DJing
DJing is a way for music lovers to promote their favorite music by entertaining dancers and partiers at clubs and events.
Basic Spinning with Free Beatport
Talk Like A DJ
Before you're ready to rock the virtual ones and twos, you'll need to familiarize yourself with some basic DJ lingo.
BPM: Beats per minute is a measurement of tempo, i.e. the speed of a song.
Beat match: Match the downbeats of two different songs so they line up, sort of like when your windshield wipers magically line up with the beat of a song on your car radio. Beat matching sounds more natural when the two songs have BPMs that are in the same ballpark. If the gulf between two songs' tempos is too wide, you're better off with a simple crossfade.
Crossfade: A gradual fade from one track to another, so that they play simultaneously for a little while as one transitions to the other. Crossfaders slide from left to right across the mixing console.
Cue point: A spot near the beginning of the song where the rhythm kicks in. Cue points are helpful for skipping past silences or intros at the beginning of songs, and are absolutely necessary when beat matching. Once you set a cue point in a program that supports them, the song will always contain it, so you only have to set it once.
Deck: Think of a deck as one of the two turntables a DJ uses. Most DJ software uses two decks, allowing you to switch smoothly from one song to the next. Some software includes four decks.
Downbeat: Play a standard dance song and count along, "1, 2, 3, 4." The "1" in that rotation is the downbeat.
Basic DJing Methods
There are several ways of DJing.
Turntables and Vinyl
Old-school DJs use turntables and big crates full of real vinyl records. Vinyl sales have actually increased in the digital age with the growing popularity of DJing.
Digital Scratch Control with Turntables
The state-of-the-art in DJing setups is digital scratch control with turntables. These hardware setups like Serano Scratch allow you to use a special controller record on regular turntables to control the playback of digital audio files on your computer. You get all of the physical control of real vinyl with none of the bulk because you can carry your entire music library on a laptop like a MacBook.
CDDJing
A CDDJ setup works from tracks on CDs. Many clubs have CDDJ systems as they are inexpensive and don't require bulky vynil collections. Even if you store your music library on the computer, you can easily burn CDs of songs for DJing purposes.
Ableton Live DJing
Some DJs use Live for DJing.
Traktor
Traktor is a Native Instruments app that allows you to DJ without having turntables or other hardware of any kind. The only hardware that is recommended is a multi-channel soundcard so that you can hear a DJ monitor mix on headphones seperate from the mix you are playing.
Basic Traktor DJing Techniques
A video about how to use Traktor
For a computer-savvy digital music collector, Traktor is the easiest method of DJing to start learning.
Import Your Collection
The first thing you have to do is import all your music such as MP3s to Traktor's Collection window on the bottom.
Setup
You have to set up Traktor's audio settings to get the sound working properly for performance.
Song BPM Matching
You need to find out the BPM (beats per minute) of your songs. Traktor will usually be able to analyze song BPM in a few seconds but sometimes it will have trouble giving you the BPM number of a song. Sort your music collection by BPM and try to follow each song with a song that is the same BPM or within 5 BPMs difference.
BPM Matching
You can match the BPMs of songs by setting the currently playing song to Master and the song you are going to match to Slave.
Cueing
Once you have a song playing and a song ready to go next, you are ready to cue the next song.
- Pick a point where you want to start playing the new song at. This may be the beginning of the song or it may be a highly visible spike in the waveform that looks like the beginning of a bar of beats.
- Either way, click that spot to get it ready to play from there.
- Double-check your deck settings are correct for your new song to begin.
- If you want the new song to fade in gradually, make sure the crossfader is all the way on the currently playing deck.
- If you want the new song to begin abruptly, make sure the crossfader is near the middle or you won't hear your new song begin.
- If you want the new song to begin somewhat muted, adjust its levels such as by equalizing down its highs.
- Now pick a good spot in the currently playing song to start the new one.
- Right at the moment where one bar ends and another is about to begin, hit play on the new song.
- Adjust the new song to crossfade its volume up and raise its equalizer levels to normal.
- Crossfade out the old song or let its outro play itself out.
Crossfading
If you want a new song to begin somewhat muted, adjust its levels such as by equalizing down its highs.
BPM Shifting
If you want to shift tempo of a song in the middle of playing it, do so at a slow part where the beat breaks down or is silent for a few bars. This is useful if you started playing a song at an adjusted tempo and want to return it to its intended tempo at the first opportunity.
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Advanced DJing
To learn more advanced DJing, there are a wealth of sources.
Mentorship
There is ultimately no better way to learn than by finding a DJ who is willing to teach you the craft through hands-on instruction. Even if you go self-taught, finding more experienced DJ mentors to learn from is invaluable.