So I opened for a pretty huge headliner a year ago now who will remain unnamed and I got the opportunity to watch his DJ’ing up very close. Needless to say, I found out a dirty little secret about how he DJs and was wondering what he used to do it.
Each and every single one of his tracks was 130BPM, so he would just adjust the pitch .8% when doing in any direction tempo wise, so no real “beatmatching” was necessary, he would just change the pitch in increments of .8%. On top of that, he had standardized all of his tracks to be the same volume so no gain adjustments were necessary.
Worst of all, he played like 12 different 5 minute long mashups, but that I don’t really care about. It’s typical bullshit.
I’m curious to know if he just warped the tracks in Ableton to be 130BPM and what plugin he just to standardize all of the gains without squashing the dynamics of the track?
“Worst of all” …why? It’s not a big deal. Playing a 5 minute long mashup is pretty normal. Over 7 minutes I’d be asking questions. A song/mashup is general 4-6 minutes. Sounds like you’re complaining, but you’re probably going to do the same thing if you’re asking.
So, there’s a lot of ways to change a songs bpm. 1) depends on your software. I use Audacity (free), because it is the easier and best for that imo. You just put in which bpm the song is at and at what bpm you want it to be, press ok, export, done.
For the gain, there’s MP3gain (free). It normalizes all your mp3 files to a certain level that you decided.
I change the tempo on the spot and for the gain, I’m still debating whether I should use Mp3gain or not. I’ll end up doing it, I think.
Appreciate your answer. I said worst of all because when I DJ, I basically make it as technical and as challenging as possible. It was a little disappointing seeing a headliner who I looked up to playing like that, but oh well, it’s not my business and he having a lot of fun regardless.
More than likely warped the tracks on ableton had a friend a fellow DJ that did the same and Tbh it’s not much different to using sync if u think about it just hope they then use the opputunity to be more creative.
chances are the audience doesn’t really care about how technical and how bad ass you are behind the decks, because they cant tell and they probably don’t care.
maybe they don’t know because all they’ve ever seen is mediocre. In my experience folks do notice when the DJ is going far beyond the standard fare that everyone has grown accustomed to.
This DJ selected tracks from a variety of artists and remixers that were all in a narrow range of tempo?
This DJ selected tracks that they also produced, and those tracks were in a narrow range of tempo?
Headlining is less about a DJing as a “service” and more about DJing as an “art.” In most cases “headliners” need to be somewhat “conservative” in their approach to their performance. Perhaps “risk averse” is a better description. The goal of the headliner is to present a clean set across a wide range of environments and audiences that showcases their “point of view” and “taste.”
I wasn’t there, so I can’t comment on the specifics. But, from your description the biggest issues appear to come from a difference between your “point of view” and “taste” and the headliners “point of view” and “taste.”
I think he means this DJ altered all of his tracks in a DAW so all of them are 130 BPM - a.k.a. no need to beatmatch on CDJ
Probably played them in “A->B mixing style” also
I’ve done that before. It was my first party back from like a year long break, and all I owned was SSL and a copy of Ableton Live. It seemed like a better option than spending the entire party trainwrecking because my fingers had forgotten how to do it or doing the whole thing in Live without a controller. It worked out just fine.
I’m not proud of it. But it did work. The funny thing was that the inaccuracies inherent in turntables meant I was pitch bending the whole time anyway.
I don’t recommend it, though. You’re pretty much always playing a heavily messed-up version of the song. Pitch-shifting beforehand will screw things up some, and then pitching it again on a CDJ (presumably with MT on) will make it even worse. Normalizing the gain is probably not a big detriment.
At least he was doing something and not just playing a pre-recorded set like a lot of headliners do. They tend to claim is because of the synchronization with the lights/fireworks/whatever, but metal and rock bands have been playing live, while drunk, for 40 years.
I don’t have a problem with sync, even if it’s just because it’s easier. But if you’re going to do it, own it.
