How / What Do You Practice?

i just pick random songs that i know dont mix together and TRY to make them mix. like different genres. just practice. 1 hour a day. if i trainwreck i stop (yes im a big baby) just lose my mojo. then im at it the next day.

I’ve often had the same questions too. What helped me was just being able to try new things with my music. I also looked at Dj’s I liked that make mixes on You Tube, and see how i can do the same. Just seeing what goes together and what sounds nice helps. One thing too another DJ said was just Mix like your in front of a crowd and see how long you can mix….this does work and helps you with ideas with your current library of music. Its helped me for 23 years now and I’m still mixing. If you have an Ipad with Traktor too, thats an awesome way to help you make mixes on the go 🙂 I hope i didn’t ramble too much :D.

BshidoHEAT, post: 43294, member: 13775 wrote: I don’t think there is anything more important to practice than learning your music.
But if you really want to practice, turn off BPM and phase meters, cue up without looking at the screen, mix by ear. When it’s go time, you can turn those things on to make life easier. When I listen to a new track I usually have traktor up and I write what would go well with after it, I also like to imagine how a crowd would react to the next track, put yourself in their position, but that’s less practice, more mentality I guess.

I agree. Practice is fine and you need it to train your EARS and to get intimately familiar with your gear. You want to find the buttons blindly. And when you know your music intimately too, then you’ll do fine. You’ll listen to a track and your brain will tell you: “you know what would go well with this one … !”. And then you pull it out, do a quick listen and go: “yes”… or … obviously “no”. Eventually you will develop an acute memory of points in a track that are suitable to mix into or out of.

Personally I never wrote down stuff. I would always play on the fly. Especially in my residency days doing 6 hours a day/6 days a week, you are definitely not gonna prep every evening. I would use the quiet nights to try out new records, try different mixes and such. I would BPM my tracks (this was stopwatch stuff guys) and (re)organise my collection.

And to this day I only make a playlist if I have very specific requests or I am to play a genre that I am not totally at home with. So I know that the music I take with me is all suitable for that night. Still I won’t make it into a predefined set. I’ll still treat it like a nice collection and pick my way through it as the night progresses. Sometimes that works a bit better than others, but generally speaking that is what works for me.

Greetinx,
C.

Generaly if I enter “practice mode” is listen to many different genre tracks, in order to keep up and develope my hearing siginificantly, often I go with modern classical composers, noise artists etc. Then I go with radomize pattern practice, blending different tunes, experimenting with sounds is also a part of my training, gives me the most fun overall.

Don’t Go!

Oh, and as far I can remember, working with other people, mixing live with them, this is a great way of improving, it is so much fun and everytime someting new and unique may be created in colaborating with other musicians.

With my copious amounts of free time I had over the summer break, I practiced for about three hours every day (sometimes more, sometimes less, just depending on my schedule, but I practiced a LOT).

I did this thing where I would close my eyes and just select a random song, then whatever the amount of time it took, I made them mix one way or another. Even if it wasn’t the best, I still did it. I just kept doing this, even as I continued buying songs, and eventually I had gotten to the point where I mixed about most of the songs with one another.

That’s what I did and it helped. But typically, at least on a live set, I try to stay within 3 BPM when mixing.