Headphone cueing and CUE: listening before mixing.

Headphone cueing and CUE: listening before mixing

What headphone cueing is and what it is not

Cueing means hearing a track in headphones while the audience continues hearing the previous one. It is half the DJ’s work: without cueing, every mix is made blind and depends on memory or luck.

What cueing gives you:

• checking the incoming track’s tempo and phase before it plays in the room;
• calmly choosing an entry point, without the audience’s clock ticking;
• adjusting the incoming channel’s level and tone before raising anything.

What it is not: it is not automatic mixing, does not decide phrasing and does not replace judgement. You can hear an entire track in headphones and still bring it in at the wrong moment. Cueing provides information; the decision remains yours.

Headphone CUE is not the cue point

This misunderstanding wastes the most time for beginners, and it is not a matter of nuance: these are two different functions, treated separately in official documentation. The rekordbox manual puts it this way: headphone cue is a different function from the cue-point function.

• Headphone CUE (monitoring): decides which channels you hear in headphones. It is signal routing and lives in the mixer.
• Cue point: a saved point within the track, the place from which you want it to start. It is track information and lives in the player.

They resemble each other because they share a name, rather than a function. When a channel’s CUE is enabled, you hear it in headphones; if a cue point is also saved, pressing CUE starts the track from that point. Confusing the two explains most “I cannot hear anything in headphones” and “it starts where I do not want it to” problems.

Setting up headphone cueing on the mixer

The routing is always the same, and this is a rule rather than a preference: what you hear through headphones does not go to master unless you raise the channel fader.

Traktor’s official documentation describes it unambiguously: each mixer channel includes a Cue button, which sends the audio signal to the headphone channel, and the manual specifies its exact uses: preparing the transition to the next track, previewing tracks or checking an effect’s behaviour live. The same manual makes the function conditional on equipment: using CUE requires a multichannel audio device. In other words, if your headphone output is not configured as a separate channel, cueing does not exist however many buttons you press.

In rekordbox, the official monitoring procedure is:

1. Open the headphone panel.
2. Put [MIX] in the centre: the manual describes this as the point where [MASTER] and [CUE] volume are equally balanced.
3. Turn [LEVEL] all the way down.
4. Press [CUE] on the channel you want to hear.
5. Raise [LEVEL] to a comfortable volume.

That [MIX] control is the piece almost nobody explains: it governs how much master and CUE reach your headphones. The documentation only describes the centre position as an equal balance; turning to either side gives greater weight to one source. Finding your position on that control is judgement, rather than a rule: some people need to hear the room to keep the pulse, while others prefer to isolate the incoming track completely.

Practice heuristic: start with headphone volume low and raise it only if needed. Loud monitoring does not improve judgement and accelerates listening fatigue, which you need to avoid until the session ends.

What the CUE button is for

The player’s CUE button does something different from the mixer’s CUE, and that too is documented. In rekordbox:

• During playback, press pause, then [CUE]: the point where the track paused is set as the cue point.
• To return to the cue point, use Back Cue.
• If you hold [CUE] after returning, the track plays from the cue point while you hold it; on release, playback returns to the cue point and pauses.

rekordbox can also set an automatic cue point at the beginning of a track (Auto Cue), using [Auto Cue Level] as its reference. It is convenient for navigating a large library, but explains why many tracks start somewhere you would not choose: if the track contains an ambient sample or an initial silence with background noise, automatic cueing lands in the wrong place.

Judgement, not law: a good entry cue point is usually on the first beat of the first bar with rhythmic content, rather than the first audible sound. An ambient sweep is also “first audio” and is not useful as a mixing start point.

Procedure: preparing the next track

This order works in the booth, and can be made automatic until it becomes a reflex.

1. Load B on the other deck while A keeps playing.
2. Enable channel B’s CUE and hear it through headphones.
3. Check tempo and phase: if the kicks gallop, correct it before continuing.
4. Find the phrase boundary where you intend to enter. This is already phrasing: cueing simply lets you hear it without rushing.
5. Adjust channel B’s level with trim before raising anything.
6. Raise the fader when your chosen point arrives, rather than when it feels right.

Steps 3 and 4 are studied separately because they are techniques in their own right: manual alignment is covered in How to beatmatch manually, step by step, and choosing the entry point in What phrasing is and how to mix by phrases. With both resolved, the next link is How to mix two songs correctly.

What to listen for while cueing

You learn cueing by listening with specific questions, rather than “let’s see how it sounds”. These are the questions asked in the booth:

• Does it gallop or line up? If the two kicks together produce a double hit, there is misalignment.
• Is it louder than the track playing in the room? It is almost always trim, rather than the track.
• Do the bass parts fight? Fix that before the fader, rather than afterwards.
• Where is the first section change? That is your phrase boundary, the information that decides the entry moment.
• Does the playing track have a clean exit point? Not every track does, and knowing in advance changes the entire transition.

Common mistakes

“CUE is the cue point.” They are separate functions, exactly as the rekordbox documentation states. One routes audio to headphones; the other saves a position within the track.

“I press CUE and should hear it, but my headphones are not configured.” The most common configuration failure. Traktor explicitly sets the condition: a multichannel audio device is required.

Raising the fader before listening. If you have not heard the track in headphones, you do not know whether it lines up, where it changes or what its level is. It is the fastest way to ruin a transition that was going well.

Monitoring at brutal volume. It does not improve judgement and leaves you without fine hearing for the session’s end.

Listening only to the first few bars. The beginning is almost never what breaks the mix; the section change you had not heard is.

Leaving CUE enabled while mixing. It does not muddy master, but leaves both tracks summed in headphones and loses your reference for what the room hears.