Serato Tone Play on Numark NVii Tutorial

Tone/Pitch Play

I first ran into tone play (or pitch play) after watching the video Single Cue Point Pitch Play by DJ 69Beats,  There are a few tone play examples out there from the masters, but nothing really in the way of a tutorial.

I recently got my hands on a Numark NVii and I was wondering (already piecing together how to do it)  about doing a custom midi mapping, but with the release of Serato 1.9.6 (March 2017) it comes with the mappings required. Happy days.

I think then its best to watch some of the videos out there, and try and replicate them.

Here is the approach I have just taken, I looked at this video: Texas Tone Play with John Styles, about a minute in, he shows an example going from Martin Garix - Animals, into Steve Aoki - Boneless, two EDM bangers as he describes them.

So now it's time to try and replicate and practice.

The first thing I did was try to work out the sounds, the best way to do this if your ear doesn't quite work, and you are just trying to learn, it to either convert the song to midi, or look for someone who has done it.  In my case I found this video, Fl Studio Remake: Boneless - Steve Aoki, Chris Lake & Tujamo I looked at the bassline:

So in semitones, that's 0, , 0, -1, -4, -5, followed by 0,0,0,-1,-4,-5

That was good enough for me to proceed...

So now look at home best to replicate that in Serato, the Serato Blog has this post: Learn: Pitch Play, from that we can see that the mappings we want will all be heading down and need to go to -5, so we want this Down Range (Down 7 Semitones) :

We will use just the the four keys(2x2) on the right.

Next find the right sound in Animals, this is what I selected and set to my cuepoint 1:

Now I set a cue point in Boneless, set it to an 8 bar repeated loop

And whilst it is looping just repeatedly practice tapping out the semi tones on the pads, to get the right timing ...  (With that practice, I think the pattern is acutally  0, , 0, -1, -4  | 0,0,0,-1,-4,-5)

This at least is a rough approach to get started until someone writes up or vlogs something better....

Looking for more Ideas

Why not try looking at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx2ePQT4LNo there is a download in the link, and try an FLStudio trial.  I havent tried this approach yet, but it should give you some ideas to play with.