So I’ve just gotten into digi Djing a few months ago. I am a long time club goer both here in the states and overseas when I lived in Germany.
I play mainly trance and progressive house and use a Hercules Steel controller and an Audio2 DJ with Tpro. I have not made a demo tape yet in order to get any gigs because I wanted to perfect my mixing. I don’t plan on using CDJ’s or timecodes as I believe I can do the same thing with just my controller…especially for my genre…
My question is, with this genre of music, what else can I do so it’s not just mixing the end of one track with the beginning of another?
Here is my main mixing technique.
count measures at the beginning of a track - it’s usually 16 until the meat of the track comes in.
Count measures at end of track - find where I want to drop the new tune. Mostly 16 measures from end of track.
3 Create cue points to show me this.
when I get to end of track ready to mix new one, kill bass on incoming track, wait until the 16 measures, switch bass over and either kill other track or fade out with vol. or filter.
I have a plethera of FX at my disposal, but not sure what else to do other than this to create a very clean mix…I occasionally use the gator with Bass kill 4 beats from my drop point, but that is on a rare occasion.
Any advice to create a nicer, more interesting mix is welcome! I would love to start my demo tape soon!
listen to other mixes by superstar djs and copy the things you like about them.
practice lots.
pretty much all there is to it, it’s not rocket surgery.
edit:
one thing is
EQing, balancing the levels is pretty tricky. I think that was one big thing i overlooked when i first got into it myself. do some reading on production mixing/eqing, it will help you understand how to balance eqs when your djing.
yeah what he said. and then add your own unique stuff (obviously no recipe for that), but don’t experiment too much on a mix you want to hand out to people. keep fx to a minimum.
free hint: demo mixes aren’t that relevant for getting booked. I think that ended ~10 years ago.
actually i’m being serious, very rare i let a track play for more than a couple of mins. and i layer up tracks with 4 decks, so the odd held loop over a track and mix into that, things of that nature - hit my youtube link, and find the 2 decks 2 samplers vid
Try doing live edits of some of the tracks by playing its parts in a different order when it’s appropriate. You don’t always have to play it all from beginning to end.
Dabble with keymixing if you wanna play melodies together.
What he said. Try mixing 2 or more tracks together for minutes at a time and not just at the start and end of the tracks. I always try to aspire to mix in a way where, hopefully, people can’t tell when a new track is coming in. Also, As a DJ who loves to mix and not just play tracks, I love to watch other DJ’s mix, without being obtrusive of course. It’s amazing how differently people approach it.
Thank you all for the tips! I’ll give all of your suggestions a shot and see what I come up with! I like the idea of starting the mix sooner in the song as well as looping for a period of time until the next track fully comes in!
yeah this is where 4 decks comes in real handy. you can use C + D like a sampler, apply effects, play with cueing or key. experiment they open up some new avenues if you take the effort to explore them.
using the same tracks that are playing in decks A + B is a great technique to get the effect of “teasing” the listener earlier on before your ready to mix out. this is great stuff!
I would love to be able to use 4 decks, but I have my controller and it’s effects set up for 2. It would be a lot of work to convert to 4, but I may have to…
you certainly don’t HAVE to. it has been proven many times that for a good dj, nothing besides 2 analogue decks and a simple mixer is required to completely own a party. 4 decks with all the digital bells&whistles won’t help you if you don’t “feel” the crowd and give them the music they want before they realize that they want it trust me on that, it matters more WHAT you play and WHEN you play it than HOW you play it.
also, if the more advanced stuff doesn’t come to you naturally (meaning: unless you also “feel” your setup and operate all fx and other toys flawlessly without thinking) it’s never gonna sound right and there’s no need to push it.
trust me on that, it matters more WHAT you play and WHEN you play it than HOW you play it.