- In this full review
of the Denon DJ Prime 4
standalone four channel DJ system,
you're going to learn everything
that you need to know to decide
whether this is potentially
the DJ system for you.
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that doesn't need the laptop,
at least not for performing with.
It's only there to prepare your music on.
It's very exciting,
because it's got this huge
screen that you can see,
and it's very powerful,
far more powerful than
any standalone DJ system
that we've seen to date.
It kind of represents a
full circle for DJ stuff
because in the beginning
laptops arrived
and kind of wiped the floor
with everything that had come before them.
Well now the laptop isn't needed anymore
because the DJ systems
themselves have fought back
and they've got computers in them
that are approaching the power
in one of these things.
What does that mean for a DJ?
It means you don't need to take the laptop
into the DJ booth with you
to do all the cool stuff
that the very best software
and controller systems can do, in theory.
But how does it pan out in practise?
Well we've had a few days
to play with the Denon
DJ Prime 4 in our studio,
it's been a long time coming.
This is a Digital DJ Tips review
of this unit.
You're going to learn here
whether this is for you,
whether you're a mobile DJ,
or club DJ or a hobby DJ,
you're going to learn what we think
are the good points about it,
and the points that are
not so good at launch.
And for $1699 dollars,
you're going to learn whether
this is a good purchase
against other systems
that are out there right now.
So to start with,
I want to talk you around
the unit very quickly,
then we're going to dive in
and look in more detail
by playing some music
and some of the features in here,
and then we're going to go
and look at the software
because without the software
to prepare your music
you're kind of not getting
the full story with this.
So it's important to understand
what that software is
and how it works,
also how it integrates with
other software packages
because as you're going to find out,
that's one of the strengths of it.
Denon DJ is trying to make
this kind of universal
so whatever you're used to using
you can bring it with you to the Prime 4
and to the Prime ecosystem.
Okay, let's get started.
it's solid, it's got
great big feet on it,
it's got nice finishes
in various brushed and shiny surfaces.
It just feels like high quality.
It's immediately got that
Denon DJ look about it
with these green and blue light effects
although I'm going to show you how easy
it is to change those to something
that might suit you later on.
Overall it just feels professional,
it just feels like you could
be DJing anywhere on this
and not feel like you had
brought your controller along,
so that's a really good start.
It's got a nice weight to it,
the screen of course it's
the centrepiece of this,
folds flat like that,
and actually you can put
a cover over it.
Which is really nice,
that fits snugly,
but nonetheless the screen does stick out.
You're going to want
to buy a case for this
if you're moving the unit around
because otherwise there's a real risk
of knocking this and damaging it.
Now we thought this might
be a little bit flimsy
but actually,
the stand at the back here
does a really good job,
trying to undo it without looking at it,
there we go.
That does a really good job
of letting you put it at whatever
level you want
in order to see it properly,
which was always one of the things
that I didn't like about the iPad systems,
where they put a slot in the back
and you could put your iPad in there,
because it always held it
at one particular level.
So here,
it's good you can adjust
it to where you want it.
you can pinch waveforms
and get things moving around
in a really smooth way,
it just feels good,
it feels like a step up
from screens on DJ gear up to now.
We're going to have a
closer look at that in a bit
but, it's cool.
Touring around the system then,
let's start up here.
It's really good for
mobile and event DJs,
as most Denon gear in the past has been,
it's always been one of the niches
they've made sure to service well.
So there are two microphone channels here,
both of them have got independent on/offs,
levels, low and high and
mid, on one of them, EQs.
There's an echo which you
can switch independently
from one to the other,
although you have only one echo setting
for the mics.
Really, pretty comprehensive.
Plugging in around the back there,
I'll take you around the back in a minute.
So there's also a talk over button there,
and a lot of the things here
can be adjusted in the settings,
which we'll show you
when we get into the settings
later on in this review.
So the effects units, left and right here,
they're identical,
let's have a little look at this one here.
Now I'll demo this later,
but this has got really
nice built-in displays.
These are similar to effects units
you find on DJ controllers.
So this is one of the two identical decks,
the only thing different on the decks
is that the buttons here
select between decks one and three
on the left hand side,
and decks two and four
on the right hand side.
We've got the Digital
DJ Tips logo in here,
you can put any logo you want in there,
you can also display track artwork,
that's really nice.
So the deck itself is laid out
in a way which would be very familiar
to anyone used to using
decks or most DJ gear.
You've got the manual
and auto looping in and out here,
there's a slip mode, there's a vinyl mode,
the jog wheels are a lot smaller
than on the Denon DJ standalone gear,
the SC5000 and the motorised SC5000M.
In a controller this big,
I think they could have got away
with having these jog
wheels an inch bigger.
That said, they feel really nice to use
and again we're going to demo
that in a minute for you.
So track movement here,
the buttons
are hard plastic,
they're to me better than
having rubberized buttons,
I think that's the way
most people are going now.
They're very quick,
they're very snappy to use.
The performance pads down here are nice,
again we're going to demo them later.
Beatgridding is a good thing to have here.
Really nice big long pitch control,
I'll show you how good the Key Lock
is on that later on as well.
This is the central mixer section,
four channels as you would expect.
They're all independently available
for external stuff
around the back as well.
So you can control four
channels on your unit
but you can also plug four
different things in as well
and that switches along the front here.
They have sweep effects,
this is the same as colour
effects on Pioneer gear,
so you can set different
effects for the channels,
or the one effect will
go on all the channels.
So as well as that,
nice big metering up there
(fast-paced techno music)
that you can see going up and down.
The blue is bad on Denon gear.
Rounds off a really nice mixer.
The top here is the control
for moving up and down
through your library,
loading tracks and also
moving backwards and forwards
through stuff you've done on the screen.
Up here on the right
is one of the standout
features of this unit
for mobile DJs,
because this is called the zone output
and it allows you to play some music
in a different zone to
the main dance floor.
The way it works is
you plug something else in the back,
a lead going off to
another room or whatever,
you could even buy wireless system
so that you don't have to
wire it into another room
but basically you plug an output from here
into a sound system somewhere else
and then you can press the zone button
and take over channel four of the mixer
and from that channel
you can play a playlist that you choose
that is completely separate
to what you're playing in the main room
which is really nice.
So there's a zone output there
which we haven't seen on
any controller before,
to my knowledge anyway.
So the only other thing I think
I've missed out here is the Beatgridding.
There's Beatgridding sections
that let you adjust Beatgrids on-the-fly,
you can't change the BPM
of the song on-the-fly
and I haven't seen a tap button
anywhere in our investigations
which is quite common on DJ systems
that lets you tap in the BPM
if it hasn't guessed them.
There doesn't seem to
be a way of doing that,
but once the Beatgrid has
been decided by the system,
at least BPM wise,
you can shift the grid around there,
we'll show you more about that in a bit.
Let's have a look at
the front of the unit.
So this is pretty sparse,
you've got your headphones
as usual nowadays 1/4 and 1/8 inch
in and out for the headphones,
you've got your selectors
for whether you want to use the internal
or the USB or SD
or internal hard drive,
we'll talk to you about that in a bit,
or the external line inputs
for all four channels here.
You've got Fader Start,
which is a mobile DJ friendly feature,
some DJs like the track to start
when they push the fader up
so they don't have to
press the Play button.
You can adjust the
contour of the crossfader
for scratching or blending
and the other Fader Start there.
Around the back of the unit,
is the power on/off
and the ubiquitous Kensington Lock.
Actually probably worth
locking this one down
if you're leaving it for even seconds.
This is the power input,
the transformer's is built-in
so there's no pesky external transformer,
which is nice.
Here's various USB inputs
which allow you to do
things like get music on
and manage the internal hard drive,
we'll tell you about
the internal hard drive
in a little bit,
but that all happens from there.
This link also lets you
get some really cool stuff plugged in,
in this case lighting.
This is the proprietary
lighting link cable input,
and then you can plug this
into SoundSwitch or Resolume
in order to control external visuals.
So over here to the outputs,
this is the output for the zone
that I was telling you about
for somewhere else other
than your dance floor.
This is the booth output
and the master output,
of course these are all balanced XLRs,
and then here is the unbalanced output.
Another Denon feature
that I've always liked
is the ability to switch stereo and mono,
because a lot of sound systems are in mono
so no sense sending stereo out to them.
So the line inputs are here,
two of them are switchable to
phono, for all four channels
and the microphone inputs are here.
Unsurprisingly they are OMNI inputs
so you can use jacks or XLRs
to plug your microphones in.
So I've talked a bit about the music
and where it comes from on this,
up here at the top is where
you plug in your SD card,
which I've got my whole collection
on a really big SD card there, plugged in,
or there's two USBs,
so there's plenty of ways of
getting music into the system.
You don't have to have done
anything with the music,
you can just put stuff onto a CD,
onto a USB or an SD drive and plug it in
and it will work but as
we're going to find out
it's better to use the
software to analyse it first.
That said,
the processor in this is so powerful,
it does a really good job
of getting to grips
with anything you put in
pretty quickly.
Now underneath the unit
is a hard drive slot.
This is really cool,
there's no hard drive supplied with it
but you can put up to a one
terabyte hard drive officially,
unofficially two or four
terabytes work fine,
into this unit
and you can keep all of your music on it.
Plug your laptop in to
manage it, nothing else,
unplug your laptop again
and this can literally
have everything you've got
on it at all times,
so that makes it a standalone
in the true sense of the word,
it could literally be
your whole musical life,
one unit.
I mean you can have this
in your living room,
controlling your music.
It'd be pretty cool wouldn't it?
So that's how music gets into the system.
apart from the very end
when we're going to go
and look at the software
which is crucially important,
is about just that about
getting the music loaded.
I'll show you how it plays,
I'll show you how it all works,
I'll show you the effects,
I'll show you the pads and
the transport controls,
and the pitch and all that kind of stuff.
So, well we've got to get some tracks
onto the decks to start with haven't we?
So let's look at how that happens.
The first option at the
top is your collection,
this is the database that's on the media
that you're currently accessing.
You can access one media at a time,
so for instance I'm currently
looking at my SD card
and there's a light there to show me that,
I'm not looking at the USB
or any internal hard
drive that was fitted.
You can switch this in the software
which we'll look at in a bit,
So that's an important thing to notice.
So everything that's going on here
is related to the to the media
that's got the lights switched on.
If you want to switch DJ's,
another DJ can plug their stuff in
and the track that's currently playing
from the media that is currently live
remains playing while
that DJ switches over,
so you can have smooth DJ switchovers
but important to note that you can't play
from lots of different
kinds of media at once,
just the one.
Right, so we're looking
at my SD card here,
and in this SD card is a collection,
this is what this is
showing me, the collection.
Within that collection are crates.
I've got some of Joey's music
and some of Steve's music in
here as two separate crates.
It's nice because you can
keep whole chunks of music,
whole sections of music,
you know someone else's stuff
or stuff that I'd never play
in the club only at home.
You can keep them in big crates,
and that's what crates means.
The next one down is playlists.
So in playlists,
we can create a playlist
by hitting here, giving it a name,
you can see the keyboard comes up.
So I'll just call this My List,
and then hitting create.
I now have a new playlist here
which I can add tracks to,
I'll show you how to do that in a bit.
So I'll turn off that edit
function there, go down here.
This is called the Prepare Window,
this is where you can put tracks,
it's like pulling them
up in a record case,
where you can put tracks that
you want to play imminently
and then as soon as you play them
they disappear from this window.
The next one down
is your actual file system,
so literally where the
files are on those drives.
It's a bit like when you
go to Windows Explorer
or the finder on a Mac
and you've got folders and files in them.
So here you can browse around stuff
for instance if you've got an SD card
with some music on that
someone's just given you,
they're just files,
they've never been seen
by this system before,
you'll go and find them in there
and that's where you'll start from.
And finally the Search function.
Search function is really nice,
this keyboard pops up, you've
already seen the keyboard,
it's an easy way of doing it.
Although you can plug a hardware keyboard
into this if you like,
which is a nice addition,
a lot of mobile DJs like to have
a hardware keyboard as well.
Search has got this
drop-down which is powerful,
so we can select what
we want to search by,
you could only search by
Title, Artist and Album
as I've got set here.
If you never use Album you
might as well turn that off,
you might want to include Comments
because you have a tagging
system that you use Comments for,
and everything else.
It's a nice way of just
filtering the results
you're going to get from search.
Anyway it doesn't matter
how you've done it,
at some point you're going to want to
start doing those things
I was talking about.
Adding tracks to playlists,
or adding them to Prepare Windows.
So let's have a look at how to do that.
If I wanted to add tracks to a playlist,
I can hit this edit button here,
highlight the tracks I
want to add to the playlist
then head over to the playlist
and grab all the tracks and
just drop them in there.
It's actually really easy
and after a while it's quite intuitive.
Organising your collection,
putting stuff into playlists,
putting stuff into crates,
you can do a lot of stuff
that you normally do
on the computer on here
and the nice thing about this is
that you can then take this
SD card or this USB drive
and put it back into your computer
and update your master collection,
if you like, over there.
Again we're going to
look at the way it works
from the computer later on.
Now that's similar to the
way it works with Rekordbox
but it does work and it is good
because it means changes you make here,
arrangements and organisation
you do here isn't lost
when you get out of the DJ booth
and back to your studio at home.
Okay, shall we load a track?
to get the track on this screen,
which says load to deck.
So I get to choose which of the four decks
I want to load the track to from there.
Another way of doing it,
is to press the load button here.
Left or right and it will
load to the selected deck.
So in this instance let's
press the load button,
that track's now loaded
onto deck one over here.
When a track is loaded
the track colours show
pretty much everywhere.
The track colour is
showing on the ring here,
track colour is showing on the
Cue button for the deck here,
and it's also showing on the screen
and I'll show you later on
how you can change the track
colour for all the decks.
It's just nice because
you kind of know by
colour what you're doing,
it can get quite
confusing with four decks,
four tracks across two decks otherwise.
So alright, that tracks loaded.
You get it playing by hitting
the Play/Pause button.
(fast-paced techno music)
And that's playing away there now.
The Cue button will take
us back to the beginning
to where the temporary cue is set.
And I can press Play and Pause again
or the Cue button will
start it temporarily
until I take my hand off it,
this is all pretty standard behaviour
for DJ controllers by the way,
although you can tweak
the way these things work
in the settings, we'll
get to that later on.
So with our track playing then,
we have a few options for controlling it
apart and just get back to the
cue point and pressing pause.
We can Beat Jump,
and Beat Jumping is when
you move ahead or back
by a set number of beats.
That's what these two buttons do here.
We can set how many beats
by using this knob here
and it tells us how many
beats we're going to jump
in the middle of the screen.
Quite standard would be to have that set
maybe to 16 beats or 4 bars
and by pressing Beat Jump we will now
jump pretty quickly through this track
and you can see it happening
on the main screen.
(fast-paced techno music)
And you can do it very quickly.
And you can set that to more beats
so you can 64 beats or 16 bars of music,
that's quite a long jump.
But notice how it still sounds good.
This is a function the
Traktor's very good at,
this is very good at it as well.
It just means that you can quickly skip
backwards and forwards
in tracks creatively
or just cause you want
to get out the track,
if you want to skip out a
chorus or two or whatever.
So that's how Beat Jump works.
If you hold down Shift,
it's like an old-fashioned kind of scrub
or quickly move through the track
and it's like this.
So I'm going quickly
through the track now,
it's not musical at all
but it can be useful for
quickly getting to a point
that you want to in the track.
So this control here feels nice,
it's the pitch control,
and also the key algorithms are brilliant.
The best key algorithms out
there Traktor, Serato,
this is up there with them,
it just sounds awesome,
listen to this.
This is now locked so the
pitch is going to stay the same
and I'm going to slow
this down quite a long way
and then we'll go really extreme.
(fast-paced techno music)
That's minus eight.
And that's plus eight.
But by pressing shift and range,
I can change it to a
plus or minus 100% now
It tells you on the screen.
(slow techno music)
Minus 60%.
It's still usable.
I mean you can go crazy right,
that's literally stopped,
but listen to how good it sounds
when you speed it up as well.
Back to normal.
(fast-paced techno music)
We're already 40% faster,
it's a really nice algorithm.
You'd very, very rarely want
to do anything like that
to track but the point is
you're not pushing it very hard
when you lock the key and move
it within normal parameters.
Really nice, we were impressed by that.
So other things around here,
the looping works like this.
(fast-paced techno music)
Hit loop,
adjust left or right,
it tells you how big the loop
you've got going is here.
There's a two beat loop,
there's a four beat loop.
Very standard stuff.
You can loop manually by
using these buttons here,
there's a manual start, manual stop,
and it's loops out there.
In the settings you can tell
it to snap to the nearest beat
so that even your manual
loops sound really good.
The slip mode works really
well on these controllers,
let's skip back to the beginning
so I've got more time to show you.
In fact I'm going to use that
button to skip beginning.
The slip mode let's the track
you're currently playing
carry on playing while
you do something clever.
So I'll turn it on, let's
say my clever thing involves
just a little bit of baby scratching.
(techno music scratching)
As soon as I stop doing that,
the track carries on from where it was
and you can see that by
looking at the screen.
I've stopped the track
but you see that the waveform
continues playing here.
When I start the track playing again
it will jump to where it is
on this greyed out waveform.
(fast-paced techno music)
You see it's carrying
on playing underneath,
it's really nice and it works brilliantly.
It's just something that works great
and once you start playing with it
you're going to want that on
a lot when you're messing.
However, don't leave it on.
When you leave it on it can
really mess you up, you're like,
"What's going on, things
not working how it should."
It flashes to show you that.
That's Slip Mode, the Vinyl Mode
is a way of turning on or off this.
This is off.
You see how it's just slowing that down,
for nudging use that for beat mixing,
and speeding it up.
If I turn that on
the top of the jog wheel scratches
but the edge continues to do this.
This is again standard
stuff on controllers,
it's well implemented here.
The jogwheels feel a little bit small,
but apart from that they're right.
They're the right weight,
they're responsive, they're good.
I don't find them a problem at all,
I just think on a unit this big
they could have been a bit bigger
as I might have mentioned earlier.
So that's the jog wheels,
that's the Key Lock and the Pitch,
by the way turn that off,
you don't have to have that locked.
(techno music speed increases)
That's what it sounds
like without that locked
and the other controls around here.
Let's have a look at the pads.
and so you can see that
unlike deck one which is blue
deck three is set to green,
everything goes green,
this loop here goes green,
the load button goes green,
there's a green flash up there,
it's really nice.
So with this track loaded onto deck three
here's our deck three,
let's have a little
peek at how these work.
So the long and short of it
is you've got most of the stuff on here
that you get on DJ controllers
with the notable exception
exception of a sampler.
There's no sampler on here at all.
But let's have a look through them,
so hot cues are selected by
pressing the first button
and you can set cues pretty
much as you do on all DJ gear
by just pressing a hot
cue button, like this.
There's a hot cue set
and I'm jumping back to it now.
You delete it by pressing Shift
and hot cue and it goes away.
So that's how you set a hot cue,
my one there is set right
at the start of the track,
very standard for DJs to set a hot cue
at the start of a track, so
that's how the hotkeys work.
Over to the loop function.
So looping is pretty cool on here,
so I'll take a bit of time
explaining how it works.
We had a look quickly at the
standard looping top left
and is standard it's just
like on Pioneer gear,
this is nowadays pretty much
how looping work on most stuff
but down here they do
it a bit differently.
So for instance if I want to
set a loop on one of these pads
I can set the loop starting
by pressing the pad like this
and when I want to stop it press it again
and it'll automatically
loop that section for me.
And I can turn it off by just
pressing it one more time.
That loop's now off,
but I can get back to it any time I want.
That loop's now on again,
so I can turn it off again
by pressing it like that.
That's pretty cool right,
I can do a shorter one,
let's do another loop here.
That's just a two beat loop,
I can get out of that one,
and I can get back to the
first one by pressing there.
So these are pretty good
but also, let's just skip
on in the track a little bit
to something a bit more musical.
Okay, if I want to set a loop
going here at this section
I could just use the manual looping here
or indeed the auto looping here.
So let's just set an
auto loop of two beats.
There's a loop,
I think that sounds pretty cool,
I want to use that again,
I can just touch the loop button
as long as I've got looping set here.
That is now saved there in the
same way I showed you earlier
and then I can get out of it, go away
but it stays there for me to come back to
along with the two I did before that.
And you'll notice that
the colours on the screen
correspond with the colour
of the loop on here as well.
Everything is color-coded
nicely on this unit.
There's my first one.
So looping's is pretty cool on there.
So the second kind of looping we've got
is called Auto Loop on here.
On most DJ controllers
it's kind of the main one
but anyway it's got a secondary
function on this button.
To get to it, you press the button again,
this all goes green.
So Auto Loop gives you
easiest way to demonstrate it,
let's just touch that button there,
that's now going to two beat loop,
there's two in the middle there.
(fast-paced techno music)
looping two beats.
If I want to halve that,
I press the one to the left.
Halve it again.
Again.
Turn it off.
You've heard that right,
and it works the same
in the other direction,
so if I want a double it,
go up to four beats,
eight beats and so on
up to 32 there.
So the next type of looping
is an expressive type,
again it's kind of like
one we just looked at
but even easier to use
and even easier to get good results from,
it's called Loop Roll,
and effectively it's
what we just looked at
with slip mode turned on.
So in other words you can
mess around with loops
and soon as you stop it sounds great,
you'll see that the screen
shows you that as well
when we turn it on
we hit the Roll button, get
that track playing again.
So the other thing about this one
is it only works when
your hands are on the pad,
so to mess around with
the track like this.
(fast-paced repetitive tehcno music)
And so on.
So again, this is doing a set of rolls
but also the slip mode's
working underneath.
You can see it on the screen,
a slip mode will show you
where you're going to be
when you take your hand off the button,
I'm going to be the
middle of the breakdown.
Slicer works exactly as
it works on other DJ gear,
I'm going to admit right
at the beginning here
I find Slicer it to be something
that is a little bit an enigmatic to me.
What it does is take a chunk of the music
that's currently playing and
divides it up into sections
which you can then manipulate
on this on the screen here.
I just can't get it
sounding particularly good
on the kind of music I play.
Anyway it works exactly
as you will have seen it
on other DJ gear.
This is showing me the chunks of the track
that's currently playing
and I can slice them up.
Hence the name.
(techno music)
Slice the loop,
does the same thing
but it loops a section
of the current track,
in other words it locks a
section of the current track,
and then you can just play with it
for as long as you want
and when you turn it off the
track will carry on playing.
As I say I'm not going to pretend
that that's my favourite function,
it's there for you slicer heads.
That's the pads.
to work on this kind of system.
So I'm going to just get
out that slicer mode there
and go back to the beginning of the track
and hit the BeatGrid button.
Hold that Edit Grid button
until it starts flashing,
so on the screen here I can see the grid
and I can shift the grid
to just line it up with the beats
using the jog wheel
and when you're happy with it that's cool.
Another thing you can do
is use these buttons here
to move the bars up and down on your track
if they're not lined up properly,
so that's the first beat
of the bar is now there,
first beat of the bar is now there,
it's now there,
this is the first beat of the whole track
and that is correct.
And one final thing you can do down here
is double or halve the complete BPM,
because if it gets it wrong
it normally gets it wrong in that way,
it'll guess it twice the speed it is
or half the speed it is.
And again, by holding Shift down,
Shift's here, and pressing these buttons
you can do that.
So that's your beatgridding.
Right, let's move on
and look at these awesome FX engines.
to show the effects off to you on.
Now to get the FX Engine
working on channel four
I've got to press FX at the top there
to the correct engine,
FX 2 and the number two.
One would give me number one,
you can't have them both on together.
So FX engine two on,
start the track playing
and I'll talk you through how it works.
So above above each of these knobs
you have this lovely little screen
which is really nice,
it's what you need right there.
So by turning the FX engine on
the effect will start
but in order to really hear it
we need to turn the Wet/Dry all the way up
and now you can hear a flanger effect,
which is going around every half beat
which is what this 1/2 Beat means here.
I want to make the Flanger go
over a longer period of time
I can use these buttons here
to increase the number of beats
that that Flanger is working across.
Now, various other parameters
will come on or off
depending upon the effect
that you've got set,
so in this particular effect
we've got another
parameter called Frequency.
It's quite common one,
quite a good one.
So let me show you how this works.
Frequency will decide what
part of the spectrum of music
from very low to very high
is being affected.
So at the moment it's the whole track
but for instance if I turn it clockwise,
you can hear how the bass
line is now not plunging.
I can get just the Hi-Hats
which sounds quite nice
any fans of eighties progressive house
will know that one
because it was pretty popular back then.
So this is a nice control
we can do the same by only affecting
the bass frequencies for instance.
So there's quite a few effects here,
when you switch to a new one
it turns the effects off down here,
you have turn it on again.
So this is a filter LFO,
it's a filter that will cycle
to the number of beats we've got set here.
(tehcno music)
You can use Resonance
I'll get it down to four beats,
so it's going around
a bit more frequently,
you can use the Resonance Control
to decide how deeply it filters.
(techno music changing speed)
Again.
There's a Wet/Dry function here
to get that more intense
and that frequency control
has lived on in this one as well.
Next one, Phaser.
Simulates to Flanger,
those sound good right?
We were pretty impressed with these.
Next one, the Beat Crusher,
pretty extreme effect.
Especially if we have it on full here.
It's that electronic, kind
of industrial feel to it.
(electronic music)
Bit more subtle when we only put it
over some of the frequencies.
The next one is Roll,
let's have a listen to roll,
it's a little bit like the Loop Roll
down on the buttons here.
(techno music)
It's alright, I don't
know why you wouldn't
just use the buttons for that personally,
you get more control down there.
So that's Loop Roll.
Reverse Roll,
it does what it says on the tin.
It's just reversing.
Going backwards.
That is actually quite nice
and you can't do that on the pad.
Beat Brake is pretty cool,
what this does is chop up the beats
that are currently playing.
Like cutting in and out to a set pattern,
it's a bit like the Gate
but it's a programmed gate,
and there's lots of
patterns you can play on.
So let's put this on full
and kick it in
and I want to jump to a part the track
that isn't the Brake,
because there's no beats
in the Brake to chop up.
So let's go back to near the beginning,
by the way you press Pause,
touch the waveform, it'll
jump in the track for you.
And start that playing again.
So you've got to tap this one in
bang on the beat for it to work,
or if it's chopping off kind of space
and it sounds a bit messy,
so let's do that.
Hear how that's chopped the beat up,
if I turn that down
that's what it sounds like normally.
And that's chopped up
but there's patterns, that's
the important thing here.
Totally different feel.
(techno music)
Try another one.
They're really nice
and you can chop up vocals
and you can chop up all
kinds of things with those
so we like that one,
we had a bit of fun here
messing around with that one.
Scratch, what it does is scratch,
it lets the track play for a beat
then it scratches back for that period.
So let's set to just a single beat
and turn Scratch on.
Forwards, back, forwards, back.
And again, you could have
that just on some frequencies.
Quite nice, a bit more subtle
and you couldn't do that over
here on the decks of course.
So Scratch is quite nice for that.
Reverb, have a listen to the Reverb.
Very big reverb there.
There's an Echo,
which is what is says on the tin.
By the way these are all post fade effects
so let's just get that echo on.
You see how that's echoing away
even though the channel is turned down.
Delay will just delay it
by one beat like this.
You see that just delayed it once
to the two beats that we got set
and it disappeared,
so unlike the echo it
doesn't have that tail on it.
Hall Echo it's just a big messy echo,
if I turn it on and turn the channel off
you can hear what it sounds like.
It's got that big hall kind of fit,
it's like an echo plus
a Reverb kind of thing.
Ping Pong Echo goes from left to right
and Auto Gate's a nice one as well,
it's called gate on a lot of DJ stuff
so let's just get that switched on.
An Auto Gate will chop the beat in and out
by the setting that you have here,
so I've got that set to half a beat
and I've got it on full,
let's get the track playing again
and turn it on.
(staggered techno music)
Every half beat is cutting in and out.
And you can set it to
one beat if you want.
And there's other values as well,
I don't like the way
that you have to jump past the 3/4 beat
to get to half beat
because these buttons,
you know when I was showing
you down here on the pads
you could go double or half
by going up or down left or right,
I would like to have an
option to turn that off
because basically if you're trying
to do a roll effect on an effect
and you want to jump from one
to half to a quarter to an eighth,
you've got this weird kind of one
that can throw your rhythm
off in the middle there.
Anyway it's a very small thing.
So that's Auto Gate,
and we've got Flanger
which sounds like this.
(upbeat techno music)
That's the Filter LFO,
and we're back to the Phaser
effect at the beginning.
Overall, they're awesome
and you've got two of them to play with
as well as the effects down here,
the Sweep FX which we have yet to look at,
so thumbs up for those.
So let's look at the Sweep FX,
before we do I just want to point out
for all you split cue fans,
one thing in one headphone
one in the other,
hooray you've got the button,
you don't often get that
on all-in-one units.
So these Sweep FX,
you've got four of them.
Filter.
(techno music fades in and out)
You've got echo.
(techno music intensifies)
Wash.
(repetitive techno music)
And the Noise effect,
I'll just jump back to some beats.
I'm sure you've heard
this in a many an EDM set.
Interesting thing about the Noise FX...
...is that it works,
even with the track stopped.
It adds something in over the top.
They all do that, or
most of them do anyway,
but just if you've never seen that before
the others don't, there's nothing going on
when the track isn't playing
but noise there is.
Now if all that wasn't enough,
you can really get under
the hood of this thing
on the screen and in the screen setting
so let's have a look at that.
which I've already shown you
which is really wonderful,
you get a whole load
of extra things on here
which allow you to customise
a lot the stuff we've seen.
By holding down the View button
we get these four big screens.
So one of them is Record,
you can see that I'm recording
everything I'm doing here
so that we can use it in the final video,
and this is nice you
can record to anything
that you've got plugged into the unit.
Another thing is the Source
so these are the easy ones
I'm showing you first.
This is just the source mode
of the music that's currently playing.
You can switch to different sources.
If I had more than two things plugged in
they'd all show here.
The two big ones are
Utility and Preferences
so let's have a look at those.
So starting with Utility,
loads and loads of
granular settings in here
so we can set whether we want
decks three and four to show at all,
we've had four vertical decks haven't we
but they don't have to be that way,
you can have just two
if you want to use it as a two controller,
so that's set there.
You got Screen Brightness,
loads of microphone controls
so Microphone Attenuation,
whether the mic plays in the booth or not
which can be good for feedback,
you've got EQ
which I just showed you the
EQ nearly fully cutting,
you can make it fully cut
by selecting isolate there
you can set where the EQ crosses over
between low and mid and mid and high,
there's a Filter Types there
so you can have the resonance
which is how musical the filters sound
and also how extreme they are.
That can all be set there.
That noise control I showed you
you can say how loud it is basically
which is something that
users of a lot of DJ gear
wish they could adjust,
you could adjust it on this.
Now you've got your Headphone Gain there,
there's all other kinds of bits and pieces
about updating the firmware and so on
so a lot going on in that menu.
So the next window is Preferences,
so there's five big things in here.
There's Playback preferences
this is just around loading tracks
and how they work,
stuff around tempo, stuff around sync,
whether it jumps to the
beginning of the track
or whether it jumps to the previously set
temporary cue point,
all that stuff is in there,
the default range for
the pitch fader as well.
The second one is Cues and Loops,
so you can set how smart
the cues and loops are,
how good they make you look,
in other words what beats they jump to,
whether your manual loops
jump to the nearest beat
or stay totally manual
and freestyle and so on.
Display is about how the
tracks are displayed,
is it going to use the track title
or the chat file name
and things like this.
Time Format is an interesting one,
Time Format will tell you
how long you've got left
in the track depending
upon where you've got
the Pitch Fader set so in other words
if you slow the track down quite a lot
you're going to have a few more seconds
than if you spread it out quite a lot,
and that will allow you to choose
whether you want that or not as well.
There's safety functions here,
so you can lock the deck that's playing
so you can't accidentally
load a track onto it
and stop it playing
when you think you're loading
a track or to another deck,
and you can lock the pads out as well.
A lot of DJ's are not
that interested in pads,
they just want to play they're
tapping them all the time
and making making mistakes that way.
Just turn them off.
So that's there as well.
So you've got some
library functions in here,
you can decide how the unit reads,
the key of the music it's playing,
whether it's going to tell you that
in traditional musical format
or in the kind of DJ formats
and you can also set
when you're asking it to
show you compatible tracks,
both for BPM and for key.
It'll show you your choice of whether
it shows you stuff that's
in a very nearby BPM,
or the same or a little bit wider,
and the same with the key,
same key or keys are probably
going to mix all right.
So the easter-egg at the
end of this is deck colours,
this is awesome.
So say I want to make the deck colours
match the Digital DJ Tips logo,
the blue ones look alright
on decks one and two
but decks three I want
a nice purple colour.
Look at that deck three is now purple.
Ooh I like that.
Now my whole unit
has been Digital DJ Tipsified,
how cool is that?
And you can set any colours
you want for your decks there
which again is a really nice feature,
so, no I don't like that one,
I want to go back to something
that's close to our company logo.
Yes, that looks nice.
So a lot of stuff for you to get into
under the hood there.
so you get a sense of it.
This is something that
Denon DJ is spending
a lot of time working on right now,
by the time you watch this
they'll probably have updated it once
and then twice and so on
so we'll probably have an extra review
just looking at the
software in the future.
For now though, you're
going to use this software
to prepare your music
you're going to plug in
your USB or your SD cards
and they're going to
show in this window here
and you're going to add
cues and loops and so on,
on one deck or on two
decks, it's up to you.
I can switch to that second deck on or off
you can kind of practise
your mixes here as well.
So this is kind of like your
all-in-one preparation window
where you can get everything ready
so that when you turn up
to actually DJ at your gig,
it's all how you want it.
Hot cues, loops, key syncs been done.
You've even practise your mixes a bit
you can name your cues and
colour them and stuff like that.
It's pretty good.
But it's not as good as
for instance Rekordbox.
Which you it's not too
surprising because guess what
Rekordbox has been there for 10 years now
helping the DJs of Pioneer
gear prepare their stuff.
This is much newer than that.
This hasn't got tagging,
it hasn't got smart playlists
that you would find on Rekordbox
and so it'll be a bit frustrating
if you're coming to it from Rekordbox.
But a couple of things it has got,
as well as being able to
import your iTunes library,
look at this,
you can get your Serato
library in here as well.
And it gets better,
you can import your Traktor library into here
and now your Rekordbox library.
So while this might not be fully featured
as a preparation software
for Pioneer gear,
you can bring your collections
from Traktor, Pioneer
and Serato into here.
Now they work in different ways
depending upon the software
but the point is they're putting
this functionality in here.
And we spoke to Denon
about what the timeline
is for improving this software,
because I think this would
be one of the sticking points
for a lot of people thinking about
whether they want to move to this system,
and they said that they've
invested 10 million pounds
in a 20-person strong
software development team
only working on DJ software,
firmware engine and so on.
So you've got you get the
feeling that they know
they've got to develop this
in order to support the hardware,
the two are going to go hand-in-hand.
As I say we'll take time
to have a deeper look
at the software as it develops
over the coming time period.
But for now it works,
it's good enough to get the music ready
and put onto the unit.
And the unit's so powerful
that you can even just plug music in
that hasn't been anywhere near that
and it will work really nicely with it.
So yes we think this needs some work,
but as a start
it does the job that it's intended to do.
It's incredible.
For the money this is incredible.
This is brand-new, this
is state-of-the-art,
what you've got here
even a year ago was kind of unthinkable
and here it is.
The power in this thing is amazing,
four channels,
this incredible responsive screen,
the speed that it analyses tracks at,
even from other DJ
software, is incredible.
And it's a real laugh to use,
it's so much fun.
The screens here make effects good to use,
just having your artwork
or your logos here
getting the colour how you want it
that's all awesome.
The power under the hood
means the sound quality's brilliant,
we didn't have time to demonstrate
Key Sync and Key Lock, that sounds amazing
you have heard the effects,
they sound amazing.
The quality overall is really really high,
it's not going to let you down
both either in and build quality
or in what's under the hood.
It's it's state-of-the-art, its fantastic.
With anything that
state-of-the-art of course,
there is a downside.
In the case of the Prime 4
the downside is the learning curve
because while the screen's amazing
while the way you arrange
your music's amazing,
the preparation and so on is great,
there is a learning curve in doing that
and you need to be slightly geeky I'd say
to be able to kind of work
out what's going on here
compared to what's going
on in the software,
and the second downside for us
is the Engine software.
Because if Denon DJ
want to get people over
from Rekordbox, which is the
other big preparation software
for pro DJ gear
they're going to have to
work on that software,
there's no two ways about it.
It hasn't got the smart
playlist is a big thing
you really do need playlists
that can auto populate to your rules,
they're not there yet,
but also tagging is a big
bit of Pioneer's software
that just isn't there
and I'd really like to see those things
put into the software.
So should that happen,
and should this get a bit of traction
I think what you're looking at here
is the perfect mobile DJing system.
You've got the zone out,
I mean that in itself, amazing.
But also because of all the functions,
the four channels, the pads,
you got a really good system for anyone
who can think past the market
leader in clubs and so on
and think about something different
because the performance
stuff is here as well.
All in all for the money it's great value,
it's great fun
and we think it's got a great future.
It's the Denon DJ Prime 4 system.
So tell us what you think,
what haven't we covered
that you'd like us to cover,
ask us below and we will get back to you
and help you out with that stuff,
and if enough of you ask
we'll make some extra videos as well.
If you've found this useful
please do hit the subscribe button,
hit the notify bell so
that you'll find out
when we add more reviews,
but meanwhile this has been
A Digital DJ Tips Prime 4 review,
get good, get out there, make the moments
and we'll see you very
soon in another one.
