How Do You Get To Know Your Music?

**mr.magma** · 12-14-2010, 09:53 PM

Hey everyone,

Long time lurker, recently set up an account so will start posting more. Just wanted some information on getting to know your music...

How do you get to know your music? There are so many tracks being released every day, just going through them and keeping up with all that, different genres/styles/etc. is a mission in itself, but then the listening for DJ-ing purposes, especially since whole tracks themselves can be very long, it's a time consuming process. Then for the digital DJ's there's the whole beat gridding/warping process. So I just wanted to know, if this hasn't been discussed before, how you guys go about doing this? Do you have any procedures, tips, advice, etc.

Thanks a lot!

**djfrogstar** · 12-14-2010, 10:50 PM

http://hypem.com

**Bassline Brine** · 12-14-2010, 10:50 PM

Well, I guess a huge part of it for myself, is that I just honestly love finding and listening to the music. The digging is a huge part of enjoyment for me, and a huge hobby in and of itself.

I usually go through various blogs, and also check out record labels/artists myspace pages. I keep up to date on beatport and juno. I don't do this all in one day, but I get going on tangents. Also, browsing through youtube and being subscribed to a lot of awesome people posting stuff is also helpful.

When I find a track I like, on something like Beatport. I then generally (if it's something I'm interested in buying) generally try to find it on youtube, and listen to it all the way through. If I like it, I buy it, or at least put it in my crate for later.

Once you get beyond that point, I guess I'd let someone else pick it up from there, because I'm still "finding my feet" as far as DJing is concerned. Finding good music though? It's the passion that keeps me going.

**maxonemillionone** · 12-14-2010, 10:50 PM

iPod on shuffle. iTunes of shuffle. Sleep with iPod.

Search for choons while listening to choons. Let this be life.

**GPS** · 12-14-2010, 10:56 PM

hypemachine

following ppl on beatport/soundcloud/twitter/facebook

**Nunz** · 12-14-2010, 11:00 PM

Originally Posted by maxonemillionone

iPod on shuffle. iTunes of shuffle. Sleep with iPod.

Search for choons while listening to choons. Let this be life.

If you don't mind I'm definitely using this as my sig.

**mr.magma** · 12-14-2010, 11:01 PM

Awesome, yeah definitely the searching is a big part of the fun... I do the same checking out blogs, artist charts, mixes, forums, Soundcloud pages, etc.

I was morning trying to gauge the getting to know the music itself once you've got it, since that is what sets one mix apart from another or whatever. The listening to the music in itself is what also takes up quite a bit of my time to and especially since I have a very basic non-digital background, having to know tracks without waveforms and all that is quite tough and that's still what the majority of DJ's do, so I was wondering how to go about doing that, if there were any innovative or unique approaches to understanding the music you already have and have gotten.

**Eliot Han** · 12-14-2010, 11:04 PM

I listen to my music constantly at work on shuffle. I also play a little bit of this for fun, to change things up a bit.

Game on Steam called Audiosurf, lets you choose your own mp3's to play levels where the speed movements and puzzle go in tune with the waveform and bpm of the song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOfdccaZnBU