I would love it if djay gave us only one panel for effects on all decks and lets us choose which decks these effects apply to. Pioneer/Rekordbox already does this and it makes a lot more sense to me than separate controls per deck.
My reasoning: separate controls give more flexibility but create more mental strain and make it necessary to have more complicated controls on our DJ controllers. I do not choose which deck a song goes to based on the effects I have set for that deck, so effects are an afterthought. If I have selected „echo“ as an effect on a previous song for effect 1 on deck 1, I will expect it to be set similarly when I use effects on deck 2. This only becomes more pronounced when you’re using more than 2 decks.
The Mac version of djay already got a lot better at displaying effects and making good use of the Limited space but it almost becomes ridiculous when you have a 4-deck layout. I have to look very hard to see which effect will be applied when I press a button on my controller in 4-deck layout. The iPad version doesn’t even have space for all three effects, showing us only two of them.
In an ideal world, Controller-wise, you would give me:
three buttons that let me turn on effect 1, 2, or 3 (while we’re at it, why not make it an even 4?)
** shift plus that effect button chooses the next effect for the corresponding slot, double clicking goes back to the previous effect
one dial that controls wet/dry, for all effects
one dial that lets me control which deck the effect applies to, including „all decks“ or „left“ and „right“
left/right buttons that control parameters (a dial would also do but I prefer discrete steps)
a dial that lets me choose which neural mix stem all effects apply to
All of this would mean a simplification while keeping a nice amount of flexibility.
Someone already suggested something along these lines.
The problem is that the effects UI is incredibly complicated and a headache to use when mixing on 4 decks. In order to simplify it, there ought to be a global effects config panel, and each deck should have routing for effects sends. That’s how a multi-channel studio mixer should work.
For instance, I like to use reverb, delay, and flanger or phaser in my mix. When I bring a track into a new deck, I have to check and see what that deck’s FX options are. I don’t really need 4 reverbs in my mix, it’s a waste!
And there is no multi-preset for this to make it easy to recall my preferred FX setup. Another thing that wastes my time is that it defaults to 100% wet, when always I want to gradually bring it in from dry.
If none of this is added, at least I would like to drag and drop FX blocks to copy/clone them across decks, and also to reorder the FX chain within a deck.
There is an FX Favorites / Star tab in the FX menu which might help some. On iOS, you swipe left on the FX that you want to add to the Star menu. It groups these in the order you add them so you may want to consider that if you prefer to have your favorites in a certain order. You cannot reorder them once they are in the Star tab. You have to delete them and add them again in the desired order.
Unfortunately, whenever you load djay it defaults to the full Audio tab so you need to manually switch to the Star tab for each deck every time you load djay. I wish djay would remember my preference to always load the Star tab for FX.
thanks, I’m aware of but it doesn’t really solve my problem if repeated FX. It really just illustrates more lack of basic convenience features — not remembering things, no way to drag-and-drop reorder. Even with these conveniences (which I think should be implemented) it still doesn’t provide the larger essential issue of global effects with sends in each track.
For sure. I agree the FX setup and preferences could definitely use some improvements to make them more user friendly. Personally, I like having a lot of detailed/granular control over each effect and the ability to chain them on each deck in a fashion similar to Traktor Pro. The FX in Traktor are even more complicated than in djay, but this level of control allows you to achieve really unique results. Quite a while ago Traktor also added Macro FX which are much simpler to setup and use in a 4 deck scenario. Personally, I like having both options so I can switch between them depending on the scenario.
