Deck controls
Quantize
Quantize snaps your actions to the beatgrid: a cue point, a loop or a hot cue fires on the next grid line rather than the instant your finger lands. The setting decides how coarse that grid line is.
In practice
Set quantize to 1 beat for cue and loop work, and turn it off when you want to place something by hand.
Coarser settings are for larger structural moves: at 4 beats a hot cue can only land on a bar line, which is what you want when you are jumping between sections and never what you want when you are triggering a stab. The setting is not a quality control — it is a statement about how big the thing you are firing is. And it inherits every problem the grid has: quantized to a beatgrid that is wrong, your perfectly timed cue lands perfectly in the wrong place.
1 beat
Cues, loops, rolls
4 beats
Section jumps
Off
Hand-placed moves
1.90s
One bar at 126 BPM
Where these come from: Conventional settings, plus one arithmetic figure: a bar of 4/4 at 126 BPM, the median tempo across the 273,725 house, techno and trance tracks in our catalog. For what we can measure, see the grid it snaps to.
Why it matters
It is the difference between a performance move landing musically and landing where your reflexes put it. With quantize on at one beat, a hot cue pressed slightly early still fires on the beat, and the mix stays tight while you concentrate on something else.
The cost is that it removes the possibility of being deliberately early or late. Anything that depends on being fractionally off the grid — a drag, a stutter, a hand-placed cue — needs it turned off, which is why most DJs end up toggling it rather than leaving it in one state.
Frequently asked
Should quantize be on or off?+
On at 1 beat for most mixing, because it keeps cue and loop triggers musical while you are thinking about something else. Off for anything you want deliberately early or late, such as a hand-placed cue or a dragged stab.
What does quantize 1/4 beat mean?+
That your action snaps to the nearest sixteenth rather than the nearest beat. It is fine enough to feel unquantized on fast triggers while still preventing an obviously off-grid hit.
Why is my quantized cue still off?+
Because quantize snaps to the beatgrid, not to the music. If the grid is misplaced, every quantized action inherits that error exactly — the fix is the grid, not the setting.
Related terms
Beatgrid
A beatgrid is the map your DJ software lays over a track marking where every beat falls. Once it is right, sync, looping and quantise all work; once it is wrong, everything built on top of it is wrong too.
Sync
Sync matches one deck’s tempo to the other automatically and holds it there, using the beatgrid the software calculated. It removes the arithmetic of beatmatching, not the decision about which record follows which.
Hot cue
A hot cue is a saved position in a track that plays from that point the instant you press its pad. Most players store eight per track, and they are stored with the file rather than with the session.
Bar
A bar is four beats in 4/4 time — one full cycle of the kick pattern. DJs count in bars rather than seconds because a bar is the same length of music at any tempo, and seconds are not.
Explore: Beats-to-time calculator · Beatgrid · Mixing guides · All DJ terms