I recently had a chat with my good mate Craig and he's informed me that he's purchased himself a set of Stanton CD decks and a mixer. Now I'm not going to go into what brand I think is the best for equipment as I believe it's how you use the equipment rather than what you have to work with that makes you an awesome anything. One thing that he did ask me for was some tips for the beginner DJ... so allow me to present to you:
DJ SayWhut?!'s tips for the beginner DJ!
Tip 1: DANCE TO THE RHYTHM!
You might be asking yourself "SSSSSSAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYWWWWWWWWHHHHHHHHUUUUUUTTTTTT????????!!!!!!!!! Why would I want to dance to the music, if I wanted to dance I'd be out on the dancefloor not behind the decks!!!"Well grasshopper if there's one thing that the good groove is known to induce it's got to be the wiggling and shaking of body parts thanks to the infectious rhythms emanating from the speakers! One thing about dancing is that if you can dance to the beat then you have rhythm flowing through you - you end up feeling the music that is playing on the system! Whether your dancing style is to tap your feet, sway side to side, or bob your head up and down, if you do it at the right times, you will start to find yourself naturally moving with the rhythm and that is important for a DJ. Not only that but the music and gig becomes a far more personal experience for you, and you will start to know your tunes quite well from each drop, to each drum fill to every phrase. If you've ever sung along to a song then the idea is similar. So while your dance moves will never be as awesome as the above picture whilst you're behind the decks, don't be afraid to shake a leg to get into the groove.
TIP 2: Learn to mix with other tunes in your collection
Pretty obvious tip right? I mean why wouldn't you try to learn how to mix with other tunes in
your collection, they're right there on the vinyl and all you need to do is move the needle/change the CD track... surprisingly though not many DJs play obscure tunes in favour of just going for the big tunes and why not... the big tunes are what everyone knows and what they get right into at the club/party right?
OK, in order to see what I'm getting at here, we need to wind back the clock. Back when I was a bedroom DJ I had a pretty basic set up - 2 budget turntables, a DJ mixer all plugged into a pair of computer speakers. Being a home DJ set up I had everything tuned to suit my environment - the volume was set to a certain level, the mixer was set to a certain way that suited me and I trained my ears to listen to everything with those settings. I also released a few mixtapes (pretty damn primitive ones at the time) to give to clubs and promoters to demo my sound. The feedback was really positive at the time saying that I had quite a unique sound that not many people were pushing around town. All good right? Yeah, you'd think so!
It wasn't until a couple of years later when I got my first club gig at Chinese Laundry for Salt Shaker (a night that had a lot going for it in my opinion just never received the crowd it deserved) that my learning curve took a steep climb when I heard first hand for the first time how loud a club system can be. Yeah sure, I went clubbing and party a lot when I was learning how to DJ, but my ears weren't trained on a massive club system so I lost a lot of confidence when I played my first set.
So what does all this have to do with listening to other tunes in your library? Well for one if you constantly listen and mix the same tunes when you are learning to DJ, your ears become way too accustomed to listening to the same sounds and may never train themselves to hear other sounds while beat matching. So when you get to a big system, if you've trained your ears to hear a lot of different sounds when playing a particular track, you can start to really differentiate other noises in the tune you are mixing in with.
Another important aspect of selecting other tunes is that there's a good chance that the two tunes you have selected to play out were inspired by hearing a DJ play them out, there's also a good chance that while they may sound really awesome together, there may be another pair of tunes that sounds even better than what you already have and you have the added bonus of not sounding like the same DJ you were at last week's gig so try to spice things up a bit and mix and mash it up behind the decks.
TIP 3: 8 is your favourite number and if not it will soon be.
8? Why 8 you ask? Well to put it simply, most modern day music is cut up into 8 bar phrases. I'm not going to delve into music theory here, for those who don't know what a bar is in music you're better off reading about it here. Sure some tunes are written with 4 bar phrases but most are written in 8 bar phrases. Listen to most choruses in modern day pop songs and there's a good chance that they're written with 8 bars (if it's 16 bars, then it would be 2 sets of 8 bar phrases)
So why is all this 8 bar counting important? Well if you're listening to a song with lyrics and you intend on mixing in another tune with lyrics in it, the mix would sound unclean if the vocals clashed with each other. It would sound much nicer if you mixed in the 2nd song just right so that when the vocals of the second will come in just as the vocals of the first tune cut out.
Let's take for example the introduction to Kool & The Gang's "Jungle Boogie". It basically goes "Get Down" 16 times with every odd "Get Down" dropping at the start of each bar.
TIP 2: Learn to mix with other tunes in your collection
Pretty obvious tip right? I mean why wouldn't you try to learn how to mix with other tunes in
your collection, they're right there on the vinyl and all you need to do is move the needle/change the CD track... surprisingly though not many DJs play obscure tunes in favour of just going for the big tunes and why not... the big tunes are what everyone knows and what they get right into at the club/party right?OK, in order to see what I'm getting at here, we need to wind back the clock. Back when I was a bedroom DJ I had a pretty basic set up - 2 budget turntables, a DJ mixer all plugged into a pair of computer speakers. Being a home DJ set up I had everything tuned to suit my environment - the volume was set to a certain level, the mixer was set to a certain way that suited me and I trained my ears to listen to everything with those settings. I also released a few mixtapes (pretty damn primitive ones at the time) to give to clubs and promoters to demo my sound. The feedback was really positive at the time saying that I had quite a unique sound that not many people were pushing around town. All good right? Yeah, you'd think so!
It wasn't until a couple of years later when I got my first club gig at Chinese Laundry for Salt Shaker (a night that had a lot going for it in my opinion just never received the crowd it deserved) that my learning curve took a steep climb when I heard first hand for the first time how loud a club system can be. Yeah sure, I went clubbing and party a lot when I was learning how to DJ, but my ears weren't trained on a massive club system so I lost a lot of confidence when I played my first set.
So what does all this have to do with listening to other tunes in your library? Well for one if you constantly listen and mix the same tunes when you are learning to DJ, your ears become way too accustomed to listening to the same sounds and may never train themselves to hear other sounds while beat matching. So when you get to a big system, if you've trained your ears to hear a lot of different sounds when playing a particular track, you can start to really differentiate other noises in the tune you are mixing in with.
Another important aspect of selecting other tunes is that there's a good chance that the two tunes you have selected to play out were inspired by hearing a DJ play them out, there's also a good chance that while they may sound really awesome together, there may be another pair of tunes that sounds even better than what you already have and you have the added bonus of not sounding like the same DJ you were at last week's gig so try to spice things up a bit and mix and mash it up behind the decks.
TIP 3: 8 is your favourite number and if not it will soon be.
8? Why 8 you ask? Well to put it simply, most modern day music is cut up into 8 bar phrases. I'm not going to delve into music theory here, for those who don't know what a bar is in music you're better off reading about it here. Sure some tunes are written with 4 bar phrases but most are written in 8 bar phrases. Listen to most choruses in modern day pop songs and there's a good chance that they're written with 8 bars (if it's 16 bars, then it would be 2 sets of 8 bar phrases)
So why is all this 8 bar counting important? Well if you're listening to a song with lyrics and you intend on mixing in another tune with lyrics in it, the mix would sound unclean if the vocals clashed with each other. It would sound much nicer if you mixed in the 2nd song just right so that when the vocals of the second will come in just as the vocals of the first tune cut out.
Let's take for example the introduction to Kool & The Gang's "Jungle Boogie". It basically goes "Get Down" 16 times with every odd "Get Down" dropping at the start of each bar.
Now say for example the next tune you intend to mix in coincidentally has an 8 bar intro. If you were going to mix it in with this song, you'd ideally want to start blending the tune right at the beginning of the introduction so as soon as the last "Get Down" finishes then the vocals of the next tune will start afterwards and not cut into the vocals. If the tune to be mixed in has a 4 bar intro, you'd start to blend in at the at the 9th "Get Down" - there's a bit of math needed to be done in your head to really know when exactly is a good time to mix the tune in.
Another thing about 8 is that it also looks like 2 turntables placed side to side... whoa revelations! The number was designed for DJs hehehe
Another thing about 8 is that it also looks like 2 turntables placed side to side... whoa revelations! The number was designed for DJs hehehe
