Still at the begging of djing

First of all, since you still struggling how to perfectly mix 2 songs, I wouldn’t go with 2 dubstep songs, its hard and very confusing for a beginner who start it out,
Seek out your easy, normal 4×4 house beat, find 2 of those and practice mix it, over, over ,over again until you get the feel of it, and then maybe you can move on to another genre

raiden, post: 44057, member: 9935 wrote: If 2 songs sound similar and your using your hands to slow a song down why do you need a pitch control?

The reason why we use our hands to slow down / speed up the song (on any jogwheels, be it turntable, CDJ, controller jog), is sometimes when you release the “Play” button to beatmatch, sometimes you release it to fast or too slow, that’s when the hands comes handy to “help” out or to “chase” , the pitch control is there to adjust the tempo while you still doing the premix (aka in your headphone)

I have to disagree with you two, dubstep is so easy to mix I can do it without headphones. It gets even easier if you use VDJ coz then all you have to do is line up the waveforms. Anyway, that aside what I do agree with is practising with 2 records until you have them nailed and then try another two records. Beatmatching is one thing, the real trick is knowing *when* to mix your next record in so it doesn’t sound like a colossal mess. Having a sense of rhythm is key, this lets you win half the battle of knowing when to start the next mix already.

Sorry but if you feel dubstep is easy, good for you. But it is musically right that it is not easy. There is no bassdrum leading the count in dubstep (at least in real dubstep) and you have to count on the hat/snare.
In house, techno,… (anything with standard 4/4) you have a big boom bass everytime you should count… makes it kinda very easy.

I play dubstep and electro and I agree with these guys; dubstep is not to learn on. WhenI first started, a buddy gave mea stack of house records that were all within 5-7 BPM of each other. It helped a lot just trying to get beats together, working up to phrases being lined up, then eventually trying to figure out what records went well together.

As far as the pitch control issue, think of it this way: the records are going 2 different speeds. You can manually speed up or slow down a record, but you would have to manually control that speed for the entire mix. Once you start the new tune, nudge it if needed, but use the pitch control to adjust the speed so that they stay synced up. What really helped me was to run the pitch control way up or way down on the incoming track so that you know for sure what way you need to adjust. This serves two purposes. It takes the guesswork out of the early adjustments and it gets your ears used to what it sounds like when the new track is faster or slower. Over time, you will immediately know which way you need to adjust.

The best place to start … try to beatmatch two identical tracks! Make sure the pitch fader is not in it’s middle position on the playing track (close your eyes if you think you’ll cheat lol) then cover it up. Now start the incoming track (cover up any bpm displays too of course!) and try to match it with the other one. You know two things for sure, a) the CAN be mixed perfectly (as they are identical) and b) you can’t cheat cause there is no looking at the other fader and where it sits and no bpm counters to help you.

Next step would be to do the same, but with two tracks of the same genre and of the same BPM. Slightly more difficult but after mastering identical tracks (and don’t do this once on one day, try it several times over a few days so you know you can get it right EVERY TIME at every time) it’s not that big of a step up.

Then you start widening the BPM gap (I stay within a + or – 3 BMP difference, although have been known to go up to 5-6. But that is just me.

After you got that into your mind, fingers and muscle memory (and remember not try twice and say “hey, two good matches, let’s move on”, but many matches and right every time before you move to the next step) then it is time to start thinking about mixing different genres. At this point it is not only about beatmatching anymore, but music selection AND planning starts to come into play as well.

Along the way you will start to find out about the best places to mix into or out of, about where to set a nice word or phrase loop to have plenty of time to mix from and other assorted stuff.

Greetinx and good luck,
C.