I’m very much a house DJ, and have been for years, however I have promised a friend to DJ at his party at some very R&B-like club (if that makes sense). So what they’re after is basically the charts.
Me being a house, dubstep and drum and bass type of DJ, I’ve had little or no experience mixing hip-hop or R&B. So I was wondering if you had any techniques?
Another issue is my setup… I have a custom mapped qwerty keyboard, a 49key keyboard and a fully mapped kaoss pad 3 (and traktor pro). This, as I’m sure you can tell is an odd setup, me being pretty skint and botching where I can, and I’m assuming it restricts me from doing the seemingly popular backspin transitions and stuff…
Any advice, techniques or mapping ideas would be greatly appreciated
same problem here, really no experience in this whole r&b/hip-hop charts-stuff. smooth loop-transitions do not really work here… cuts are nice from time to time, but i’d love some further ideas to be more creative on this.
I use plenty of loops with hip-hop. Actually with Traktor I like to use the beatslicer on the incoming track to find a nice break and use that…
Obviously the vocals are the important thing; you’ll want to get the mixing business done by then usually…
Transitions are definitely shorter. EQ swaps are pretty good, slam down the bass on one and slam up the bass on t’other etc. Actually I don’t reckon you need many tips 'cos:
If you mix drum&bass and dubstep then you’ve plenty of experience mixing R&B and hip-hop… techniques are often the same.
I play rnb and chart every weekend, my clubs arent ready for real music yet! I tend to use limited effects, the filter is an easy one to mix a track out and cut it to a dramatic start to a next song, a lot of tracks coming out now have good dj orientated remixes so you can mix one of those if you are playing at say 120 into the original at say 99bpm, if you want to check my latest mix its at
you can still do backspins in traktor without a jogwheel/platter (might not look as cool, but sounds more or less the same)…
just set the deck mode to Vinyl, with your mouse click and hold the waveform on the deck - then quickly swipe the mouse to the left and unclick to release. it takes a bit of practice to get a feel for how long to hold, how fast to swipe and when to release to get the sound you want, but it’s a pretty nifty work around.
one thing i noticed though, is that the volume of the deck goes up on the backspin so i bring down my gain about 10dbs or so to compensate during the ‘rewind’ - or else it can sound a bit harsh.
/edit: i use traktor3 but i imagine it’s pretty much the same for traktorpro
Cheers guys, it just seems like I need to try and stop attempting to achieve smooth transitions and just cope with the pain. I’m glad I’m not the only DJ out there feeling this struggle…
duerr - is it possible to somehow map a control to this function rather than using the mouse? (I fear potential slip-ups!)
The Turntable FX does backspin and brake noises doesn’t it? You can find the appropriate settings and map them to buttons. Plus you can disable the effect and have Traktor keep playing.
i’m not positive, but i seem to remember there being some mappable controls for vinyl manipulation type effects. both my controllers are completely mapped for functions i use more often though so i never dug into it that deep.
Yeah it does, I tried using it… But It was quite… Buggy I suppose the word would be lol. It just doesn’t sound right, and I’ve tried mapping it in so many different ways, but I just can’t rely on it
Here in South Africa we sit with a similar situation. I find this very frustrating. R&B / Hip Hop fans. I play sets and my evening works out ok with no mixing on these songs.
I add them into play lists and hit cruise in traktor.
Keep in mind that this is early evening.
My evening of mixing then starts with commercial and remixed radio hits round about 9:30 to 10 pm.
Anyway, I found this on Youtube.
DJ Marcelca, mixing hip hop & R&B part 1 and 2.
I still struggle as your songs are far of in tempo.
