Musics suggestions for learning to beat match

Hey Hamish, good skill to learn!

Frankly, the easiest way is to load the same track in both decks (gotta love digital, who ever had two identical vinyls in the old days). The lengths of the tracks is pretty irrelevant imho. You can always hit cue/play on the main deck to restart the song if you run out of time.

I learned beatmatching after reading about it in an early (Dutch) DJ magazine and when I finally got pro residency with SL1200 that could actually be used for beat matching.

Our Learn To Digital DJ Fast course is also a good quick-starter, helping you avoid a lot of the mistakes you go to if you try to self-teach. http://www.digitaldjtips.com/how-to-dj-training-courses/digital-dj-fast/

As for headphones, it’s not the price. The Sennheiser HD201 (not any other number in that price range!) is a gem at around 20 euro and totally suitable for DJ-ing. You can use the money you save for that course, which would ultimately be the better investment at this point in your starting DJ career.

Hope that helps some.

Yep, 37 years at it now.

I had a pro residency, so I received about 20-30 new 12″ tracks each MONTH! I added to that by buying a bit of vinyl locally, as well as keeping a set of my favorite personal vinyls (bout 100 – tooooo heavy). I had room for a limited number of 12″/albums and 7″ records in the booth, the rest was kept in the storage room of the nightclub. It was a true 1 in – 1 out system.

I’d go in during the day and practice. Just took two tracks that I thought sounded well together (the human ear equivalent of harmonic mixing) and were close to each other in BPM. Then just find a part I thought would be good to mix out of (especially on those -often- long @ss 12″ remixes) and the part I wanted to mix in. The rest was trial and error and once you found the right spots, practice, practice and practice.

Now I’d advise you to just copy a few tracks you like to practice with onto one CD, copy the CD and start practicing with identical tracks. I have taught people by tossing a tea towel over the cd player (display and pitch fader covered), moving the pitch fader through the tea towel a bit and then using the other CD player to get into sync and make a beatmatch. Once it sounded good, take off the towel and check BMP on display.

The right order should be: 1) get the BPM right, 2) get the beats lined up once they are at the same speed (nudging/pitch bend) and 3) get the 1st downbeats lined up. 1 and 2 you’ll learned to do in one motion. Once those two are good, you can concentrate on finding the right moment to start the mix (3).

It’s too easy to peak over at the other player and see how far off-centre the pitch fader is. If you move it blindly (under cover) it’s a lot harder to start guessing where it is at, so you have to start the proper way (full slow or full fast, whichever you like best and then work towards the other way).