Is this progress? Or bad mixing

YES, Please stopped looking at the screen, it’s bad, i repeated BAD, BAD, BAD practice to start out with, especially when you just starting out,
Ears, its your best starting point, for those who just starting out
Use em, abuse em…
STOP now looking at the display / the waveform / and such ….
You getting a BAD progress by going thru a BAD shortcut … it will hurt you in the long run

Because beatmatching alone is not the full truth. The easiest way to learn about songs, beat and song structure is to learn the old way of beatmatching. Not because you need to do it all the time and you will not have the knowledge to mix right, even with the sync button. So the question in the end is: Do you want your mixes to sound “somewhat ok” or do you want to DJ?

This video actually shows it perfectly and I am sorry for the bad language in there, but it nails it.
[media=youtube]-7O6KQzHH6s[/media]

Here’s my take on it.

Do not use the visual cues to tell you when to bring another song in. I deliberately look away from the screen when I’m about to drop in the next track. You mix with your ears, not your eyes.

THAT BEING SAID…..

Once the next track is started, I do use the waveform and grid to make sure they are perfectly in sync with each other (no, I do not use the sync button). BUT, not all tracks are going to be beat gridded perfectly, and some EDM tunes have a beat that will “drift” over time. So, you will need to have your ears working all the time to make sure it sounds good. Again, just because it looks matched up on screen does not mean it will actually sound good.

I hope this helps. You will hear a lot from people saying “you have to learn a certain way or you’re not a real DJ.” The truth is, there are a lot of ways to learn that are effective.

I know what you mean. Serato displays the bpms, so I just manually adjust the bpm on each track to match, but if that works for you, that’s cool.

My story is that Traktor’s beatgrids aren’t always perfect even after pressing “auto beatgrid”. Therefore, I better know how to beatmatch or else I will have a few runaway trains on my hand..LOL. And then too, I’m too lazy to sometimes fix the tracks where the auto beatgrid function lacks. Also, there are some old school tracks where the tempo changes and there is no fix to that. Well, not that I know of. So beatmatching is an essential skill.

The moral of this story is to not rely too much on technology, but to have a good foundation of your craft.

Well, I have a couple of vinyl turntables too, paired with a Kontrol Z2 but I don’t think that has anything to do with the topic here – what I was saying is that you will have access to visual aids if you bring a laptop to play music from. Sure the beatgrids might be a bit off or the tempo might drift with given songs but you will _always_ have those waveforms to help you out. If technology fails (i.e. your laptop dies) then that’s it – or are you telling me you actually own all your tracks on vinyl too? And bring that collection with you to gigs? What you’ll do (or what I do, at least) is have an ipod with a few ready-made mixtapes on it hooked up to the mixer in case the worst happens, so I can put those on while trying to figure out the laptop issue. And then I’ll have my waveforms again.

raiden, post: 44560, member: 9935 wrote: I got vinyl turn tables. No sync button for me 🙁 I saw a good video by a Australian dj on how to count today. I get it now. Just need to know my tunes and practice

If you’re using laptop and software to dj with turntables then there is always a sync button.

raiden, post: 44572, member: 9935 wrote: Where’s that on serato? I got a SL1

You won’t be able to get it until October when Scratch live becomes Serato dj. Meaning there won’t be no more updates for Scratch live and Scratch live will now become Serato dj. Though scratch live may have a shortcut for syncing.