Jog Wheel Feel or spinning speed Denon Prime 4+

Hi, i just bought a denon DJ Prime 4+ and i was supprised about how stif the jog wheels are, they wont turn 1 cycle when you give a back spin. Is there some settings to ajust the feel of the jog wheels, like lose or tight?

There is no brake adjustment on the Prime 4+ jog wheel because they are factory calibrated.

If you want to perform longer backspins, you need to apply more force to your movement.

However, you can use a trick:

Activate Fader-Echo in the top bar of the screen, perform your backspin, then suddenly lower your volume fader. This will create an echo effect on your backspin.

Note that this process is done in two steps, one after the other, and you will need to set the quantization to 1 beat.

It’s not exactly the same effect as a long backspin, but the effect is still nice during transitions.

Got a Prime4+ as well and recognize what you are saying. I’ve found the FX of backspin a valid workaround for most of my work and the more I’m using it the easier it gets. Especially setting the beats, speed etc. gives and extra dimension to the backspin. And you can configure two FXs and assign them to a desired channel. A bit more work with buttons but it might cover your needs.

Technically there is nothing stopping the software from allowing you increase the sensitivity of the movement of the jog wheel. I think there might already be an option when using it adjust the grid. So when you perform a back spin, it just increases the the number of revolutions that the movement returns. It would not feel as natural as mechanical but over time being adjustable, it would not be long to configure it to something that simulates the backspin without this juggling work around. especially for newbies like me that haven’t built up the muscle memory to do even the most basic things.

As a user of an mpc, for some reason, I took to it like a duck to water but with the prime 4 I’m still very robotic and haven’t reached that flow state yet

Given that there’s already a nudge sensitivity setting with four presets, I think further increasing the sensitivity via software would also affect the nudge sensitivity.

The default value is already relatively very/too sensitive for many people’s liking. And the feel varies depending on the device.

The jog wheels on an SC Live 4 feel much lighter than those on a Prime 2 or 4. When I use these devices, I choose the minimum sensitivity preset to gain accuracy during beatmatching.

So I don’t see how increasing the software sensitivity for backspin wouldn’t also affect the nudge sensitivity in some way. You might get longer backspins, but you would lose a lot of accuracy for beatmatching due to the excessive sensitivity.

No idea mate, I think nudge is a different operation to what is used when you spin the platters. Nudge is activated by touching the side of the platter whereas the top of the platter is where I touch to perform the back spin so that is a different sensor and so it’s this sensitivity that I would have thought is what would need to be adjusted. So if my hand is on top of the platter and I perform a back spin, the faster I pull back the platter this would translate to more rotation before the wave form stops tapering off towards the full stop before resuming playing back at a normal speed.

remember it’s software that is translating movement of the platter to move the play back head. The correlation between the two is not physical and rather just code translating these inputs into rules that are applied to the wave form that has been loaded into memory.

I use the prime 4 so I’m not sure if that is not the same as other devices. If the sc platter feels lighter feels different but the rotations are still code translating this movement into digital information. So if the coders wanted, they could make a rotation to map 1 to 1 to movement of the playback head but could change that to 1-2 or whatever they want and it’s this that they could implement in an update the same way the sensitivity of nudge works which is a different input as it’s achieved through touching the sensor on the edge of the platter or rather by not touching the sensor on the top of the platter.

have a good day mate :+1:t3:

Actually, no, there’s only one optical sensor that determines both the direction and speed of the jog wheel and then sends the information back to Engine OS.

The distinction between nudge and backspin is made by Engine OS simply by adding two nested conditions:

Engine OS checks if vinyl mode is active.

  • If not, then only nudge mode is active, regardless of where the jog wheel is touched.

  • If yes, then Engine OS checks if it receives a touch response from the jogwheel touch plate :

  • If no touch input is detected, then the nudge function is activated.

  • If touch input is detected, then scratch mode is activated (including for backspins).

Therefore, since the sensor is shared, if you increase its sensitivity for scratch mode, you simultaneously increase it equally for nudge mode.

But that’s the point

  • If touch input is detected, then scratch mode is activated (including for backspins).

    so we need to be able to adjust this sensitivity momentarily for when we are performing a backspin which can be done if coded by the dev.

  • Ie

    If in vinyl mode and touch input is detected, and shift button is held down use increase tail off time from spin.

  • We have different vinyl stop times settings so a similar option could be implements for backspin time. I still think it is possible especially as vinyl stop is able to do what it does when you press stop on the deck. It would just need to translate the force of spin movement when the platter is span backwards and the platter doesn’t detect contact any more which is what it does already but the playback head scrolls even longer before gradually tapering down to a full stop.

  • it’s only software translating movement and making it a shift function or some other way to easily toggle between default and your preferred setting means you can activate when you need to perform a backspin and the reactivate the default setting which is almost 1:1 revolutions.

  • This would solve the issue that you suggest about affecting the nudging.

Thanks for your reply as that has helped me think this through a bit more and I still believe it’s possible and maybe a feature that we might see in a future update.

Have a great day friend