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Learning to DJ?
cloudkj asks: "Being a geek and a music fan, I've played with various applications for creating and mixing music. DJing has always been an interest of mine, but I've never had the time nor the resources to take it up as a hobby. Now that I've left college and started working, I have the time and the funds to allow me to explore DJing. What are the best ways to start learning how to DJ? Are there any spectacular pieces of digital DJ software out there that a aspiring DJ needs to have? How does a DJ transition from digital to the real thing?"
I always start with the Wikipedia article whenever I want to learn something new.
It seems you might be interested in a program called Final Scratch.
Is it just me that thinks this one is odd, or should this have been posted to slashdj.org
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You could do what my brother did and start taking tons of ecstasy and pass out in a puddle of your own vomit on the courthouse lawn. I think that was the secret to his success.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
Well, there are a few. I'm sure links will pop up later, so I'll stick to the info part.
The first step, obviously, is learning to beat match. This involves working up a sense for tempo and rhythm, and also for listenting to two simultaneous songs and determining which needs to be slowed down / speeded up in order to match the tempo of the other. Most modern DJ software (and a few CD drives) does this automatically, but it's still a required skill to have.
Next comes harmonic matching. This involves learning about keys and chords, and making sure the two songs don't interfere harmonically. There are less rights and wrongs here, it's more a matter of "do the two songs blend?".
Finally, there's music selection. DJ:ing isn't just making sure everything is in place, it's also about using two songs to create a third. This is where taste trumps theory, so you just have to take inspiration from other great DJ:s and learn the "groove."
Going from DJ Software to CD:s is a minor change today, most CD:s can even play the same mp3:s directly. You lose a lot of information (such as the scrolling waveform or the handy playlist search function), but you're not ready to hit the floors until you know your selection by heart anyway.
Hitting the vinyl requires a lot more tactile training, and you're also immediately stripped of any beatmatching, looping or cue point facilities. It's you, the needle and the track.
A great segway, however, is getting Stanton's Final Scratch. This product comprises a special soundcard and two specially encoded vinyl discs with timecode information. The timecode is reported to the software, which then plays the appropriate part of any song you choose. This way, you get most of the benefits of digital music playback, but you also teach yourself how to handle vinyl. The move to real analog playback is then made much smoother.
Personally, even though I'm well past my active DJ years, I'd love to give Final Scratch a go. Given a small enough buffer size and some clever interpolation, it'll be at least as good enough as the real thing, and in many aspects far superior.
Teeworlds - it's Super Mario Quake!
I would go find a DJ I like locally and ask him that same question. Talk to EVERY DJ you can, and ask him what you have to ask. Having somebody real in front of you is way more valuable than all of Slashdot. No offense, dear reader.
You can get practical software solutions, practical hardware solutions, and really get a lot of comprehensive feedback where a Google search will fail you. And if you're lucky/friendly and find a DJ who's interested in YOU, you could get actual feedback on your performance. Sometimes, a Pro will let you touch their gear, and that's thrilling, too.
Good luck!
Please stop stalking me, bro.
1. Blends different tracks together, and creates a new track.
2. Creates smooth transitions from one song to the next, so the partiers don't have to have their energy messed up by a gaping pit of silence.
3. A GOOD DJ takes you on a journey energetically, providing you with different levels of emotion through the music, all while reacting to the mood of the crowd.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
My amateur rig is a laptop running Traktor DJ Studio and a visualizer called G-Force. Traktor DJ is leaps and bounds ahead of any pro DJ software out there. It's a commercial package with anything a DJ or amateur could ever want. Beatmatching, streaming, looping, it's all there. It will even help you "work up" to a level of mastery until you go out and buy real turntables. G-Force is a great shareware app that will give a set-it-and-forget-it light show with nothing but an ordinary projector.
Finally, here's some advice from when I first started. Learning "how to DJ" involves three things you must master. First, learn the equipment, which isn't too tough if you're already an ubergeek. Second, get familiar with a whole spectrum of music, which can be hard if your tastes are polarized against genres like rap or country. Last, and most importantly, you must refine your skills to "work a crowd" and respond to your audience's tastes. Developing that charisma is by far the most challenging aspect of becoming a DJ.
[shameless plug] For more tips, I set up a pseudo-DJ tutorial at my website. [/shameless plug] Good luck.
...is what do you consider a DJ? Do you want to scratch for a nu-metal band like DJ Lethal? Do you want to back a hip-hop act? Do you want to produce your own beats and DJ for crowds like Tiesto? Do you want to be one of those guys who plugs his iPod into a sound system and says he's a DJ? Do you want to use vinyl, or take the digital way out?
Answer that question, and then you can start down the road.
My advice to you is as follows. This is coming from someone who has DJ'd around the world, supported big acts like the Prodigy, had residencies.
Your first step is to learn to play music that people want to hear. Don't worry about beatmixing, cutting, scartching, all that can come later. If you want to be popular, the kind of Dj that gets asked to play regularly and has a good following (regardless of whether it's underground or mainstream), learn first to read the crowd and play music that you think they will like. Some of the world's best DJ's are technically awful. But they play upfront tracks.
Then, when you're ready, buy some turntables. They don't have to be Technics - in fact I recommend some rubbish old ones first. They will improve your technique.
Then practice, practice, practice.
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
A DJ is someone who plays music for people, this means only two things:
-Access to a suitable music collection.
-Knowledge of the crowd or listeners you're playing to.
Nothing else.
Now... depending on the style of music you're playing to people this might mean picking up some technical skills, but these are not really mandatory, if you can read the crowd and play just the right tune you'll be alright.
Skills you might need:
-Beatmatching
-Harmonic matching
-Needle dropping
-Scratching
-Doing voice overs (for instance, in radio work)
-Putting on a show, in the visual sense, might mean video screens or maybe costumes, maybe even (shudder) dancing
Listen to some mixtapes, radio shows etc. of suitable variety to see what you're aiming to. Talk to people: DJ's, listeners, music geeks, partygoers, the list goes on. Once you're aware of what you're trying to do, just practice. As much as you need to. Also, if you're a DJ of the bedroom variety,and have no other feedback: record your sessions/sets, and listen after some time to hear all the mistakes you've made. It's painful but there's no way around it. Maybe play them to people who might give some insightful comments.
Again, in my opinion, what you're aiming for is entertainment, something that is seamless and builds up to a cohesive whole. Something that keeps people dancing, listening, tapping their toes and nodding their heads. Tell a story, you can line up your records by tempo, theme, artist, melody, intensity etc. To do this you need to know your music well. Listen.
Don't let your ego rule your thing, people aren't going to be there to watch you (unless you dress up in drag and do spastic dancing for show), they're there to dance or listen to music, make it worth their while. Audience comes first.
Hmmh, but then again... maybe i've got it all wrong. Plus I'm slightly drunk. Take this with a grain or two of salt.
How to DJ Right by Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster is easily the best text I have read about DJing. I had been DJing for quite a few years when I read this book and there was a lot of information which I found very useful.
My advice would be that if you are serious about learning, buy yourself some good second-hand technics decks. They have excellent re-sale value because they are built to last for years. I have some old second-hand 1200 Mk2s which I bought when I was living in England, and they have been moved around countless times and still are as good as the day I bought them. Even if you buy a cheaper mixer to start with, get the turntables right.
I'd also advise to get in with an online community of people that play the same sort of music as you want to. Not only is it handy for finding gems which you might not know about, when you get confident enough to start hosting your mixes online you will get some useful advise and criticism of your mixes.
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
Welcome to the wonderful world of mixing. The first thing you're going to need is gear. Absolutely essential are 2 good direct-drive turntables (direct drive is essential, belt-drive won't have nearly the torque you need). The industry standard is the Technics SL-1200 (the MK2 is the normal baseline model, the MK5G is an updated version with selectable +/- 8/16 % pitch adjust and updated styling). Some other acceptable models (which are themselves heavily influence by the 1200) are the Stanton ST-100 and STR8-100, the NuMark TT1600 and TTX series.
Now, I know you're saying "Turntables? Vinyl?!! Are these the dark ages here?" Well, the fact is that most dance music is released primarily to vinyl, for DJs just like you. The good thing is that, since LPs are an analog technology, incremental improvements in quality are possible without breaking compatibility. In fact, record mastering is an art which has advanced considerably even after the invention of the CD, and well-taken-care-of LPs played back with professional-quality cartridges blow the sound quality of CDs away. Believe it.
Speaking of cartridges, that brings us to the next set of kit. There are a wide range of pickup cartridges, ranging from $20 entry-level models to the superior Ortofon Concorde at over $100. Honestly, get the Concordes. The cartridge itself is extremely high quality and delivers amazing sound quality without distortion, and the actual needle tips are replaceable (for much less that the cost of new cartridges), and can even be swapped out with different styli for different purposes (ultra high-fidelity vs. scratching, etc.).
The next piece of gear is the mixer. Here's another area where there is a vast range in price. The extremely expensive models feature loads of inputs, multi-band equalizers, full banks of filters, several effects loops (and possibly some integrated effects), quadraphonic mixing, optical faders, and maybe even full-digital mixing. The truth is, you probably don't need all those feature while you're starting out. The important features you want are a seperate 3-band EQ on EACH CHANNEL, nice smooth (and user-servicable) faders, and maybe an adjustable curve on the cross-fader. I use a Stanton mixer with these features, and an optical scratch fader, and it set me back only about $250 new.
Now, I know I said earlier that Vinyl is the DJ's medium of choice. That has been the case for several decades, but to be perfectly honest, there ARE some viable alternatives now. Stanton's Final Scratch system is a pretty amazing box that plugs into your existing DJ setup and your PC, and allows the playback of MP3s which are controlled by real, physical specially-encoded Vinyl. There is a slight latency involved with playback of the special discs, which is fine for mixing and even light scratching, but more complex scratches aren't really possible. Even then, the system is truly amazing, and it hooks in with the excellent digital DJ software package Traktor from Native Instruments.
CD turntables are also a major new technology. This field was pioneered by Pioneer with their CDJ-1000. The first model featured a large mechanical jog wheel that can be used to manipulate CD tracks like Vinyl (the platter doesn't spin on its own however, so it is slightly more limited than Vinyl). Since the introduction of this product, Technics and NuMark have both introduced their own CD turntables with full 12" platters that actually rotate. If you must use CDs, there are some good options out there (be aware that they are very expensive, however).
OK, by now, you're presumably kitted out and you've bought a couple dozen records that you like. Now, h
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Maybe there is even software that can help you in learning to find the right beats in a song?
Just start tapping your foot when you're listening. That's the beat.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
The real meat of DJing is records. If you're serious, you'll be spending tens of hours and hundreds of dollars a month shopping for records - much more time if you play obscure stuff, much more money if you do contemporary pop or commercial dance. The DJ is the lord of the meta; acting as a metafilter and selecting the best of the kind of music the audience wants to hear and arranging it across the length of a set, forming a metanarrative for maximum emotional impact. Learn about music, about classical composition, about artistic lineage and the history of movements and styles. See the connections that no-one else sees, hear the subtext that no-one else hears and make them obvious to an audience. In short, be the guy who always finds cool new music and play it to people.
Here are some things I wish someone had told me when I learned to DJ:
1. Do not spend your money on mixtapes/cds or DVDs made by other DJs.
2. Do not spend your money on music you can't use in a set.
3. Do not spend your money on drugs. It bears repeating: do not spend your money on drugs.
In fact, maybe you should just forget about ever having money for anything but records ever again. Records are always going to be an expensive addiction. It's kind of like a puzzle that never really ends -- some records work well with some but not others -- so you're always going to be searching for new stuff that has the sound (hopefully your sound) that you're trying to play. The drugs thing should be obvious, but I've seen so many people for whom it's not that I think it's worth mentioning.
4. Do not spend your money on cheap equipment.
5. Do not spend your money on more equipment than you need.
6. Extra equipment will not make you suck less.
Cheap equipment won't work as well (turntables with too little torque, etc), won't last very long, and will have no resale value whatsoever. If that means waiting six months to save up the money, so be it. Also, you do not need anything but two turntables (or CD decks, if you're one of those people), a mixer, and some cables. If you find yourself looking at samplers, drum machines, DAWs, MIDI stuff, effects boxes and so on (and you will), walk out of the store or turn off the computer and go practice instead.
7. Practice every day. Not every other day. Not when you feel like it. Every day.
8. You are not going to get laid because you DJ.
9. You might actually get laid less because you DJ.
Practice is really the most valuable part, but it's the only one you can't buy. Books and DVDs won't really help you much, so don't waste too much money on them. You need to know what to practice, but there isn't much that one book will tell you that another won't. A lot of how-to DVDs are actually just an hour of showing off with maybe ten minutes of instruction: fun to watch, but useless for learning.
8 and 9 will spare you some potential embarrassment. These days you can throw a rock and hit a DJ (please do!), so as a general rule people are not going to be impressed by that fact alone. If you want to learn to DJ because you want people to be impressed by you (and there's no shame in that, it's only natural), you're going to be disappointed.
10. Stop doing it when it stops being fun.
This applies to just about everything.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
I'm a hobby DJ myself and do a monthly (former weekly) event for about four years now together with a friend of mine who has about seven or eight years of DJ experience, and this is my opinion on this topic (I'll first rant about DJ'ing itself and then about the software/hardware we use):
I think the most important thing for DJ'ing is to know your music. You must know the bands and names of your songs and vice versa you must know how your songs sound like when you hear their names. And you must learn how to combine them. The bigger your reportoire the better. Be prepared to buy a lot of CDs over time... my collection is currently about 400 CDs right now and that's not very much, IMHO: other DJs I know have more, some have MUCH more. Most DJs I know could have bought a car with the money they've spent into CDs. (Yes, there are P2P nets, bla bla, but I like to hold something in my hand; and I also know some DJs which still only use vinyl)
We do a gothic event and that means to know a lot of different music genres, from medieval to gothic rock to 80's pop and wave to industrial. In short: all kind of different rock and electronic genres from the 80's to now. DJ'ing for those events is probably different from DJ'ing a techno or hip hop event, but you haven't said which music you're into so I just assume my opinion could be useful for you ;-)
Our concept is to do blocks of one genre and try to slide into another genre and only sometimes do "breaks" where we change e.g. from noise into "heavenly voices" from one song to another. That means if I play a song from some band I have to come up with songs of other bands that fit in the same genre and are good follow-ups to former song. Other DJs have other concepts, for example another good DJ I know normally only plays songs one or two songs of the same genre and then breaks into a completely different genre. Those concepts depend on a few things, e.g. how many guests you have, how many people fit on the dance floor at one time and also your target audience, just to name a few.
Whatever your concept is doesn't matter though, what matters is that you can come up with songs that fit your concept and that people like, and that means you really have to know your song reportoire. And to do that you don't need any fancy software for that. I personally normally work with CDs, I need the inspiration from seeing the CD backs in my DJ cases. A simple list of songs is not very inspiring for me... other DJs think otherwise, like my co-DJ.
But my co-DJ used AtomixMP3 and now the successor (AFAIK) Virtual DJ. Both are very easy to use and affordable. While I rarely use the computer for DJ'ing myself I think they're very good. They also have automatic beat mixing and stuff which may be more important to DJs for electronic music (for non-electronic stuff beat mixing and effect are quite useless, IMHO...).
We also have a console for Virtual DJ which includes a sound card and generally makes the software usable like DJ CD players. It's very nice, IIRC we paid 200 Euro for the console including the software but it's much cheaper now, I think 100 Euro or something. Together with an USB 2.0 harddisk and a notebook you're set.
Ah, and some other important advises: Have fun ! Don't let others stress you. Especially don't listen to song requests from annoying guests, you'll see that the dance floor will be empty when you play that damn song and the annoying guest is nowhere to be seen. And remember that a DJ creates trends, if you only play the songs on the current top 100 you'll probably bore your guests...
Strictly trance and downtempo on vinyl. I've been mixing records like this for (holy shit!) 17 years now as a secondary hobby to my first life as a programmer. Anyhoo, I bought a pair of Numark TTX-1s about 4 years ago when I wanted a change from my technics, and I LOVE them. What the guy said above about mixing without the fader is a very good tip. This knob twiddle mixing is a reflection of really having an idea of what sound you are trying to produce for your audience. In other words, some records need to be beaten into submission by the mixer, so to speak (so make sure you also pick a good mixer, Numark also makes a good entry level dj mixer if you aren't into 600$ for a Pioneer). I follow the sound in the current crop of records that most corresponds to the idea that I'm after, so a NuNRG - Casino would need to be matched with something suitably uptempo, maybe as a lead in to a hard trance set. Learn which artists sounds have the best familiarity to you. I find Above and Beyond to be very good at the moment in the trance world, but everyone's ear is different. Someone also made the point about accurate beatmixing, and YES it is important, but selection is the real key, Especially in electronic music where more often than not the lyrics are washed out into pan samples, etc.
Who was it, AVB that said you have to play to the women, cuz all the men are just there to get laid heh. That, and you know you're doing OK if the bartender gets into it. Last tip, don't get all flustered if you don't go out and make a million. Go into it as a hobby, enjoy it as a hobby, leave it for a month if you feel like and if you go back to it know that its what you truly like to do. As a new folk, you should aim for not only recording yourself, but making sure you are recording a suitably long set. The average set length is (duh!) 60 - 80 mins so that it fits on a CD, and while going much much longer without a trainwreck is great, you need to be able to mix a seamless set at least that long to get anywhere.
Oh and Go here:
www.tranceaddict.com (Amature DJ forums)
www.chemical-records.co.uk (a really good vinyl store)
www.juno.co.uk (another really good vinyl store)
www.3beat.co.uk (another good vinyl store, smaller, but with some odd tunes)
-- chitlenz
PS - NEEDLES MATTER!
PPS - NOT all mixes are created equal, look for the best mix on each record you buy and stick with it, even if it IS the B side =)
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
The poster is specifically asking for applications and tools, obviously it pertains to technology and computers.
As a computer and music geek myself, I would like to see more articles related to how technology is used in creating music.
Just because you aren't interested in the topic, doesn't mean others aren't.