Recommended resources
The freely available resources this lesson will direct you to.
Hi! Last time, you learned to tell apart three problems: a wrong BPM, beat lines that miss the pulse, and a red bar marker that misses the musical one. Now you’ll repair those errors on a fixed-tempo house or techno track. The aim is not just to make one part of the waveform look right; it is to make the grid agree with the music near the beginning, in the middle, and near the end.
Set aside about 40 minutes, with most of that time available to work on one track you audited previously. Choose a track with a steady section you can count confidently. If its tempo audibly changes, save it for another time: today’s method assumes one BPM can describe the track throughout.
Open the grid editor and settle the tempo
In Export mode, load your track in the 1 PLAYER view, pause it, and open GRID beneath the enlarged waveform. Rekordbox’s manual gives the precise route through that interface. Its screenshots and icon placement may differ from your version, but the functions are the same ones to look for.
Read the official Rekordbox manual’s short procedure for opening and editing a beat grid. Use it to locate the controls on your screen before changing anything.
In EXPORT mode, find “Checking the beat (beat grid),” then its “Adjust the beat grid” procedure (printed around pp. 74–75). Read the editing steps, from the description of the enlarged waveform through step 4. Notice that the grid lines change appearance while editing; that alone does not mean you have changed the audio.
First decide which pulse you want the BPM to count. If Rekordbox shows roughly 64 BPM while you count the house kick at roughly 128 BPM, use the grid editor’s double BPM control. Use halve BPM for the opposite error. If the displayed value is simply wrong—for example, it says 98 when you count a steady pulse near 125—enter a plausible BPM in the editor’s BPM field. Treat your count as a starting estimate, not a guarantee that the grid will remain accurate for the whole track. Tap BPM can also give you an estimate, but tapping errors make it less useful for the final fine adjustment.
A BPM edit changes the spacing between grid lines. It does not, by itself, establish where beat one occurs. That is why a corrected number on screen can still accompany a badly placed grid.
This tutorial shows both the bar-one control and the double/halve controls. You saw its explanation of beat markers in the previous lesson; concentrate this time on what the controls do.
How To Beatgrid Tracks In Rekordbox - Free DJ Tutorial
Watch “How To Beatgrid Tracks In Rekordbox” from Digital DJ Tips for demonstrations of setting a bar’s first beat and correcting a half- or double-time BPM reading.
Watch setting beat one: the presenter finds the intended first beat, opens GRID, and uses the set-beat-grid control. Later, watch halving BPM; focus on how changing the BPM interpretation changes which beats the grid counts.
Put the grid on a real downbeat
Move to an early, steady passage, rather than trusting a beatless intro or the first loud sound in the file. Listen and count several bars of “one, two, three, four.” Pick a beat one supported by the repeating pattern or a clear section entrance. Pause and zoom in; position the playhead on the start of that beat’s attack, not automatically on the tallest point of its waveform.
Use the GRID control that sets the current position as the first beat of a bar. In the resulting grid, the red bar marker should meet the musical one, and the intervening beat lines should follow two, three, and four. Rekordbox may reposition the whole grid when you do this, so inspect the following bars rather than assuming the single click finished the repair.
The image below illustrates the visual check, but keep listening: a prominent waveform attack might be a pickup or an offbeat sound.
If every beat line already lands on the pulse but the red marker identifies the wrong beat as one, this bar-one operation is the relevant correction. If all lines sit slightly early or late, you can shift the entire grid in small increments instead. Those are different edits: one establishes the bar reference; the other fine-tunes the grid’s position relative to the audio.
For a written guide to the controls, read the following targeted portions. The article’s numbered button map is useful when your on-screen icons are unfamiliar.
Complete Rekordbox beatgrid tutorial – Everything you ...
Read Deejayplaza’s Export-mode control map and its explanations of setting a bar’s first beat, entering BPM, and shifting the grid. Use the button descriptions to identify functions, rather than relying on an icon’s appearance alone.
Under “Rekordbox Beatgrid off? Here’s how to change it!”, start at the GRID controls and follow the numbered list through the lock control. Then, under “Changing first beat of a bar,” read the bar-one instruction. Under “Tempo & BPM,” read the tempo options; under “Shift beatgrid to left or right,” find the two controls that move the whole grid.
Fix spacing errors without chasing the playhead
Now let the track play for several bars. If the clicks or beat lines agree near your chosen downbeat but gradually fall behind or get ahead, the problem is grid spacing: revisit the BPM. Moving the whole grid to match a later kick would merely trade an early error for a late one.
The relationship is simple:
A slightly higher BPM places grid lines slightly closer together; a slightly lower BPM places them farther apart. Adjust the BPM value or use the editor’s fine spacing controls, then check again from your early reference through a later steady passage. Small spacing changes may be difficult to see until you zoom in or move farther along the track.
By contrast, if the lines miss comparable attacks by about the same amount everywhere, keep the BPM and nudge the whole grid left or right. These nudges are small; use the waveform and metronome together to judge them. Neither method should be used to force a grid onto a stray clap, a syncopated sound, or a deliberately displaced layer.
How To Beatgrid Tracks In Rekordbox - Free DJ Tutorial
Return to the Digital DJ Tips tutorial to see the difference between shifting every marker and changing the space between markers.
In shifting the grid, watch the markers move together. In changing spacing, watch the intervals widen and contract. Relate those two motions to constant offset and increasing drift.
For this fixed-tempo track, apply your correction to the whole grid. Rekordbox also has an option to edit only from the current position onward, but that is not a shortcut for fixing a BPM that is wrong throughout the song. If an abrupt change makes one fixed spacing impossible, stop and reassess whether this track fits today’s fixed-tempo assumption.
Complete Rekordbox beatgrid tutorial – Everything you ...
Read the guide’s short explanations of spacing, whole-grid versus later-only edits, and the metronome. These supply a useful check while you work.
Find “Expand or shrink beat intervals” and read the spacing controls. Continue under “Apply changes to …” through the edit scope. Under “Metronome,” read the playback check. Remember that a click can be on time even when the red bar marker identifies the wrong beat as one.
Verify the repair and keep it
Give the finished grid the same audit you gave the original analysis, but now use it as a pass/fail check. Listen in an early steady section, the middle, and a later steady section. At each point, ask whether individual lines coincide with the pulse and whether red bar markers coincide with your counted ones. The metronome should remain with the rhythm throughout—not merely for the few beats beside the playhead where you made the edit.
If it passes, consider enabling Analysis Lock for that track. The manual warns that re-analysis can overwrite an adjusted grid; locking helps protect a repair you have verified. Be aware that the lock also prevents further grid editing until you turn it off.
Return to the official manual for the overwrite warning and the available Analysis Lock routes. Read this after verifying your track, so you do not lock an unfinished edit.
In EXPORT mode, find “Re-analyzing tracks to detect beat positions and BPM” (printed around pp. 75–76). Read the overwrite warning. Continue to “Setting the Analysis Lock” (around p. 76) and read the lock instructions. The manual also gives a track-list right-click option if the GRID-panel icon is hard to identify in your version.
For your one-track repair, a practical stopping point is a grid whose BPM, beat positions, and bar-one markers all hold up at those three locations. If you cannot achieve that without repeated local fixes, mark the track as unresolved rather than trusting Sync or quantized controls with it.
Takeaway
On a fixed-tempo track, correct the BPM and its spacing, establish a genuine beat one, then fine-tune any whole-grid offset. Verify all three decisions by listening across the track; a tidy waveform at one point is not enough. Next, you’ll use dependable grids to place memory cues and hot cues at useful entry, exit, and recovery points.