What Is a Hot Cue?

A hot cue is a saved position in a track assigned to a pad or button, so the DJ can jump to that exact point and start playing instantly. DJs set hot cues on the moments they need in a hurry: the end of the intro, the first drop, the start of the outro, a vocal entry or a breakdown.

Cue point, hot cue, memory cue

• Cue point: the main start marker. Pressing Cue returns the deck to it; holding Cue plays from it. There is one per track.
• Hot cue: a stored position on a performance pad, usually up to eight per track. Pressing the pad jumps to the position and plays. Hot cues can be named and coloured.
• Memory cue (rekordbox and Pioneer players): a stored position shown on the waveform that can be stepped to with buttons but has no pad. Useful for markers you want to see but not trigger.
• Loop cue: a hot cue that stores a loop, so pressing the pad starts the loop.

What DJs put hot cues on

Hot cue	Why
Intro end / first downbeat of the song	Start the body of the track in time, skip the intro when needed
First drop	Jump straight to the drop for a quick mix or a tease
Breakdown	Set up a long blend or an acapella
Vocal in	Avoid mixing another vocal over it
Outro start	Know where the mixable tail begins
A clean kick	Juggle or loop

Consistent colours across the library make the pads readable in the dark: a common convention, which Club Ready Music follows, is red for intro end, orange for first drop, blue for outro start and green for vocal in.

Using hot cues in a set

• Jump to the drop at a phrase boundary for an instant energy lift.
• Quantised triggering snaps the jump to the beat grid so it is always in time.
• Cue juggling: tapping between two hot cues to create a rhythm from the track's own parts.
• Preparation: a hot cue on the first downbeat after the intro lets you mix the previous track right up to the moment the body begins.

Hot cues in Club Ready Music files

Club Ready Music calculates the cue positions from the arrangement when a track is rendered: intro end from the intro bars at the track's BPM, first drop from the drop bar, outro start from the outro bars counted back from the end, and vocal in from the model's timed lyric sections when available. For generated tracks with "rekordbox / Serato tags" on, they are embedded as Serato hot cues in the MP3, written to the rekordbox XML as position marks, listed in the comment tag in minutes and seconds, and included as a cue sheet in the DJ pack. Up to eight cues are written.

DJ edits of uploaded songs mark intro end and outro start. The edit page's Intro, Drop in and Outro buttons jump to those positions in the browser player, and the times are written to the comment tag so they can be set as hot cues in any software.