and save up to 6 Flips per track, ready for playback in the studio or the club.
AJ Bertenshaw, CEO of Serato says: “We are very proud and excited to finally unveil Serato Flip, which we have been hard at work on for many months. We think our users will find the ability to flip tracks and save their edits to be an indispensable new way to work with Serato DJ.”
The original idea of being able to record and playback cue point information in a simple way was first pitched to us by NZ producer P Money, who was already using Serato to put beats together by manually triggering cue points.
Not only a great beat sketch pad, Serato Flip can also be used as a powerful DJ tool. The simple, yet effective control set designed with the DJ in mind allows you to use it in your set in a number of ways:
- Make clean edits of your tracks by recording censor actions.
- Extend intros, breakdowns or outros for better mixing.
- Create transition sections in your songs for changing tempo or beat structure.
- Advanced tone-play and performance.
- Auto-skipping verses or choruses in songs.
- Making beats.
Serato Flip will be available as a paid Expansion Pack with Serato DJ 1.7, coming this September. It will be available for purchase in-app and on the Serato Online Store for USD29.00.
Features of Serato Flip
Record Cue Point & Censor Automation
Click record once to arm recording. Once you hit the first cue or censor, recording begins. Hit record again to set the end point of your Flip.
Prepare & Edit Tracks In Offline Mode
Use Serato Flip without your hardware connected.
Flip Saving
Save 6 different Flips per track. Serato Flip information is saved to your tracks metadata and doesn’t edit the audio of the track. You can delete cue points and your Flip will still be remembered.
Hardware Controls, Keyboard Shortcut & Midi Mappable
Control Flip directly from your computer or your controller with a keyboard shortcut and hardware controls being mapped for supported current and future hardware. Flip controls are also MIDI mappable for use with the MIDI controller of your choice.
Looping / Loop Snap
Choose whether your recorded Flip plays through once or loops. Select whether your looped Flip will snap to an end-point that’s on beat with your track.
Recall and Replay
Turn Flips ON / OFF and start your Flip on track load or whenever you like.
Make perfect edits
Platter movements aren’t recorded so you can move the platter to an exact point and trigger a cue point to make the perfect Flip.
Name your Flips
Just like Serato DJs nameable Cue Points you can also name your Flips. The name of your Flip will appear in the deck info area when the track is loaded.
Watch a teaser video and get more information on Serato Flip here:
http://serato.com/latest/blog/17389/announcing-serato-flip
Download Serato DJ from serato.com/dj/downloads
Serato Flip – now hotter cues
Serato Flip an incredibly clever way of working. Instead of having to manually make the edit on the fly, or have to create your own edits in separate files, you can now create up to six (which like cue points feels like a very arbitrary limitation) different edits and save them in one track. Not only that, that complex cue point button bashing you did is now automated with reverses, and can be looped at will. And all of these have descriptive names as well.
Let’s take this a little further — let’s put two tracks into one, apply strategic cue points, and with Flip, you can create a mashup. Beyond this — drop a bunch of drum samples into a single track, flip it and boom you’re making beats. Hell, let’s even combine four flipped tracks on four decks to make the most amazing synced layered flips. Just imagine a single track, on four decks, all flipped, looped, filtered and effected — wow. I haven’t even touched Serato Flip yet, and already I can see the potential. Give it to some DJs considerably more gifted than myself, and all hell could be about to break loose.
Given that a flip is essentially metadata, there should be no reason why flips can’t be shared freely across the community, but that is rather down to Serato. Perhaps Serato Whitelabel tracks will come preflipped so that one track contains all sorts of edits and mixes.
Theorising — beyond flipping hot cues
Having shown that recording of actions is achievable, my mind naturally wandered off into the potential of such a thing. The very nature of hot cues means that the moment you jump from cue to cue, one part of the tracks ends and the next begins abruptly. It has the potential to sound harsh, stuttery and staccato if misused, unless that is the aim of course. But sequencing the SP-6 samples in the same way will mean very smooth unclipped sounds can be used to create very smooth rolling beats. And what of effects? Applying an effect ‘f’ for ‘x’ amount of time with parameters ‘y’ and ‘z’ are just numbers right? To me, this feels like fledgling DAW features in the making.
What this feels like to me is a second stab at Serato’s not entirely successful dalliance with Ableton Live. But instead of using the whole package in a window, the automation is happening entirely within Serato DJ. I guess it’s possible that flips, being nothing more than numerical data, could be translated to Live compatible data, so that Serato action can then appear inside Live itself. It happened before, and it would make perfect sense to Bridge (geddit?) that gap.
It’s the new Hoover
There have been many brands in the past that have become generic. Hoover is a unique example of this, in that the brand name is not only used for all generic vacuum cleaner, but has also become the process. And I’m absolutely certain that this will happen with Serato Flips. Using it will become known as flipping, and clubbers will love how a DJ flipped a track, and probably even when flipping is being done by a different product. Flipping branding genius if you ask me.
Summing Up
Serato Flip is due on September to coincide with Serato DJ 1.7, and will cost just $29. Game changer? Game flipper for sure.