A hot cue is a colored, labeled marker placed at a specific moment in a track and stored in your DJ software's library. When you press the assigned pad on your controller or CDJ, playback jumps instantly to that point — no scrubbing, no guessing, no missing the drop.
What DJs use them for #
- Navigation. Mark the intro, the first drop, the second drop, and the outro. Now you can jump anywhere in the track without touching the jog wheel — useful when you need to preview a section fast or recover from a bad cue.
- Performance triggers. Hit a hot cue to re-trigger a vocal chop, slam back to a build, or repeat a phrase on the beat. This turns a static playback button into a live instrument.
- Transition markers. Set a cue at your ideal mix-in point and your ideal mix-out point. When the time comes, you're not calculating — you're reacting.
Best practices #
- Land on the grid. Set hot cues on beat grid boundaries so they fire in time. A cue that's a few milliseconds off the beat will sound sloppy every time you trigger it.
- Color consistently. Pick a system and stick to it — green for safe mix-in points, red for drops, yellow for intros, for example. When you're in a dark booth at 2am, colors communicate faster than labels.
- Always set a "safe" cue. Pick a point in every track you can always return to mid-set without disaster — a clean intro or a pre-drop moment that gives you time to recover. That's your panic button.
Hot cues vs. loops #
A hot cue is a one-shot jump point: press it, and you're there. A loop repeats a defined section until you exit it. They serve different purposes — hot cues are for navigation and triggers; loops are for extending moments or building tension. Many DJs combine them: jump to a hot cue, set a loop running, then exit when the energy is right.
A note on portability #
Rekordbox stores hot cues in its library database, not necessarily in the file's ID3 tags. If you hand a USB to another DJ or open a track in different software, your hot cues may not come with it. Export to a rekordbox-formatted USB if you're playing on CDJs — that carries the cue data in a format the players understand. Don't assume your cues are in the file itself.