Judojerry
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Judojerry
MemberFor a 13 year old who’s just starting out I’d look at buying a Numark Mixtrack Pro from Ebay. It’s cheap, gives him what he needs and has a high resale value, so if he wants to move onto bigger things later on you’ll have some money to purchase the next item 🙂
MemberPersonally when very first starting out, I would reccomend one of two things
1) Map your computer keyboard. You can learn all the basics of mixing really easily by doing this in the free version of VDJ, including finding out whether you really like DJing or not.
2) Buy a used mixtrack, not even pro, here you get all the basic features of a controller, for basically nothing, I even picked up a new one for about $120 when i was first starting. The investment is so minimal, but the experience gained from the product so worthwhile, plus the resale value is pretty much equal to the price you’ve paid for the controller, so it ends up being almost free.
MemberThe Mixtrack Pro has an inbuilt sound card, so you’re going to be fine 🙂 And speakers aren’t essential when first learning, though I would look into buying some fairly soon, just so you can hear the tracks with a bit of punch 🙂
To the OPs question, I would think that it’s probably the cue/pgm issue that madman mentioned, it’s the knob above the browse knob, just make sure it’s turned to the left (cue) 🙂 If that doesn’t work you’ll want to have a look at your audio settings, to make sure you’ve got cueing set up properly.
MemberDon’t hold me to this, but my first instinct would be trying to route your VDJ output through something like Audio Hijack, and doing the same with skype. Or you could just switch back and forth between the feeds, by having VDJ run through your external soundcard and Skype your internal and just change the one that you’re broadcasting from, since I doubt you’ll need to be mixing underneath the interview.
MemberIt takes a lot of practice to be able to get them right. A lot of the time it will be just because the two songs your mashing don’t sound good together, so you should keep that in mind, and if you’re layering a vocal sample, remember to match up the peaks to the right parts of the song, play around with it. Just keep working at it.
MemberIt’s definitely not cheating if you take them and remake them into your own thing, I regard it as pretty close to cheating to do what Steve Angello did with Knas, where an unaltered sample is the basis of your song, but I really don’t think you can call what Avicii did with Penguin, or the Prodigy with Smack My Bitch Up, in anyway ‘cheating’.
MemberGarageband or Audacity are both capable of doing what you want for free, so I would start there, sink at least 15-20 hours into one of them before you even think about upgrading, so that you know exactly what tools you need above the basic stuff. Once you know what those programs can’t do, then you can start looking at the more featured DAWs.
If you’re a windows user, then check out Fruity Loops, it’s one of the most astonishing pieces of free software ever made, and people have made millions (Literally) with productions coming out of it. However, being free, it does lack features, and in order to make productions of the kind that many people get out of it, you have to buy (or steal if you’re Avicii :P) expensive plugins.
If you’re on a mac, there isn’t really a cost free upgrade path, with Reason, Logic and Ableton all amazing programs that can fulfil most of your needs. Reason is great for a dynamic workflow with a quick start due to the astonishing number of instruments included, however, mastering Reason can take some time, as complex patching is required. Logic is a professional piece of equipment, and probably a logical path if you’ve spent some time in garageband, it’s great for getting things to audiophilic precision and for polishing, however, it can be a bit dense when you first approach it. Ableton Live is the logical stop for a DJ, it’s set up so that things can be chopped up and synced to a beat really fast, but the included instruments in Live leave many people unsatisfied. It can also be hard to get a handle on the workflow of the software when starting out.
Both Ableton and Reason are cross platform applications.
I’m personally an Ableton Live user, although I’m thinking about incorporating Reason into my setup.
If you’re not looking for such in depth programs, although I’d recommend learning one of the above in case you decide to get into production, then the programs mentioned above, mixmeister and (possibly) Virtual DJ 8 will suit you just fine.
MemberI think we’re just seeing a super fast development of variants of genres, which began with UK dub getting exposed to a wider audience and has developed into Knife Party styled complextro. I personally think it’s got a ways to go before it burns itself out, with the wide availability of DAWs and the relatively low barriers for entry into music production, new spins, combining these sort of things and a huge variety of genres will be around for quite some time.
MemberI’m not sure what you mean by controller adaptors. If you mean the cables that go from the controller to the computer, then they don’t vary by country, but controller. The majority of Controllers use firewire(on the controller) to USB (on the computer), which will work with any computer that has USB ports.
If you are talking about power, then that depends on the country you are in, but it is inexpensive to buy an adaptor that will allow you to use the controller with your mains power.
MemberI just checked, and the top three results on that ebay search all claim to be authorised Denon Dealers.
MemberMemberThe only issue is price, I only want these for house parties of less than about 35 people, so I don’t want to fork out too much.
MemberThank you, just the kind of advice I was looking for. Not purchasing.
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