Hello there!
I’m a beginner myself, actually I’m just waiting my first controller to arrive today, but I have quite good musical knowledge. My point being, don’t take anything I say for granted. I’ll be just thinking out loud, and hopefully I might be able to help you out in some way.
Personally I think that some artificial intros/outros might do the job, but I wont bet my life on that, since every song has it’s specifics, thus relying on a third part intro to mix well with two other hip-hop songs might not be your best bet. Yeah it might work out perfectly, but up until a point where you are actually confident at what you are doing (e.g. you have the practical experience), it will be a blind pick.
I think that you should first think more about the order of the songs you mix. What I mean is, to think about intros and outros of the songs to make a compatible order in your list for your mix set. If this fail, or if you really want to mix two songs that don’t mix perfectly on the go, I have three more suggestions:
1. Try to introduce the new song with scratches.
2. I’ve noticed that most hip-hop songs start/end with some gibberish from the artist, that is really cool, but it’s not essential for the song. This is usually mixed with the intro/outro in the original track.
What you can do about this, is to find the instrumentals only. Cut the intro of the instrumental, hence removing the gibberish, and stick it to the full song, removing the same part from the original song.
Luckily, I’ve noticed that a lot of the hip-hop songs, have their instrumentals/acapellas, all over the internet.
3. Following from 2, you can get only the instrumental from the original track, and take the hook part and stick it before the intro of the track and it will make the transition more smoother.
All 1,2 and 3 can be used to the first track as well to extend/manipulate the outro, hence giving you more time to introduce the new track.
Also, you can introduce some loops, adjust the cross-fader responsivity, and use the individual faders as well, and combine all of those with scratching and the above methods, as well as all other options in your mixer (EQ bands, high/low pass knobs and so on).
Luckily I was on the right track writing this post and I hope I helped 🙂
P.S. If you are going to cut and stick parts together (pre-edit I guess), I use Audacity for that one. It’s quite unresponsive program but it does the job and it’s completely free. Actually that is the program (along with some other stuff), that pushed me finally to start with DJing.
Cheers!
Daniel 🙂
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