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5. Realistic scratching with DJ software

1 If you can scratch a bit, why not bounce parts out of your current project and do some actual scratches? We’ve bounced down instrumental and vocal stems from a hip-hop track, then loaded them into Serato DJ. Pitch is set to 0% on both decks, so our samples will stay at the same pitch as our song. 2 To capture scratching without the beat behind it, monitor the instrumental and master output, with the instrumental fader down so it doesn’t play through the master out. Plug your DJ mixer’s record output into the Serato interface’s Aux to record cuts back into the computer with Serato’s internal recording feature… 3 After hitting Record, play the instrumental and lay down a few cuts. Once done, save the audio as a WAV file. We can now bring the cuts back into our track and arrange them on the timeline. We used Serato DJ with vinyl turntables for this, but you can also do this easily using CDJs or a DJ controller.