Serato Hot Cues: The Complete Guide (Set, Color, Name and More)

Serato hot cues are saved markers that jump playback to an exact point in a track the instant you trigger them. Serato DJ Pro gives you 8 per track, Serato DJ Lite gives you 4. You set one by clicking an empty cue slot in the software or hitting an empty pad in Cue mode at the right moment, and it writes into the track's file, so it loads with the track every time after that.

Hot Cues in Serato: The Basics

Each track gets its own cue slots. Pro shows 8, Lite shows 4, and every slot works the same way: empty until you set it, lit once there is a cue in it.

Trigger a cue while the track is playing and playback jumps there and keeps going. Trigger one while the deck is paused and it plays only for as long as you hold the pad or button, then snaps back to the cue and pauses again. Hold the pad and press play at the same time, and playback carries on when you let both go.

Do not confuse a hot cue with Serato's temporary cue. The temp cue is the white marker set by the CUE button, there is one per deck, and it is not saved to the file.

Hot cues save into the track's file tags. That means they are not lost when you move or rename the file, and they travel with your music to any other computer running Serato. It also means a read-only file or drive will quietly refuse to keep them, which is the cause of most "my cues vanished" panics.

One cross-software note: Serato has no separate memory cue layer. In Rekordbox, memory cues are navigation markers that sit apart from the performance pads. In Serato, every saved marker is a hot cue, so your 8 slots have to cover both jobs. The wider concept is covered in the hot cues complete guide.

Quantize is worth switching on while you prepare tracks. With it enabled, cues snap to the beatgrid instead of landing a few milliseconds off, and you can set the beat spacing under SETUP > DJ PREFERENCES.

Turn quantize off when the point you want is not on the grid. Off-grid vocal chops and reversed hits need the raw position.

How to Set Hot Cues in Serato (Step by Step)

Using the cue display in the software

• Load the track and let it analyse.
• Switch on Quantize if you want cues locked to the beatgrid.
• Pause the deck and drag the waveform so the playhead sits exactly where you want the cue.
• Click the + symbol in an empty cue slot in the cue point area.
• The slot lights up to show a cue is set. Repeat for the rest of your points.

Setting cues while paused is the accurate route. You can nudge the playhead a frame at a time and check it against the beatgrid before you commit.

Using performance pads in Cue mode

• Press the CUE or HOT CUE pad mode button on your controller.
• Load the track and start it playing.
• When you reach the point you want, press an empty pad. The cue is set at that position and the pad lights up.
• Press that pad any time after to jump back.
• To set on the fly with more control, pause first, park the playhead, then press the pad.

Setting on the fly is faster across a whole crate, and quantize covers small timing errors. Pause for anything that has to be exact, like the first transient of a drop.

Serato Hot Cue Keyboard Shortcuts

Prepping on a laptop with no controller plugged in? The keyboard covers most of the work.

To set a cue (Serato DJ Pro)

• Control + 1 to 5: sets cues 1 to 5 on the left deck
• Control + 6 to 0: sets cues 6 to 10 on the right deck

To jump to a cue

• 1 to 5: cues 1 to 5, left deck
• 6 to 0: cues on the right deck

Temporary cue

• I: sets the temp cue on the left deck (paused only)
• K: sets the temp cue on the right deck (paused only)

Two settings change how these behave. If "Playback keys use shift" is on in Setup, you have to hold shift when pressing the number keys. There is also an option that lets you set cues to empty slots with the plain 1 to 0 keys, no control key needed.

Serato DJ Lite uses control + 1 to 4 for the left deck and control + 6 to 9 for the right, with the same keys minus control to jump.

Here is the catch nobody mentions: the keyboard only reaches five cue slots per deck in Pro. Cues 6, 7 and 8 have no default key. You need performance pads or your own MIDI mapping for those, which is why most DJs who fill all 8 slots work from pads.

How to Delete and Move Hot Cues

To delete a cue in the software, hover your mouse over the cue slot and click the small x that appears in the corner. On hardware, hold SHIFT and press the pad for the cue you want gone.

There is no drag-to-nudge in Serato. You cannot grab a cue on the waveform and slide it 20 milliseconds left. Moving a cue means deleting it and setting it again at the right spot.

Dragging cues in the cue point area only reorders which slot they sit in, and it needs "Sort Cues and Loops Chronologically" switched off in DJ Preferences. Useful for tidying pad layouts, useless for fixing timing.

Safety note: SHIFT plus pad deletes instantly, with no confirmation and no undo. That combination is easy to hit by accident in a dark booth when you are reaching for a different pad mode.

Serato Hot Cue Colors: Change Them and Build a System

Right-click the cue point trigger button in the software and pick a colour from the picker. That is the whole process, and it is a Serato DJ Pro feature.

Colour shows up in three places: the cue slot itself, the marker on the waveform, and the RGB pads on your controller if it has them. That last one is why a colour scheme is worth the setup time. You can read a deck without looking at the screen.

A consistent scheme beats a pretty one. Your eyes should find the drop on any track without reading a word.

Here is a simple scheme that works:

• Green: intro or mix-in point
• Red: the drop
• Blue: outro or mix-out point
• Orange: vocal start
• Purple: breakdown

Whatever you pick, apply it to every track. A scheme that is right on half your library is worse than no scheme, because you stop trusting the colours and start reading positions instead.

Naming Your Hot Cues

Double-click the cue point time in the software and type a name. Hold CTRL and click the name or time to toggle between the two displays.

Naming earns its place when colour alone is ambiguous. "2nd verse vox", "FX out", "acapella" and "explicit" all carry information that no colour can.

It does not earn its place for structural points you have already colour coded. If red always means drop, typing "drop" into it eight hundred times is wasted evenings.

The practical split: colours for structure, names for the specific and unusual.

Serato Pro vs Lite: What's Different for Hot Cues

The count is the headline. Pro gives you 8 cue points per track, Lite gives you 4.

Colour and naming are Pro features. Serato documents both in the Pro manual only, so on Lite you get the default slot colours and no labels.

Pro also has the Performance Pad Cue Layout toggle under Setup > Library + Display, which switches the on-screen cue area between the legacy layout and one that matches your controller's pad grid.

For most Lite users, 4 cues is the real limit. Intro, drop, second drop and outro fills them fast, and there is no room left for vocal or FX points.

Do Serato Hot Cues Transfer?

Your cues live in the track's file tags, not in a separate database. Copy your music folder to another drive or computer, load the tracks in Serato, and the cues are there.

That also shapes how you back up. Backing up your music files protects your cue work. Backing up only the Serato folder protects your crates but not the cues inside the tracks.

Two things break it. Read-only files or drives let Serato hold cues for the session then lose them on close, and a crash before Serato writes the tags can drop recent work.

Moving cues to Rekordbox is a different story. Dragging tracks between the two does not carry cue points or loops, so you need a conversion tool such as Lexicon or Rekord Buddy.

Expect losses. Cue names and colour data generally do not survive the trip, so check your important tracks by hand after any conversion. The full export workflow for club gear is covered in the Rekordbox hot cues guide.

Can You Set Serato Hot Cues Automatically?

Cueing manually is accurate and slow. At two or three minutes per track, a 1,000 track library is 40 to 50 hours of listening, scrubbing and clicking, and most DJs give up somewhere around track 80.

The options are a conversion tool that carries cues in from software you already prepped, pre-cued tracks from a pool, or an automatic cue tool that analyses the audio for you.

KimiCue does the third. It detects the actual drop in each track, then places 8 structured hot cues per track around it, before, at, and after, so every track in your library follows the same layout. It writes them straight into the file tags that Serato reads, so you open Serato and the cues are already sitting there.

Honest version: automatic placement gets your structure right across a whole library in an evening, and it will not read your mind on the tracks where you want a specific vocal or an off-grid chop. Most DJs use it as the base layer and hand-set the two or three special points that matter. It is $29 one time, and the first 15 tracks run free so you can check the placement against tracks you know before paying. More on how the detection works in automatic hot cue placement and AI hot cues.

FAQ

Wrapping Up

Serato hot cues come down to a short workflow: set them on the points you actually trigger, colour them so a deck reads at a glance, name the few that colour cannot explain, and remember they ride along in the file when you back up or switch machines.

Do that on every track and your library becomes something you can perform from instead of something you have to read. If the setting part is what stops you, KimiCue places the structural 8 for you and leaves you to add the specials.