Native Instruments has announced its latest DJ controller, the Traktor Kontrol S8, via the release of a new teaser video.
The clip, which you can watch above, is fairly light on concrete information. It features a host of notable DJs, including the likes of Carl Craig and Booka Shade's Arno Kammermeier, hanging around a pool in Ibiza, demoing the S8 and offering positive, albeit entirely non-specific first impressions of it, intercut with a few brief flashes of the controller itself.
We can take a few things away from this first glimpse of the S8, however. Most notably, it appears to feature no jog wheels, implying a reliance on Traktor's built-in beatmatching algorithms and tempo-synced features such as Flux Mode and Remix Decks. There also appears to be a pair of screens similar to those found on NI's Maschine Studio, all of which makes us suspect the S8 has been designed as a sort of 'performance controller' aiming the bridge the gap between a DJ device and beat making tools like Maschine or the MPC.
There are no spec, pricing or release date details available as yet, but we'd expect these to follow in the next few days. Keep an eye on Native Instruments for more.
