A good BPM range for my crate

Depends on what kind of a DJ you are and how much beatmatching you do and if large bpm changed are expected in your given genre.

For example, I work as a (sort-of-it’s a very specific audience) mobile DJ – in an hour, I would be expected to go from 115bpm to 160bpm and back down again – but I don’t have to beatmatch anything so it’s easier to move up and down bpms.

Alternatively, some DJ’s (particularly in very specific genre scenes) would expect to go from 120bpm to 125 in a 2 hr set!!

So it depends on your genre.

BUT a few tips would be to:

– Never speed up/slow down a track by more than 2/3% if you can help it (tracks start to sound weird after this point)
– If you want to beatmatch a 120bpm track into one which is 123 and then into one which is 125, remember that you can speed up/slow down track whilst they are playing (do it slowly though!) in order to make it work. So, in this case, I would speed the 120 up to 122 for the first mix, then speed the 123 up to 124 for the 2nd mix, and so on. (If that makes sense)

So it doesn’t matter what bpm range you have in your crates – I actually arrange my tracks by bpm as opposed to genre anyway as I cover from 80 all the way to 160 and it is easy to find the tracks I want to play next that way – but rather it matters what you are expected to play. If you are a house club DJ, I wouldn’t expect you to have anything below 120 bpm but if you were a deep house DJ I wouldn’t expect you necessarily to have anything above 120..

bob6397

I organise my (you call them crates I call them virtual folders/playlists) using iTunes. I tag all of my tracks with the correct genre, bpm, energy level (I use the rating field for this) and then use the smart playlists so that I can have a list of tracks in a specific genre/specific bpm range (I use 10bpm ranges)/energy level depending on what I want at that particular moment. I mostly find myself working from the bpm folders though.

I use iTunes as it then makes all this appear in my DJ software, and you can put playlists in folders easily. I sometimes copy the playlists into virtual folders in my software if I want them to be editable – the only issue with iTunes is that it doesn’t allow other software to edit its playlists.

I also use a different iTunes library for my DJ music to my “Me” music library – helps keep my DJ collection small whilst keeping the music I listen to (which for the most part I wouldn’t DJ!) separate.

bob6397

DJ Vintage, I’m very grateful to you for teaching me so much in over two years, but I would add a wrinkle to what you said above regarding BPM changes.

I honestly think that the traditional parameters for changing the BPM of a song too much before it begins to sound weird (this is, obviously, while keeping the song in its original key) have changed quite a lot since Serato introduced its Pitch N Time add-on in early 2014.

I tested it before using it “live” (so to speak), using both fairly good Rokit reference monitors in the studio, and also QSC K12 and KW122 speakers (plus subs) in different rooms.

In these tests and in lots of gigs in the past year, I have found that using Serato’s P’N’T keylock function you can now safely make bigger tempo changes without noticeably affecting sound quality. And I mean changes even from, say, the low 100s to the high 120s, for example. For me the clincher was using it in the far quieter environment of a fashion show, a situation in which you always try to keep your BPMs at no more than 114 to 120, which meant now being able to slow songs from like 128\130, and speed up songs coming from the low 100s, to have them “join hands” in that 114–120 sweet spot.

In fact, another well-respected website did a comparison of keylock functions in various digital DJing apps and it was no contest.

Just saying … 😉