How to DJ: Skills, Attitudes and Basic Mixing Techniques Introduction
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How to DJ: Skills, Attitudes and Basic Mixing Techniques Introduction This page covers some comments and opinions on the basic skills and attitude of a DJ. How does a typical audience behave ? What they expect and how they react. Afterward we give a set of recurring, but wrong, ideas about 'DJ-ing'. The Audience The audience is the most important of all. They are the final judge of what you're doing. A party without people is no party. It is as simple as that. People can be at a party for a number of reasons They are there because they are organizing the party. People can come for social contact. To take pictures of the room (I hate the Japanese tendency to run around with half a ton of lenses and photo machinery) To drink & forget their problems. As the night goes on, people will become drunk or stoned (or both at the same time :). Dirty Trick: If you throw salt over the floor before people come in then the audience will drink more later on the evening. To dance and have a good time. These people are the ones which will be your judge. People can also be there because they came along with other people. These people aren't expecting anything. So don't expect anything from them. So, a party is not that difficult at all. Nevertheless some DJ's have quite a strange picture of what's going on at parties. Some Recurring Misconceptions A number of DJ's have the tendency to act as if they are god. This is wrong, they are not. A number of these wrong attitudes are stated below. Playing music is not only using your intuition. The times you have an aha-erlebnis and you know what to play will be very small. If you play 300 songs overnight, 80% will be based on ratio. Only 20% on 'feeling'. Especially in the beginning because you will be nervous and will need to fall back to your technical skills. Do not expect everybody likes what you are playing. Often DJ's are very explicit about the music they like and the music they don't like. Don't be like that. It is not because you are playing music, that other music is bad, also don't insult somebody if he doesn't like what you like. You are not the center from which music comes. (technically this is true, but it doesn't go any further than that). There will be songs which you like, which nobody else will ever like, try to detect these and cut the crap, how painfully it might be to play a night without your favorite songs. Learn different styles. New influences are absolutely welcome for a DJ. For most DJ's the following holds true: you are playing for the audience, the audience isn't there for you. So, look at how people react to your music. You are playing music either for money, for personal reward or because nobody else wants to do it. In any case the result: 'the audience stays and is happy' is the most important. And the worst kind of god-attitude that is embodied within current day DJ's and Party- organizers is that: DJ-ing with MP3's ain't cool. It doesn't sound the same. Sorry, we only do turntables. You don't have to do anything yourself and so on.. It is just required to point out that more and more DJ's nowadays use CD's, which weren't cool enough a while ago, then we can safely say that this kind of 'oops, I don't like it when the world changes'-attitude won't bring them any further. The Correct State of Mind On top of these strange attitudes, we have DJ's who wants to use certain drugs to play. They probably think it is cool to be high (or down, or slow or fast). I wouldn't advice to behave like this: stay sober. The essence of whatever you are doing is to feel good. If you don't you will not have enough focus to do what you are payed for. If you want to gain some confidence, be fit! Do exercises every day and eat well (healthy food). It really helps to do some exercises before I go to a club (even if it's only DJ's meeting not a party). But, let's skip this 'how- fucked-up-is-the-DJ-exactly' crap. Let's continue with the real work: Indexing and Selecting Your Music Whether you have CD's, vinyl or MP3's, have an index at hand, sorted by style, annotate with the BPM and marked with the 'sound-color'. This list should contain cross references between styles: 'switch to this style using this song'. On top of this style list, also have a full index by name available every time you play. Creating such a list takes a lot of time. You can easily spend months to create it, but when you have such a list it is your treasure. This will be half the money you make with DJ'ing. So never give this away. Warning: A mistake often made is only to exploit the index and not to explore anymore. This is wrong because you might encounter better mixes. It's also wrong because you're definitely not looking at the audience, and above all it's wrong because DJ'ing isn't fun anymore this way. Tempo It is also a very good idea to accurately measure the tempo of all your songs (that is up to 1/100 of a BPM). Programs such as BpmDj, BpmCount or BpmLive can help you with this. The tempo in general is necessary to a) match the tempo of the new song to the old song and b) set the tempo of various effect boxes exactly to the current playing tempo. Finding Cool Music Tip #1: Comb the aisles of your local record store, hit all the online music outlets and follow the dots from song to song and artist to artist (this is the fun part of DJ'ing - research). Tip #2: ask producers for previews of music and songs that will come out. The sound quality, timbre, color and immediate recognizability belongs to the song, not to the DJ. Your set on the other hand belongs to you. The night belongs to the party organizers. This means that if the songs is not good or boring that it is not your responsibility to fix it. You should select songs that are already good in the first place. How you weave them together in your set is on the other hand your task. Even 5 minutes of crappy songs can ruin your set, so be sure to use the best music you find. New CD's Often if you buy a new CD you want to know what is usable on that CD. In general if I get a new CD I play it from front to back. If I survive that first play then it is a good record. If not then hopefully there were some excellent and remarkable good songs in it. Once this is done, I'm interested in finding mixes that fits to the good songs. This requires some fiddling. Which song can be linked to this cool song. Basic trial and error. I do however only work with the songs that are worth it. I don't spend much time on songs that 'might be good if handled like this or this'. Bottom-line is that these were not sufficiently good in the first place. Select Music A good strategy to play music for a specific audience is to rely on a number of prototype people you know that like the music that is typically played at a certain kind of party. Think: 'would this person like this music ?' This works quite well ! Basic Mixing Techniques The Mixing Desk Now (halfway the guide), let's start with the basics. The mixing table. A normal mixing table has a number of mono and stereo channels. We are only interested in stereo channels. Every channel has A gain. This can be found on all mixing devices. This changes the pre-amplification of the signal before it goes to the volume fader. The gain should be set as high as possible without clipping or distorting the music. An equalizer. Depending on the mixing table it is a parametric or non-parametric equalizer. A non parametric equalizer is a filter which weakens or strengthens a signal in a certain frequency range. E.g, if a mixing table has three knobs, one with 11kHz, one with 3kHz and one with 100Hz it is a non-parametric equalizer. On the other hand if we have a mixing table with 4 knobs, 11kHz, 100Hz and a knob which let you choose the frequency and another knob which let you choose the strength of that frequency then it is a parametric equalizer. When changing the equalizing, the gain has to be changed too. E.g., when cutting down the bass, the gain can be raised. Warning: the human ear becomes accustomed to a certain frequency spectrum. So, avoid the trap of equalizing everything too sharp. If you see (you won't hear it) that your equalizing is completely out of balance fix it slowly. In fact not that many (modern) songs need equalizing anymore. Fatal: Some DJ's like to turn their three equalizer buttons completely to the right when they play.