What Is a Hard Start on a DJ Track?

A hard start is a track whose first beat lands at the very beginning of the file, with no leading silence, fade-in or lead-in before it. Beat one is at zero. DJs want it because the beat grid becomes exact from the first sample and the track can be fired from the cue button or a pad and be instantly on the beat.

Why leading silence is a problem

Most released files carry a little silence at the start, from a few milliseconds of encoder padding to a second or more left deliberately. It seems harmless but it causes small, constant irritations for DJs:

• Grid anchors move. The first beat is at 0.412 seconds on one file and 0.030 on another. Every grid needs its own anchor and analysis sometimes misses by a beat.
• Cue from the start is late. Pressing play at the file start and expecting beat one gets silence first, so the DJ must set a cue on the first kick for every track.
• Pads and samplers. A drop or a loop triggered from a pad should sound the instant the pad is hit. Leading silence makes it feel laggy.
• Automation and sync. Beat-synced starts, such as slip or quantised play, assume the first beat is at the grid origin.

A hard start removes all of this by putting beat one at zero.

Hard start versus intro

A hard start says nothing about what the first bars contain. A track can hard-start into a 16-bar drum intro: the first kick of the intro is at zero and the intro proceeds from there. That is the ideal DJ file: an instant, gridded start and a mixable intro. A track can also hard-start into its first chorus, which is a cold open and suits open-format sets and radio edits.

How a hard start is made

In mastering, the engineer trims the file to the first transient. Automatically, a silence-removal stage drops everything before the first sample above a threshold, typically -40 to -50 dBFS, so that noise floor and encoder padding go but the attack of the first kick stays. The threshold matters: too high and the start of the transient is clipped, too low and background noise survives.

Hard start in Club Ready Music

In the Studio's DJ mix edit section, "Hard start on bar 1" is on by default. The master chain removes everything before the first sample above -45 dBFS, so the first kick of the drum intro sits at zero milliseconds. Because of this, Club Ready Music can write a single Serato beat-grid marker at position zero and a rekordbox tempo marker at zero, and the grid is exact in any application.

Turn the option off when you want a generated track to keep an atmospheric swell before the first beat, for example for an opening track or a radio edit.

DJ edits of uploaded songs begin with the drum intro on a downbeat, so they start on the beat by construction. The song body itself starts at the confirmed first beat, which you can correct before building.