How many of you regularly do personal track edits of stuff you DJ often with?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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How many of you regularly do personal track edits of stuff you DJ often with?

I have been wanting to start doing this. I’ve been wanting to personalize the DJ process a bit more and start editing some of the tracks I really like to mix with. Usually there is just small arrangement changes I want to make to work something more into my style or cut out certain sections to shorten some longer tracks. I feel like it is also a way to really get more involved and creative with the process and really know your tracks inside and out if you are altering them.

I know a lot of DJs and producers will DJ exclusively with original material, remixes, and custom edits of other people’s tracks when they play out live and I think there is something to be said for that. So I’m wondering if many of you do this and what types of changes you make to enhance or fit a track to your style. There is also something to be said for keeping the original mix as it was produced and mastered so I’m interested to hear both sides.

As a bonus maybe post up some of your track edits along with a link to the original, I would be curious what they sound like side by side. :sunglasses:

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I’ve just started doing this a bit and I would definitely recommend it. I’m a beginner with Soundforge/Ableton etc. but i’ve found it fairly easy to make simple re-arrangement edits.

The reason I did it was to just make tunes easier for DJing with, particularly stuff like old disco records. Generally i’ll just extend a few sections, like the start and end, for easier mixing (so I don’t have to mess about with loops and cue points). Sometimes I might cut out a chorus completely, with a few disco tunes I like I hate the main chorus but love the bridges/breaks etc.

I’m not confident enough in my abilities to post any of them unfortunately and there is nothing mindblowing about them anyway, just simple re-arrangements.

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I tend to slightly rearrange and shorten tracks using the hot cues in traktor. I use the fade in and fade out flags to mark these spots and have them in numerical order so I know where I am jumping to. This way I can shorten them or keep them original.

I use this for things like starting with the breakdown for an intro to mix into then skipping back to the first verse, skipping the second set of 16 or 32 bars of a repeated phrase, and sometimes just to cut out a verse of a long song. I am using the term verse loosely as in not all music has lyrics.

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Hey, you okay, I like new friends, I wish you a happy day

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this ^… lol

Some songs have great intros and i will just copy that part and save it under a new file name. ex. the intro has a great kick and clap that goes great with another song playing, so i will sample it in. or use lyrics to throw in. basically creating mini loops or samples saved as a new track in traktor. i found it easier and quicker to have it in a folder this way.

i hope you get what im saying. im terrible at putting the thoughts in my mind into words.

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Damn spammer bot muther f&#kers. Getting sick of them.

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haha i know right? none of them make any sense either.

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Been doing it for YEARS!

But more so when I used CD’s mostly…now I just put a cue point if I want to skip a part of a track.

Then…we cut it out in SoundForge and burn it back to CD.

First I did it was for a track called The Raver by Tortured Brain.

Sick track…but had this LAME part in it. Cut it out and added a section that was basically just a repeat of a section and worked the charm!

Did it a lot for psytrance tracks with a very well known vocal in it. Everyone knew the track when they heard that part of the break etc…and it would be naff to play it.

So I removed that section and a year later was jamming it at a party…had so many people asking me who and what it was.

They would not believe me when I told them.

Jess would know it… Eskimo - Party Pooper.

“sorry everyone…the police are here and we had to stop the party!”

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Recently I’ve been using Ableton to warp acapellas and match them closer to a metronome beat in the bpm range of the other songs that I’d be mixing that track with.

Currently working with Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap and San Francisco (If You’re Going) by Scott McKenzie.

Although there are remix versions I like, the instrumental backing can be a little much if I’m layering it on top of something else, so its much easier to just make my own beat-responsive acapella track to use with a wider possible range of songs.

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yeah I’ve chopped out the lame synth solo from Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough by MJ… much better!

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i hever have done it, but i want to do it ;o)

i have 2 tracks in my brain that needs to be re-edited before i can play them because i don’t like them the way they are (for the usage as intro waaaay too powerfull) but they have a mega intro i want to use ;o)

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My method of choice as well.

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Yep… make lots of edits.. some smaller than others… also make my own remixes and productions as well… in this day and age where everyone thinks they are a DJ you’ve got to be able to bring something to the table that sets you apart from the rest… edits include the following:

  1. Cutting out sections of tunes that don’t work (i.e. the bleepity beepity shit from moombahton)
  2. Adjusting EQ / levels.. a lot of tunes artists produce these days are done only with headphones and may not be balanced… I’m really sensitive to the 1Khz - 2Khz range, so I usually find myself cutting these frequencies often as well.
  3. A lot of bass tracks just rumble on larger systems so I use some frequency targeted side chain compression to tame the rumble and put some punch into those tunes.
  4. Add quantitized intro / extro where needed (I play a lot of world music in my sets and these aren’t DJ friendly… some world tracks I add arrangements to, but I consider this to cross the line between edit / remix.
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Sounds good!

Good effort then in your work!

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There was a period where I was spinning more personal/custom edits than full tracks. I kinda gave that up at some point.

Mostly, they were just structural edits, as that’s the easiest thing to do without screwing up the track too badly…that’s also about all I did when I was spinning on Abelton, other than occasionally adding drums, a capellas, or synth lines and running everything through a very light compressor to kind of tie it all together (set for maybe a couple dB of gain reduction).

I wouldn’t mind getting back into it, mostly because there are some old songs that I love and would love to spin more often (old Daft Punk, Orbital, and Underworld stuff, mostly) where the drums just kind of don’t fit with modern music anymore. Re-doing the drums for those would go a long way to make them fit with a modern house set.

I’d kill for audio stems from the Alive 2007 tour, for example. But IMHO, it’s not worth dealing with the crowd noise to just play those tracks.

The biggest stumbling block I see in doing custom edits/remixes, is that it’s pretty limited what you can actually do without stems. You’re basically limited to adding sounds to an already-mastered track…maybe squeezing them in with filters, EQs, or sidechained compressors…but all of that adds noise and can make things sound really muddy and over-processed if you overdo it. And then to get it to sound right, you kinda have to do a half-assed mastering job…which means compressing it even more than it already was. And that can really squeeze the life out of it.

So, I say go ahead and experiment. My tools of choice are Ableton Live, Pro Tools, and Logic…just like for everything else in a studio. But, you can use a lot of different stuff. Just be realistic about what you expect to accomplish and occasionally ask yourself whether your edits are really making an improvement or just being different.

Also, xone, I think you own Maschine. IDK what you use it for in your DJ set, but it’s really insanely powerful for doing some of those edits live.

If you can work out the sync issues, I’d seriously consider starting by getting some construction kits off sounds2sample or wherever…maybe just working with the included kits to do things like adding breakbeats or little flourishes over your normal DJ set.

The routing gets weird, but the experiments I’ve done are pretty cool. It’s kind of like the best parts of an Ableton hybrid DJ/Live set with a more straightforward way to just play tracks and a damn-good live production setup that you don’t really need to look at the computer for if you put in the prep work.

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i do it often especially when there are parts of the song that i dont like or just deem unnecessary. maybe for hardcore fans the 20 minute buildup breakdown would suffice but the majority of the people i play for have the attention span of 2 seconds so i have to switch it up lol

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I have been doing a bunch lately. I’ve done a lot of combining original songs with one or more of its remixes and arranging them all together throughout the song to keep it fresh but still sounding good.

Also, for the songs that have percussion-less parts that drag on for too long, but that I really like, I will throw in some drums in the back so it still keeps the groove going making it easier for people to keep dancing to it.

And of course have been making some cheeky mashups with popular songs depending on the gig. Like if it’s an open format gig, I may take a heavier (than I might feel comfortable playing in that situation) house/electro track and throw on an acapella from a Top 40 track so it can be familiar to people and they can sing along, despite maybe not know the EDM track

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ive not long started doing this, mainly taking two mixes of the same track and making something to transition from commercial crap to something a bit heavier.

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Something that I’ve been doing is not so much track restructuring, but somewhat mash-ups.

Taking some deep house stuff, and throwing some jazz (Miles Davis) over the top. Having a lot of fun with that.

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i like the sound of that, do you have a soundcloud where we could have a listen??:smiley: