no headphones?
ive learned everything on my se without using headphones. i feel like i dont have to use them at gigs. i know my tracks well enough. but i seem to hear a lot of people saying they cant go without. just wondering if anyone else goes headphoneless? i find them a lil restricting (I like to move while im playing 
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ha no i don’t use them either. also knowing all my songs pretty well. but sometimes I think it would be good for me to play things I don’t know to well or don’t feel totally comfortable with. expand a little. so im considering getting a pair.
I know when im just messing around with all my EDM i normally dont use headphones.
However when it comes to gigs i have to cause i dont know that many songs.
BTW so were on the same track, by GIG i mean… An event where i get hired to DJ (Wedding, Backyard, ect…)
I spent years mixing from a system with only one output, so I got really good at syncing tracks quickly. I listen to old mixtapes and can hear the out-of-phase beginnings but nobody else heard them. I’m retraining myself to sync on headphones them mix through, but I still end up with the crossfader stuck in the middle as I start my tracks most of the time.
So no, you don’t need headphones to cue on.
But you can learn to use them to your advantage if you have them.
i use headphones because i do a lot of in track mixing and remixing on the fly.
i know a lot of serato users go phoneless because the beat matching with the colors on the beats - sometimes i wish traktor had something similar, but alas…
headphoneless? never! it simply takes all your creativity away, you cant mix those old recorded mp3’s that you just cant beatgrid. you cant suddenly play that samlpe or loop you got inspired to by the other track. you cant play back to back with anyone. as ryan says intrack mixing is gonna be hard aswell. and i could go on…
in my humble oppinion, headphones are absolutley vital for a good dj performance!
How do you key match?
I cue far less than I thought I would when I finally got a sound card that supported that. At home I never bother, playing out its handy if your going to be mixing tunes you dont know that well, and for finding a certain points in tracks etc that you dont have marked.
i just knwo which tracks sound good with others. if i feel like a song will sound good with the current one playing, i just jam it on. ive never used any form of key matching, i just listen
wow is sound good but imagine that u put the song in the wrong time or at the wrong moment that would be a - point for u but if u think is better not to use the headphones :thumps up:
i can understand how you might do this but i personally think you’re not performing your best without them.
Example:
you start bringing the new track in, despite whatever beatgridding you do it sounds better slightly out of phase. You have to bring this up to a certain volume so you can hear it to correct it, the listeners hear this correction. If you used headphones you could make the adjustment before bringing the new track volume in - so the listeners NEVER hear anything other than a perfect beatmatch.
Unless you know your tracks EXTREMELY well.
as for key matching i try to do that by ear generally and avoid major clashes but i pretty much do nice long mixes with lots of EQing and i think you can mix most keys this way.
Sure you won’t win any prizes for perfect aural progression but it doesn’t sound bad.
Your work habits are your work habits, and if you like not using headphones, who’s to tell you otherwise? But to say you know what tracks already work with each other precludes your ability to key-shift an enormous amount of tracks to blend harmonically even if you’ve never heard either one of them before, because you can headphone cue. Not that this is vitally important. I didn’t have monitor outs when I first learned on Traktor, and I got very good at judging from the display. You can certainly work like that (though I’m in favor of anything that helps me make eye contact with the crowd and not the screen).
When I’m fucking around at home just finding tracks that mix well I dont bother. But at gigs even tho I’m using ableton where at the end of the day there is totally no NEED to use headphones I think its best to for 2 main reasons.
Allows you to more accurately judge the loudness of the two tracks before its dropped so that your not getting heaps of variation in sound levels which can kill your set (IMO for ableton users where there is several tracks possibly going on at once this is fukcing VITAL)
Allows you to test a song before you drop it, which is very handy as even if you know your tracks if you cant do this it cuts down on your freedom HARD.
Theres other uses such as hearing tracks isolated and EQing more effectively etc but those 2 I think are v important.
Oh and reason 3. Headphones make you look cool and like a ‘real DJ’ as stupid and superficial as that might sound its actually IMO important as being a DJ is in part putting on a show not just playing music, and a part of that is looking the part and that means having headphones…
Counting bars will help better. 
True, it’s still the DJ that serves the crowd and not the other way around.
Work for your public, make sure they don’t irritate the transitions, from one song to another.
Eventhough most of you might beatgrid and press sync, I still tend to beatmatch the old fashioned way. With that in mind, headphones become essential in my setup.
Indeed, the other thing I was thinking from the perspective of performance is that if you have your headphones on people know that you are busy and wont try talk to you 
Remembering your songs is one thing, how about remembering all your cue points in all your tracks aswell. I’m also starting to use lots of small loops and single hits in Ableton over the top of my Traktor mixes that headphones are really handy for.
That said sometimes i just cant be arsed with the headphones and get creative on the fly. I don’t think the cue button is going to go anywhere until we can wire our brains directly into the amp and be done with all this controller stuff 
oh man this would be the shit! wire our brains to the computer…i will think about this. maybe an usb 2.0 port…na firewire is better. between the eyes. rise of the meganerd.
well back to topic. i could never go headphoneless. cause i don´t beatgrid that much. but at home when i do some chillout stuff its easy without headphones…
My last mix I recorded almost entirely without headphones. I would put them on when I wasn’t just about my grid, just to make sure the beats lined up. I found it easier to mix without the headphones on (at least in a private setting, still not definite about the club setting). It was definitely weird, but I’ve always been a visual person, so mixing visually worked for me 