After the Mixify experience of not having any cue support for mixing into the stream, actually I felt liberated. It also added a certain element of surprise concerning how the final mixes sound like.
Do you know of any DJs that deliberately don’t cue tracks? I think this is a very wide area to explore and somehow I think the audience wants to be surprised instead of hearing one perfect transition after another?
PS: Concerning Traktor and spectrum waveform display, you get enough info to figure out how the track will sound like so that helps a lot in these kinds of non-cue mixing situations. As for not using cue for techno and tech house, that’s a no-brainer.
I do know some DJs who do not cue. All are “club DJs”, spinning a variety of formats. All use fairly rigid “set lists” that contain songs that are well known, and edited to have reasonable intro’s and outro’s. All “mix” based on these edited versions of songs (be it slams, beatmixing, long mixes, or whatever). It’s one step removed from “DJ Party Shuffle”, IMO.
I am a “mobile DJ”, so I am unable to take advantage of the “fixed” playlist concept. On the very rare occasion that I am not able to cue (and there are long, sordid tales to go along with each instance), I find it VERY disconcerting. It’s a bit like forgetting the side mirror extensions when pulling a trailer…suddenly all the mirrors are useless - so I can still drive, but I really feel the lack of information.
I have a really small setup, one baby sized controller with no internal (or external) soundcard. Without queing, you end up reading the waveform a lot to decide your mixes, and winging it, more or less.
The other cool thing with this kind of non-cue mixing is that you need to make rapid decisions to fit in the next track. A little bit similar how jazz musicians operate while they jam. With interesting at-the-moment sound sculptures.
Always cue if you can! It prevents horrendous mixes, and can make decent mixes into fantastic mixes.
I will say that cueless DJing is always significantly easier with software with overlapping/parallel waveforms - makes it way easier to “waveride” since your eyes don’t have to jump back and forth between the two waveforms.
Maybe but there’s something improvisational cool-cool to just mix two things together without a one minute analytical mind going through the mix resulting in predictable transitions.
Reminds me why Miles Davis fired a horn player that was rehearsing improvisation lines in the hotel room before the gig.
Sorry i don’t agree with this, i am a club dj, i don’t have anyone doing a warm up set, so i have a pre-made mix for a short time, whilst people are filtering in, and then i read the crowd from there on, i have a general idea of some of the tracks that i may play in the night, but that’s it,i think as a club dj, if you get stuck in the rutt of going by set/play lists you’re not going to last very long, the customers will know what’s coming and it’ll be boring
I think without cueing, it’s basically showing that you aren’t beatmatching yourself. Which, for what it is, you don’t have to with Ableton or Traktor if your grids are fully set and you know your tracks inside and out. Scratch DJ’s often have a different take on this as well, as they mix differently.
But I still think it’s really effective, necessary, and important to get timing spot on.
You don’t have to agree. I am not even defending the practice…I rely on being able to cue.
Boring is relative. I can hear the same banger on every pre-set radio station I have in my car at the same time!!! The songs are maybe 20 seconds out of sync. I can almost beat juggle using the preset buttons!
Out of the few hundred DJs I have known and observed over the years, I can think of three off the top of my head to did not cue. In every case, they relied on a fairly static set list of songs (similar to a cover band). At any given time they were using 100-150 songs, and playing for 4-5 hours a night (9p-2a). New songs were added to the list, and older songs dropped - but it was remarkably stable list week to week. Also, keep in mind that this was in the era of CDs, not laptops…so the “list” was really just the CDs in the case…order varied according to the mood of the DJ in the booth.
Yes, as I wrote, I was more thinking the same way a jazz musician approaches a gig, plenty of space to experiment – having to pre-listen and think analytically would feel strange for jazz musicians. Just putting out a probe for DJs to be more spontaneous instead of thinking like an engineer, not worrying about perfect mixes all the time, the odd mixes might be more interesting.
As a side note, DJ controllerism is all about being spontaneous within milliseconds.
I think going outside techno/tech house/house with no cue:ing which is the fun part. Anyone with a brain could mix atonal drum-centric music with zero cue:ing, me thinks.
If you’re doing 64/92 beat transitions, it’ll be fine, but why? Focus your energy on learning to mix, not on learning how to transition without headphones.
If you’re actually mixing choruses and verses though, it’s not going to sound as good as it would if you could cue, unless you know every track very well.
As I said, analytical mixing listening to the track before sending it out, that’s for me is boring and been done thousands of times so it’s not even that new by now. However, trying to make ad hoc changes in the mix to fit it in with the precious track and still sound good, that’s a fun challenge.
Suspect it is my producer brain that tells me to remix anything any way at any time… Maybe that’s the reason I don’t even use playlists when playing nowadays as that’s another fun challenge to always find the next track while the previous one is playing.
Here’s some other food for thought, based on classic fusion-jazz or rock music practice for musicians (anyone who has done something like this has hopefully done this practice as it opens up a lot of avenues when you are up on stage playing.)
Ever wondered why super-star musicians don’t seem to do mistakes? Well, they do, brains misfire from time to time. However, they learned to rapidly take this false part and immediately incorporate it into their playing so it seamlessly fits in. A typical exercise for learning this is to start a solo anywhere on the fretboard or keyboard. Or play bass lines starting anywhere on the fretboard.
So something similar for DJs would be to do any kind of transition with any kind of material and learn to quickly adjust it, meaning that the audience never finds out that it was a train wreck to start with.
It’s not easy and requires practice but I think it would be a good thing to learn to elevate DJ work one level up for anyone. Also make the art of DJ:ing even more unique and cultivate new styles. I even think DJs such as DJ Shadow has developed this talent to the highest level.
I only que certain songs that I know for a fact will not mix well without it. Otherwise I go cueless, like photojojo said, overlapping waveforms are the best when not cuing. You can listen to my electro house mix, the entire mix was cueless. minimal mistakes
but also seeing as i use my saffire 6 for Djing i can still cue just fine with mixify
