AlphaTheta and Serato built SLAB for DJs
Giving DJs the ability to start producing.
TRAKGIRL has been making beats on hardware since before most of the producers she’d eventually work with knew what a DAW was. Her credits read like a cheat sheet for contemporary rap — JID, Metro Boomin, Jhené Aiko, Vic Mensa — and her work on God Does Like Ugly just earned her a 2026 Grammy nomination for Best Rap Album. So when AlphaTheta and Serato came looking for someone to front their first-ever hardware collaboration, she was the obvious call.
“I love the tactile feel, touching sounds, playing pad effects, chopping samples, just having fun,” TRAKGIRL says. “I could make a whole album with just SLAB.”
SLAB is a pad controller, made for production rather than DJing. AlphaTheta, the Tokyo corporation behind Pioneer DJ gear that’s been club-standard since the CDJ-1000 era, partnered with Serato, whose software has soundtracked roughly two decades of DJ sets and sample-based production. The two have worked together since 2011, but this is new territory: a device that treats the booth and the bedroom studio as the same room.
The thing is small, it fits in a backpack next to your laptop and is USB-powered. It's made up of 16 velocity-sensitive pads, a touch strip for filter sweeps and pitch bends, and four encoders. The pads have exclusive effects baked in: Lo-Fi Crusher, Wah Filter, Inverse Reverb, Pitch Looper. If you’ve ever used a Maschine or an MPC, the layout will feel familiar. SLAB talks directly to Serato Studio and Serato Sample without mapping anything.
For DJs who’ve been curious about production, they'll find that the touch strip that sweeps a filter during a mix can do the same thing while building a beat. “SLAB brings that classic hardware feel to Studio, real pads, real knobs, without touching my trackpad,” says DJ Epik. “It just feels like home.”
LA producer Dibia$e puts it more simply: “With SLAB and Studio, you’re cookin’ up straight out the gate. Just plug in, and get chopping.”
Over the past few years, the line separating DJ and producer from performer has more or less disappeared. Kaytranada’s DJ are also live-production displays; Kenny Beats’s popular YouTube series The Cave made production the main show; Madlib treats the SP-404 like an instrument. SLAB was made to meet a new generation of music-makers who know how to work a crowd and need a bridge to start making their own sounds.
Below, watch a full overview of what’s possible with SLAB: