I’ve received a handful of emails and spotted a discussion on Reddit today all about a “new Traktor hardware teaser”. The “teaser” popped up on a ton of DJ’s Facebook feeds because the official Traktor page updated their cover photo. Almost immediately the new cover photo started to get traction (it’s sitting at 597 reactions and 109 comments as of time-of-publishing).
Here’s the full, high-res image:
“Finally a Z8? A D2 Update?”
“A standalone controller will be great”
“S8 mk2 is the controller that we need”
The speculation runs wild and all over the place in the Facebook comments.
Look, it’s a render – not a photo. It’s unlike any other product we’ve seen from Native Instruments before. There’s a keychain / rope / tube on the right, and a shiny purple EQ knob without any labels. It kind of looks like …. a toy? It might even look familiar, and that’s because it’s been getting used for months now:
It’s just a fancy-looking CG background image for Traktor’s Pro Plus subscription model. As far as we know, and can infer from the image, it’s nothing actually related to an upcoming hardware release. Traktor just finally updated their cover photo from this one posted October 2019 – which was, to be fair, announcing their last major hardware release.
What would the next Traktor hardware be?
One of the biggest on-the-horizon releases for NI is sure to be their integration of on-the-fly Stems mixing. Now that Serato DJ has joined Virtual DJ and Algoriddim’s djay with their versions of this future-of-EQ software, the Traktor team must be feeling the crunch. This type of playful, on-the-fly musical feature is exactly the kind of thing that could revitalize the Traktor brand (and something I’ve been saying they should have done years ago….).
A piece of hardware specifically built for this type of stems play would be just what would be needed. Perhaps a new pass at the Kontrol F1 or X1 would bring the hardware/software marriage that made the platform so successful nearly 13 years ago. That said, a Midi Fighter Twister also will be a perfect controller for stems users (we’ve already heard that from Serato users), so maybe there’s no need 😉
Traktor team, we’re ready for a real teaser of something new! What’ve you got?
