Working the Music

 

 

Learn the BPM of the songs you play. The beats per minute (BPM) of a song will determine how smoothly or easily you can mix it with another song. You can calculate BPM by counting the beats yourself using a stopwatch, but that's pretty tedious. Some mixers will have a BPM counter on the board, while most DJ software will calculate the BPM of a track for you, although this may not be completely accurate 100% of the time, so it's good to have some sense of the BPMs yourself.

• You can use a pitch warp to match the beats, though it's best to choose two songs that are only a few BPM off. However, use it on the song that doesn't have vocals yet. Speeding it up or slowing it down changes the key and messes with everything.

 
 

Learn the intros and outros. Most dance songs will have an intro in which the music is going but the vocals are not at the beginning of the song and a corresponding outro at the end. Mixing usually means blending one song's intro with the outro of another. Knowing when an outro starts and an intro begins is critical to live beat mixing.

• Cue up the second song. Have your second song ready to go as your first one is winding down. Use one hand on the turntable or CD player's pitch to adjust speed (if your BPMs don't match) and put the other on the crossfader, so that the first song's volume decreases as the second song's volume increases.

 
 

Learn how to scratch. The decks can be used to find your place in a song when they're queued up or they can be use as pseudo-records to get your scratch on. There are baby scratches and scribble scratches and drags and scratches that work at different pitch levels. Get 'em all down before you head out there!

• Certain songs and certain places in certain songs are prime for scratching, while others are terrible for it. Knowing when to scratch is like comedic timing: you'll know it when it's right and when it's just wrong.

 
 

Keep it simple at first. When you're starting out, make mixing easier by sticking to two songs that are within 3 BPMs of each other. You should also use two songs that are in the same key. Your software should be able to tell you this. When you nail that down, start experimenting with looping and then move on to your toggle function and adding effects.

• Also be sure to experiment with the different methods on your mixer. For most effects, there's more than one way to do them. You'll find what you prefer (generally one method is a very do-it-yourself way and the other is more automated).

 
 

Transition between the songs smoothly. One of the most important parts of DJing is transitioning between songs, matching beats so that the beat remains constant, letting people continue dancing, uninterrupted. Using conventional DJ hardware, this involves listen to the second song's intro in your headphones, moving the pitch slider until the songs play at the same speed, and cueing the song simultaneously with the preceding song. Learning to do this smoothly is one of the essential skills of DJing.

• You also need to adjust the volume levels of the songs. The song you are mixing out of will be playing at full volume, so you need to adjust the second up slowly, listening closely to the tune to bring it up subtly.
• Never mix vocals over vocals. It's important to avoid creating awkward noise, which means you need to be super-familiar with the songs intros and outros.
• Digitally, it's possible to use beat-matching software to do this automatically, provided that the songs are within a few BPM of one another. It's still good to learn how to do it analog, since this is a fundamental skill.