DJ Notation

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

DJ Notation

Here’s a semi-formal ASCII notation for marking up your tracks.

http://www.djnotation.org/

e.g.

This track is beats only. A breakbeat DJ tool, easy to mix.

-=#=-

Track starts with beat only, moves to single note section, gets melodic, returns to single note, ends with beats only. Your typical Trance track.

<##->

Track fades in to melody, stays melodic, switches to beats only and fades out.

-(0:23)=(0:46)#(6:12)(6:48)–>

Starts with beats only, at 23 seconds the drone starts, 46 seconds the main melody kicks in. 6 minutes 12 there’s a breakdown, 6:48 it drops to beats, fadeout on beats.

You get the idea.

2

Some comments I sent the authors:

The timecodes are a little loose, would there be a way to also have higher resolution timescale notations? For example:

(00:00:00:00) = SMTP timecode
(@24563) = raw sample offset
(&45698) = MP3 frame number

Here’s a small formal grammar in EBNF that you can use with Antlr:

grammar DJNotation ;
desc : (prefix)? ( (timecode)? SYMBOL )* postfix? ;
prefix : ‘<’ | ‘!’ ;
postfix : ‘>’ ;
timecode : ‘(’ INT (‘.’ INT)? ‘)’ ;
SYMBOL : ( ‘-’ | ‘~’ | ‘=’ | ‘#’ | ‘/’ | '' ) ;
INT : (‘0’..‘9’)+ ;

3

Thanks for re-posting this one Limey :slight_smile: its a good one !

4

totally agree, this is VERY usefull :smiley:

5

You want timecodes to go into hours even? :open_mouth:

Dude, you’re precise. :smiley:

6

Guys, thanks for the support. I’m the dude behind the dj notation proposal. Fatlimey sent me the link to this forum.

I’d love to get more feedback on this. There’s still a lot of stuff I’m thinking about:

  • Better define drone vs riff.
  • How to define rising levels inside the song? Something like -<=<#>-?
  • Wouldn’t it be useful to mark the timestamps with not only what Fatlimey proposed, but also segments of 16 bars (the standard length of phrases of dance tracks)?
  • Shouldn’t / and \ be also prefixes?
  • Many more.

Also, what do you guys think would be the best thing to move this forward. I deliberately made the site with Google Sites so it has the possibility to turn into a wiki. I also added an open online spreadsheet for people as a track database.

I’d love this to be a little more than just my personal way of marking up tracks. (That’s why I did the site, obviously…)

Oh and please tell me about any weird English you find on the site, I am not a native speaker.

Thanks.

7

Something to remind us what content is in our cue juggles slots would totally rock :stuck_out_tongue:

8

That’s a good point. Traktor allows 6 cue points in a track, and some I use for marking mix-in and mix-out points while others are useful for marking cue triggers, like beats or a vocal stab that you can throw in over the mix. Some notation for that would be great. e.g.

[v][o][]
i = in
B = Beat
v = vocal
o = out
Keeping the markers to a single character makes the notation easier to scan quickly (compared to “[in][beat][Beat][voc][o][]”) and laying the slots out visually as a grid of boxes is faster to parse than forcing you to decode numbers, like “1:in,2:beat,3:vocal,” etc.
Well, that’s my take.

9

so anyone using this?
its a pitty that traktor pro doesnt support the comment field in the deck details .. would make it perfect for displaying this kind of information.