How to remember/label a song by it's sound characteristics

For it comes down to knowing your music. I don’t have a system for telling me exactly what tracks go together. I sort by Genre, Key (which is filtered by bpm) and then my own music thoughts. I have my main crates that contain genres as they were bought so if I download a Tech House track it goes in to the main Tech House folder. Then there are folder organsised by Key which will contain all genres within that Key. Then I have sub folders where I have my own file system based on how I think the music sounds I so one track could be duplicated in various sub folders.. For example my Deep house will also contain other genres and the same goes for the other sub folders for other genres meaning my Minimal could contain a Deep House track. It doesn’t mean that all of these will mix with any other track in the folder though. Creating folders is all about you’re preference and what will make it easy for you to look through and find what you’re looking for.

Remember you don’t have to bring tracks in on the beat you can use the breaks, another trick is using the EQ to your advantage to kill the bass and may be bring the track in on the high hat or kill them both and just have the vocal riding over the other track. You can use long transistions and blends with the EQ or quick drops on the beat with the odd spin back. There are some many ways to mix awkward tracks together. Having said that some tracks just won’t mix and that bring you back to what I said at the begining “it comes down to knowing your music.” Also, preperation before a set can help but you can never prepare for the crowd that you just have to pick up on when you’re playing.
Hope this helps

Somewhere on this site there was a link to DJ blog with an interesting organization system much like what you describe. This guy had made a system like this: III<iii

However, I have experienced what you’re talking about. Sometimes a song has a very cluttered 32 note high-hat pattern that you don’t even notice until you mix it over one with only 8 notes. In practice, I’m not sure that I would reject a mix because of such a clash, the connection between the songs is usually stronger than hi-hat patterns. But I can see if you’re mixing exclusively minimal tech-house you might run into stuff like this frequently, so organizing your library around structure would be good.

Organizing your music collection is a HUGE issue, especially for digital DJs. I’ve wanted to write about it in more detail but I’m still sorting it out myself.

Since you mention that you’re new to this, I think you should really practice mixing more before you come up with a master scheme to organize a big collection. Ultimately you want to organize your collection around the way you mix. It sounds like you’re still working out your mixing style.

I hope I don’t sound condescending, I also had a lot of similar questions when I was starting out. Once I got comfortable with my mixing skills, my concern with the music structure of track mattered less and less. You get to a point where you generally know what spots to move in and out of in a track, and what type of tracks will work together. Then you can organize around those ideas of “melody color” and “vocals” you mention (sounds interesting, BTW).

Ultimately, if the emotional connections between the songs are right, the structure of the baseline, tempo, etc. won’t matter as much, if at all. A simple slam mix between two hit songs the crowd is dying to hear usually gets huge cheers from the crowd – even when going from radically different genres like rock to hip-hop.

To answer your other question, I make a both a rough plan, but also allow for flow. Most Djs have grouplets of tracks that work well together for about 20mins and then they shift accordingly. Just about every gig I’ve ever had, I had to change my plans to match the crowd’s mood and keep things flowing. Even when the crowd wanted highly predictable and formulaic hits, the peak of the night would always change, so I had to plan my buildups accordingly.

So again, I think it comes back to being comfortable enough with your mixing to adjust to situations that come up. But the situations that come up can also be that little idea that suddenly pops into your head during the outro. Sometimes they can be the best mixes – a little risky in front of a live crowd, though.