Transition from 130 bpm (EDM) to 65 bpm (hip hop)…how do YOU do it?
Wasup my fellow dj gurus. Drop some knowledge on me please! Just wondering how to transition from electronic music to hip hop. Any ideas or advice?
I’m guessing you would stop the first song while adding sort of effect such as turntable FX (brake) / echo / reverb…and then drop the new tune in…
Thanks!
Echo freeze
Awesome hoodless. Sorry for the rookie question, but what do you mean by freeze? Stopping the track right? thanks for the quick reply.
edm - 130 bpm / hip-hop = 65
yea thats what I was gonna say if you still wanted blend. Either beatmatch or x2 the bpm and sync
cool cool thanks i’ll fix that up top
haha Manchild you rock. Good looking out! Thanks for sharing that.
60 to 80 sounds damn slow, even for hip-hop. Should be more like 85 to 100, I would say (which renders the 130 = 2*65 solution impossible)
A few ways:
Slam it in on the 1. Slow your beat down to something that is less than a 10 or 15% difference between that beat and the hiphop beat and then just drop the hip hop beat on the 1. Easy peazy. You need to slow your beat down very slowly so it’s not noticeable. What I did once was I was playing some EDM track, and slowly started to drop the tempo while I played a loop. As I dropped the tempo I would cut the loop length to keep the illusion of a similar not-to-dissonant tempo (you want key-lock on!) then I had the loop length cut to 1/4th or 1/8th. In the background I was also dropping the ratat remix of Party & BS by biggie. Let the intro build than cut the EDM track on the vocal/beat drop right on the 1 (Sync was on! I don’t have 6 arms!). The party went nuts chanting my name as I was doing this and then went even crazier when the beat dropped. The point is you HAVE to create a buildup and a lot of tension. There is no subtle way to change tempos so drastically, so if it’s going to be obvious, you want to make it REALLY OBVIOUS so people know to get excited about the transition and drop if you want to even attempt to mix the tracks.
Echofreeze, let it sit for a few second (typically you want to do this at the end of a vocal section) and then drop the new beat on the 1. Kinda boring and can seriously kill a vibe if the party is dancing and all of a sudden they just hear an echo freeze out, then a new beat. This I’d only do if I have to.
Make a transition in a DAW or buy one. Typically (I’ll assume you are playing top 40, otherwise I can’t understand the transition from EDM to hip-hop. It seriously makes very little sense in any other situation.) you can drop a vocal loop (something that gives the feeling of energy: Fatman scoop or some other person yelling something the crowd can do a “call and response” to is good) and continually slow that down with the beat. You do a sliding tempo-range that will slow the beat down to the desired speed. For example - Anthem Kingz has a transition where they continue to slow the beat down from some dutch house beat and eventually they slow the beat down considerably with Fatman scoop yelling “if you love hip hop make noise.” It gets the crowd hyped. It builds tension, and you notice the beat is slowing down but you know there is a reason! You’re telling the crowd you are going to drop some phat hip-hop track right after this guy stops yelling so they better be ready to dance. Vocal tracks are a good way to mask - but also make more obvious at the same time - large tempo transitions. By obvious I mean you know it’s coming, by mask I mean - your brain doesn’t care because it seems natural.
And that whole 130-65 bpm just sounds…really bad… not to hate, but 65 bpm is SERIOUSLY slow. I don’t even know any hip hop track I’d want to dance and party to that is slower than 80 bpm and even that is stretching the lower boundary of tempos for a party/club event(black and yellow comes to mind). I like to stay in the 95-101 bpm range for hip hop party music.
Great responses, thank you so much.
Frank, thanks for writing in depth and sharing your knowledge. Youda youda best 
there are a lot of hip hop tracks that people like to dance that are around the 68 - 77 range.
I just made this to prove my point that it doesn’t have to sound terrible (not saying it’s the greatest either haha). I let the 130bpm track run for min so you get somewhat used to the tempo before transition. When I dj, I jump around to different BPM’s all the time, but I’m sure if you didnt and stayed at a certain BPM range for awhile you get sensitive to any tempo change and it could sound weird. Same goes for blending…if you’re blending all the time any drop,cut,slam, etc.. sounds bad cause it’s out of character from your mix.
BTW the hip-hop track is mixed in at 65 BPM
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I do this constantly in my sets. Most of the hip hop I spin that people dance to is around mid-80s to 90s. Sometimes in the 70s for tracks like How Low and Make it Rain. I’ve got some transitions that I picked up from crooklynclan.net that I use and I actually made one myself that blends pieces of the Day N Nite Crookers Remix and transitions to Make it Rain.
It’s yours for free.
here’s another trick but it takes the right record to do it.
2.when its just the bass only, start to lower the tempo of the playing track down to where you want it to be so it will fit with the next incoming track.
the bass only loop section of the first record will come down in pitch as you slow it down, making the bass feel stronger/deeper as you go.
the feeling of the bass getting deeper hides the tempo drop, even though your slowing down it feels like its getting stonger and harder, not slower and softer.
when you reach the tempo you want, make the new slower record jump in real hard, preferably with a big kik at the start that will slam through the outgoing sub bass from the first record.
this again
for very slow tempos (as u said, 65bpm) u can mix doubling the grid of the slowest track.
If that’s not possible (70+ bpm it’s too much), just use the echo freeze. Works fine.
How helpful
Oh and for whoever said it - anyone playing Fatman fucking scoop would get a thorough piss bottling from me.
Yrs
Sherlock
@Sherlock - although I quite frankly couldn’t be arsed to go back and link to the identical historical threads I thought it pertinent to bring the OPs attention to the fact they are there as an additional resource - in case they subsequently find out where the search button is
@mike_o - good stuff
@OP - I mix quite a few genres and out of 12000 tracks only a few are 65bpm - that is pretty sloooooow. Almost all of my hip hop and related genres are 80-100. Mind you, I usually just move up through the tempos gradually throughout the night rather than ping-ponging up and down
i cant teach you how to do it.
1st. make sure keylock is on!
2. Deck A Drop to 65 bpms Deck B to 130 bpm
3. Mix during the chorus and echo out after its done
4. Rinse and Repeat