There is a small six-bar cue VU per channel, and there are buttons to toggle keylock and sync. There are separate knobs for headphones volume, headphones mix, sampler volume and master volume – no booth output here. The mixer controls the two available channels decks with the usual combination of crossfader (adequate and quite loose), stiff upfaders, gain/hi/mid/low controls, and one-knob FX, which have five settings (more on these later). The pitch faders are tucked to the right of the performance pads to make way for those oversized jogwheels, meaning they are quite short. Each deck has a slip (or in Traktor speak, “Flux”) button, and a reverse button that can work with Flux to give you a censor function. The cue and play/pause buttons are big, square, and in the now standard vertical arrangement, and the decks are laid out in the increasingly popular non-symmetrical way. We look more at the software elsewhere, but for now let’s look again at the unit itself.Īll the buttons and knobs are plastic apart from the two sets of eight coloured rubber performance pads, which have a pleasing “click” on use. The capable but undeniably complicated Traktor Pro 3 software is still not the easiest to install (or use), but things have improved over the years, and suffice to say as long as you are careful and do everything in the right order, you’ll be fine. Overall, it is basic, but in a pleasing way – think minimal rather than cheap. It doesn’t creak when you do the old “diagonal bend” on it (no? only me?), and the jogwheels have just the right amount of weight, and also are a bit bigger than you might expect. Sure it’s a lightweight, plastic box – but it has just enough heft to feel serious. Let’s see how it shapes up…įor a $299 controller, it actually feels surprisingly well built. That’s what the S2 is clearly designed to do. That means that if the revitalised Traktor platform is to have a hope of keeping and growing its market share, it needs to appeal to the same people whose first taste of DJing is exactly this type of device. Small, cheap, capable DJ controllers have sold by the bucketload since (the Numark Mixtrack series, the Pioneer DDJ-SB and RB series, and now the Pioneer DDJ-400, plus even more basic but hugely popular controllers such as the Numark Party Mix). This matters because a lot has changed since the Traktor Kontrol S2 Mk2 came out years ago. Really, this makes it Traktor’s first true big offering ever for the beginner DJ. The reason is that it is an unashamedly entry-level device, costing just $299 (similar price in euros and pounds) for both the controller AND a full version of Traktor Pro 3. The Traktor Kontrol S2 Mk3 is an important controller for Native Instruments – possibly the most important controller the company has ever made.
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