Usually the automatics catch the rhythm on their own. But material varies — a muffled kick, a noisy room, a track with no percussion — and for those cases the detector has manual settings. This article is a “first-aid kit”: what to tweak when the tempo isn’t being caught well.
📍 Where: the sound settings (the panel under the visualizer or the ⚙ in the Live sound monitor); the live KICK / LOCK monitor is there too, for checking the result.
First, understand what you’re seeing (the beat monitor, more detail in 07.24):
- KICK flashes on every caught beat;
- the bar shows the beat’s strength, the red line on it is the threshold;
- LOCK lights up when the tempo is caught stably.
The settings and what they’re for:
| Setting | What it does | When to tweak |
|---|---|---|
| Sensitivity | Boosts the reaction to beats (×1–×5) | KICK doesn’t flash on clear beats → increase; flashes from noise → decrease |
| Beat threshold | The level below which a spike isn’t counted as a beat (the red line) | Set the line a bit above the “dips” between kicks — weak junk is ignored |
| Low / High (bin) | The frequency band the beat is searched in | Default — bass (the kick). Move it higher if something other than the kick sets the rhythm |
| High-frequency detection | Mixes in the upper band (hats/cymbals, 6–14 kHz) | Material without a kick → add it; on a kick loop it gets in the way → turn it down to 0 |
| Octave (÷2 / ×2) | Force-divides/multiplies the caught tempo by 2 | The detector “hears” 60 instead of 120 (an octave error) → shift it by hand |
| Averaging window | Over how many seconds the tempo is averaged (2–20 s) | Larger = a more stable number, but a slower reaction to a tempo change; smaller = the opposite |
The typical sequence if the rhythm isn’t caught:
- Look at KICK: is it flashing in time?
- Not flashing → raise the sensitivity; flashing from everything → raise the threshold.
- The BPM number is half/double what you expect → Octave ÷2/×2.
- The number “drifts” → increase the averaging window.
- Nothing works at all → switch to TAP with the T key — two or three taps in time, and the tempo is set by hand.
💡 Tip: more reliable than any setting is the MIDI clock source, if the music comes from DJ software: there the tempo arrives as an exact number and detection isn’t needed at all.
