Top DJs beat matching or slamming songs in phrase?

A lot of “big name” DJs don’t actually do any DJing. Their entire set is premixed and it’s usually their own stuff anyway and they often have personal edits of tracks.
Don’t pay any attention to what they’re doing, most of them are producers first and foremost and their DJ skills are below par. Your transitions are something you should practise and be happy with yourself, besides longer mixes enable you to fart about with effects, kill a bassline and replace it with the one from the incoming record and before you know it your doing something of a live remix.

Much more fun 🙂

Cuts and drops. Just two of the transition methods a DJ can use. There are no rulez in our game. Beatmatching is something you can do, but there are a lot of other ways to transition tracks. The Digital DJ Masterclass has a complete chapter on this subject. And apart from the actual technique there is the issue of where in the track(s) you mix in/out of.

To give you an idea, you can cue up a track as you would for beatmatching. Tempo is in sync and you are cued up at (for example, there are more advanced options) the right 1st downbeat. You could have your incoming fader up and hit play at the right time (where the 1st downbeat of the outgoing track would have been) and (timing it right) quickly lowering the outgoing fader. Or you can do something similar with a bass cut and a quick fade out on the outgoing track.

Since you made sure the run at the same speed and the 1st downbeat of track B replaces the 1st downbeat on track B, it will sound like the beat continuous as they do in a beatmatched track.

It works in beatmatched “mode” but can be equally effective if you want to do a tempo change and/or a bpm change.

Hope that helps some.

Greetinx.

Actually I did a count on my last nights gig:
I did actually use 29 different transition techniques (almost everyone was different) where only about 50% of them were beatmatched.

I think people are too set on specific transitions. There are loads and loads of options to do real great transitions, wether it be a blending of one song to another or a more slamming approach.

Here’s a link to Carl Coxs latest set for DJsounds, its done split screen with an overhead cam on the decks and mixer, really good to see how Mr Cox works up close. Should provide some ideas but probably more inspiration/