Hot Cues: The Complete DJ Guide (What They Are and How to Set Them)

Hot cues are saved markers on a track that jump playback to an exact point and start playing from there the instant you press the pad or button. DJs use them to skip intros, drop straight into the chorus, and rebuild a track live instead of waiting for it to arrive. Most DJ software gives you 8 hot cues per track, and they save with the track so they load the same way every time.

This guide covers what hot cues are, how they differ from memory cues, how to set them in every major DJ program, and where to put them. It is the hub page for the whole topic, so each section gives you the working overview.

What Are Hot Cues?

Think of a hot cue as a bookmark inside a song. Instead of finding page 40 again, you press one pad and you are at 1:47, on the beat, playing.

The key word is playing. A hot cue does not just move the playhead, it fires playback from that point immediately, which is what makes it a performance tool rather than a browsing tool.

That is the difference between hot cues and the main CUE button on your player. The CUE button holds one temporary start point that you set on the fly and lose when you set a new one. Hot cues are permanent, there are 8 of them, and they are all one press away.

Most software and hardware follows the same 8 cue standard:

• Rekordbox: hot cues A to H, shown as coloured slots next to the waveform. Extra banks exist, but 8 is what your CDJ pads give you.
• Serato DJ: 8 cue slots numbered 1 to 8, mapped to the pads in Cues mode.
• Virtual DJ: 8 hot cue pads per page, with more pages on some controllers.
• Traktor: 8 hotcue slots per track, each assignable to a pad or key.

Hot cues save with the track, not with the session. Close the software, export to USB, load the track on a CDJ in a club two weeks later, and the cues are still exactly where you left them. That persistence is the whole point: you prep once at home, then you perform.

Hot Cues vs Memory Cues vs Cue Points

This is where most DJs get tangled up, and it is worth clearing up before anything else.

Hot cues play instantly for performance, memory cues are navigation markers you cue up from, and "cue point" is the umbrella term that covers both.

• Hot cue - jumps to the marker and plays from there straight away. Used live, mid-mix, triggered on a pad.
• Memory cue - saves a position you can skip to and cue up from, without playing. Used for prep and navigation, finding the mix-in point.
• Cue point - general term for any saved marker, hot or memory. Used when talking about either one.

The practical split: memory cues tell you where things are, hot cues let you jump on them. Rekordbox users often set both, a memory cue on the mix-in point for tidy navigation and hot cues on the sections they actually perform with.

Serato does not separate the two. Every cue in Serato is a hot cue, which is one reason cue transfers between the two programs get messy.

For the full breakdown, see Memory Cues in Rekordbox.

What Hot Cues Are Used For

Once your cues are set, they change how fast you can work. Here is what DJs actually do with them.

Skipping long intros. Plenty of tracks open with 32 or 64 bars of drums before anything happens. A cue on the first melodic element lets you drop in where the music starts instead of mixing a minute of filler.

Jumping to the drop. The single most used cue in club DJing. When the floor needs the payoff now, you hit the pad and the drop lands on the next beat instead of in 90 seconds.

Restarting a phrase cleanly. Misjudged a transition or came in on the wrong beat? A cue on the top of the phrase gets you back in position without a rewind and without anyone noticing.

Cue juggling and drumming. Hitting cues rhythmically turns the pads into an instrument. You can chop up a vocal, stutter an intro, or build a fill out of one bar of the track.

Launching loops. Combining a hot cue with a loop lets you jump into a section and hold it, which is useful for stretching an intro to buy mixing time.

How to Set Hot Cues in Every Major DJ Software

The basic move is the same everywhere: get the playhead to the right position, then press an empty cue slot. What changes is the naming, the panel, and where the data gets stored. Here are the essentials for each program.

Rekordbox

• Analyse the track first so the beatgrid exists, then turn quantize on so cues snap to the grid instead of landing a few milliseconds off.
• Play or scrub to the position you want and pause on the beat.
• Click an empty hot cue slot (A to H) in the panel beside the waveform, or press an empty performance pad with the pads in Hot Cue mode.
• Right click the cue to change its colour or add a comment, which is how you name it.

To delete, hover the slot and click the delete icon, or right click and remove it. Full details in Rekordbox Hot Cues.

Serato DJ

• Load the track and position the playhead where you want the cue.
• Press an empty slot in the Cues panel, or an empty pad with the pads set to Cues mode.
• Right click or control click the cue to rename it and pick a colour.

Serato writes cues into the file's own tags, so the cue data travels with the audio file itself. Copy the track to another drive and the cues come with it.

Virtual DJ

• Set the pads to HotCues mode and position the track where you want the marker.
• Press an empty pad to set the cue at that position.
• To delete one, hold Shift and press the pad. Right click the pad to rename it or change its colour.
• To move a cue, delete it and set it again at the corrected position.

Traktor

• Position the track, then press an empty hotcue button or pad to store the point.
• Traktor saves it as a Cue type by default. In the cue panel you can change the type to Fade In, Fade Out, Load, Grid or Loop depending on what you want that marker to do.
• Map the hotcues to your controller pads so all 8 are one press away.

Traktor's cue types make it the most flexible of the four, and also the easiest to overcomplicate.

On CDJs and Controllers

• Load the track and play or search to the position you want.
• Press an empty HOT CUE button on the player to store the point, then press it again to trigger it.
• Cues set on the player save back to the rekordbox device (USB or SD) so they are there next time.
• Turn on the hot cue auto load setting so a track's saved cues drop straight onto the pads when it loads, instead of you calling them up manually.

Setting cues in the booth works, but it is slow and public. Prep at home, use the player to adjust.

Where Should You Place Your Hot Cues?

With 8 slots and a typical dance track, a repeatable layout looks roughly like this:

• First beat of the track, so you can always get back to zero.
• Mix-in point, where the track is stable enough to blend under something else.
• Before the drop, usually 16 or 32 beats out, so you can ride the build.
• The drop itself, the one you will reach for most.
• After the drop, the groove section you can mix out of.
• Breakdown, for stripping things back or dropping a vocal over it.
• Second drop, the last big moment.
• Outro or mix-out, where you start handing over to the next track.

Now the part that matters more than the layout itself: be consistent. If cue 4 is the drop on every track in your library, your hands stop thinking. In a dark booth at 2am, muscle memory beats a clever custom layout every time.

Genres bend this. A hip hop track with no drop needs cues on the hook and the verses. A 7 minute techno roller might want cues on every 64 bar change instead. Pick a system that fits what you play, then apply it everywhere.

Go deeper in DJ Cue Points.

Hot Cue Colors and Naming

Colour is not decoration, it is how you read a deck without reading text. Once your scheme is consistent, a glance at the waveform tells you where you are and what is coming.

A simple scheme that works:

• Green for intro and mix-in points
• Red for drops
• Yellow or orange for breakdowns and builds
• Blue for outro and mix-out

Names help too, but keep them short. "DROP", "IN", "BRK" and "OUT" stay readable on a small screen, and anything longer gets truncated on hardware anyway.

Colours show in the software and on RGB performance pads, so the pads on your controller or CDJ light up in your scheme. The red pad is the drop, no reading required.

Do Hot Cues Transfer Between Software and to USB?

Cues save with the track, but how they travel depends on where the data lives.

Rekordbox stores cue data in its own library database and writes it to the device when you export. Drag tracks or playlists to your USB in Export mode, and the cues, beatgrids and colours go with them to any CDJ or XDJ.

Serato stores cues in the audio file's tags. That means the cues follow the file itself, which is why Serato users can move a folder to a new machine and keep everything.

Between the two programs, transfer is not automatic. Third party tools like Lexicon and rekord.cloud exist specifically to convert libraries both ways, and you should check the results rather than trust them blindly. Traktor and Virtual DJ keep their own formats too, so any cross-program move is a conversion, not a copy.

Setting Hot Cues Automatically

Here is the honest problem with everything above: doing it by ear takes hours. Eight cues on one track is a couple of minutes if you know the song. Eight cues across 2,000 tracks is a project you will never finish, which is why most DJs have a handful of prepped tracks and a library full of blanks.

There are three main routes out of that.

Rekordbox 7 CUE Analysis places hot cues and memory cues automatically using phrase analysis, its detection of intro, verse, chorus and outro sections. You can train it by adding tracks you have already cued to the CUE Analysis playlist so it learns your habits. It is genuinely useful on standard song structures, though results vary by genre and the feature sits behind a paid subscription tier.

Mixed In Key sets cues based on energy changes rather than phrases, which suits DJs who already use it for key and energy data. It is a subscription or paid product depending on the version, and its cue placement is a by-product of its analysis rather than its main job.

KimiCue takes a different angle: it detects the actual drop in each track, then places 8 structured hot cues around it, before, on and after, following the same layout on every track in your library. It runs the whole library in one go and works with both Rekordbox (via XML) and Serato (written to file tags). It is $29 one time with no subscription, and the first 15 tracks are free so you can check its drop detection against your own music before paying.

Try KimiCue free on your first 15 tracks

For a straight comparison of all the options, including the free ones, see Automatic Hot Cue Placement.

FAQ

The Short Version

Hot cues are saved markers that jump a track to an exact point and play from there, 8 per track, stored with the track so they follow you from your laptop to the club. They are the foundation of fast, confident mixing: know where every section of a track lives and you stop guessing, and you start making decisions on the fly.

Set them by hand on the tracks that matter most to you. For the rest of the library, let an automatic tool do the first pass and spend your prep time on the mixing instead.