I want to start learning how to DJ digitally immediately
June 27, 2013 4:40 PM Subscribe
Pretty much what it says in the question title. I have no idea what the current state of software is- Serato? Traktor? Who uses what, and what's best for a beginner? Are skills learned in one program easily transferable to another, or do the workflows differ significantly between software packages?
Some background, if that helps- I was interested in learning to DJ ages ago (about 8 years), read a lot of books on the subject, and learned some very (VERY) rudimentary skills, mostly on store equipment. I kind of drifted away, partly because I couldn't afford equipment beyond a single turntable, and partly because I was living in Mobile, Alabama and was more or less completely cut off from anyone or any place that played or had even heard of the kind of music I liked. Now I'm finally in a city, finally going out, and I notice that digital has more or less totally supplanted vinyl.
Going into this, I have:
-a reasonably well-equipped Macbook (8 GB RAM)
-a demo of Traktor I just downloaded like two minutes ago
-a massive amount of techno, house and disco mp3s
-a decent ear for key and tempo
-pretty much nothing else
What should I do to make sure I'm spending my time productively and learning useful skills? I'm between jobs and my next summer term at school doesn't start for another week, so I'd like to learn as much as possible while I'm still relatively free.
I don't have any kind of controller or the money to buy one, which (I think) is OK for the time being since I don't have any pressing need to embarrass myself in front of other people just yet. I've read this recent question, which helped a bit, but I'm looking for even more basic advice, if possible.
Some background, if that helps- I was interested in learning to DJ ages ago (about 8 years), read a lot of books on the subject, and learned some very (VERY) rudimentary skills, mostly on store equipment. I kind of drifted away, partly because I couldn't afford equipment beyond a single turntable, and partly because I was living in Mobile, Alabama and was more or less completely cut off from anyone or any place that played or had even heard of the kind of music I liked. Now I'm finally in a city, finally going out, and I notice that digital has more or less totally supplanted vinyl.
Going into this, I have:
-a reasonably well-equipped Macbook (8 GB RAM)
-a demo of Traktor I just downloaded like two minutes ago
-a massive amount of techno, house and disco mp3s
-a decent ear for key and tempo
-pretty much nothing else
What should I do to make sure I'm spending my time productively and learning useful skills? I'm between jobs and my next summer term at school doesn't start for another week, so I'd like to learn as much as possible while I'm still relatively free.
I don't have any kind of controller or the money to buy one, which (I think) is OK for the time being since I don't have any pressing need to embarrass myself in front of other people just yet. I've read this recent question, which helped a bit, but I'm looking for even more basic advice, if possible.
I don't know, but in general, if you want to do it for fun, then just start doing it and do what feels right, and if you want to be good, then train your skills as much as humanly possible while seeking feedback from real audiences.
The equipment won't make a difference in the end. To illustrate, I knew a guy who was a saxophone wizard, because he practiced 3h a day. On a crappy saxophone he could hit these impossible-to-play overtone notes and generally blow everyone's mind, while I (2nd-chair saxophone) could only listen, impressed.
So here's what you do:
-- make playlists and do other DJ prep work
-- get people to let you DJ for them
-- using whatever gear you already have, try to blow their minds
-- if you succeed in blowing their minds, get a harder/demanding gig next time
posted by sninctown at 5:44 PM on June 27, 2013
The equipment won't make a difference in the end. To illustrate, I knew a guy who was a saxophone wizard, because he practiced 3h a day. On a crappy saxophone he could hit these impossible-to-play overtone notes and generally blow everyone's mind, while I (2nd-chair saxophone) could only listen, impressed.
So here's what you do:
-- make playlists and do other DJ prep work
-- get people to let you DJ for them
-- using whatever gear you already have, try to blow their minds
-- if you succeed in blowing their minds, get a harder/demanding gig next time
posted by sninctown at 5:44 PM on June 27, 2013
Response by poster: I do make playlists and try to learn the music I own as thoroughly as I can; right now I'm stuck at the very first step of figuring out what the most effective, budget-conscious way to get started is. I agree that the actual equipment isn't a determining factor, but I need to choose one, and I don't really know what the differences are (and there are surprisingly few good, up to date references or resources online that are at all friendly or usable to newcomers). To continue the metaphor, at this point I only vaguely know what a saxophone is and how it works. I just need some help getting to the point where I can start practicing at all.
#2 may also be difficult, since I still don't know anyone in real life who likes electronic music at all, though I can probably at least get some cursory listens at a music forum I belong to.
posted by Merzbau at 5:50 PM on June 27, 2013
#2 may also be difficult, since I still don't know anyone in real life who likes electronic music at all, though I can probably at least get some cursory listens at a music forum I belong to.
posted by Merzbau at 5:50 PM on June 27, 2013
Traktor is a good way to go to "practice" the skills inexpensively as it simulates virtual decks and you can set up your playlists and match tempos, crossfade... all the standard DJ stuff. But as an audio engineer and producer, I'd strongly recommend learning on turntables or even those CD/mp3 digital turntables. I say this because if you really want to get into DJing, then you may want to try your hand at doing some parties and there is nothing more painfully boring than a DJ using a mousepad to "DJ" with traktor. I like to think of the DJ as a party prop, so when you see a DJ physically cue a track or search thru his bin for the next song to spin, it makes him more than a human itunes playlist.
Consider the NuMark MixTrack Pro II. This is a "DJ Controller." It doesn't actually play music, it is rather the front end to your DJ software (like Traktor) and you use it to control Traktor more organically. Rather than clicking and dragging a crossfade, you move a real fader. You can cue up the next track in the set, A/B mixes and control the recording features.
Go to a ton of clubs and get a feel for the flow of the music. As important the playlist song selection is, when you play your tracks are just as important. If you play are hard hitting stuff at 10pm, the main crowd at 12:30am isn't going to hear it. The best DJs have an intuition for when people are getting tired and lessen the intensity... give the guys some time to try out their pick up lines, the gals to powder their faces, and bartenders time to sell ore drinks! Then when everyone is recharged the intensity of the music picks up and everyone is going crazy again.
Practice at your friends parties and get some feedback from a hopefully forgiving crowd. Good luck, it's a lot of fun!
posted by FireStyle at 6:12 PM on June 27, 2013 [2 favorites]
Consider the NuMark MixTrack Pro II. This is a "DJ Controller." It doesn't actually play music, it is rather the front end to your DJ software (like Traktor) and you use it to control Traktor more organically. Rather than clicking and dragging a crossfade, you move a real fader. You can cue up the next track in the set, A/B mixes and control the recording features.
Go to a ton of clubs and get a feel for the flow of the music. As important the playlist song selection is, when you play your tracks are just as important. If you play are hard hitting stuff at 10pm, the main crowd at 12:30am isn't going to hear it. The best DJs have an intuition for when people are getting tired and lessen the intensity... give the guys some time to try out their pick up lines, the gals to powder their faces, and bartenders time to sell ore drinks! Then when everyone is recharged the intensity of the music picks up and everyone is going crazy again.
Practice at your friends parties and get some feedback from a hopefully forgiving crowd. Good luck, it's a lot of fun!
posted by FireStyle at 6:12 PM on June 27, 2013 [2 favorites]
You gotta have two outbound channels of audio, one for the dancefloor, one for the headphones, this is essential. If you don't want to spend you can get just a mono splitter for now, but it's important to physically listen to the music coming either from the headphones and the room, don't practice with headphones only.
This is the main thing with DJing, the best practice is when you are with someone, always play for others, a big pitfall is practicing and rehearsing technically perfect sets but that are all in your head. Invite your friends over!
Interface-wise you have Traktor, which just tries to simulate a traditional DJ deck as accurately and nerdily as possible, and Ableton Live which is more freeform, it has an interesting structure for loops, can be used also for producing remixes etc, both are worth investigating.
One big advantage of learning to play with CDs is you never have to fiddle with cables and can arrive and leave the party anytime.
Regarding the boring DJ choosing his music with a mouse, you gotta like to dance and show off, it's a stage after all. Have a schtick.
Good luck in your DJ career!
posted by Tom-B at 6:17 PM on June 27, 2013
This is the main thing with DJing, the best practice is when you are with someone, always play for others, a big pitfall is practicing and rehearsing technically perfect sets but that are all in your head. Invite your friends over!
Interface-wise you have Traktor, which just tries to simulate a traditional DJ deck as accurately and nerdily as possible, and Ableton Live which is more freeform, it has an interesting structure for loops, can be used also for producing remixes etc, both are worth investigating.
One big advantage of learning to play with CDs is you never have to fiddle with cables and can arrive and leave the party anytime.
Regarding the boring DJ choosing his music with a mouse, you gotta like to dance and show off, it's a stage after all. Have a schtick.
Good luck in your DJ career!
posted by Tom-B at 6:17 PM on June 27, 2013
Most DJs will look down on you if you can't just use whatever junk is already set up in the DJ booth. The best way to prepare for this is get a physical controller of some kind (like the Mixtrack Pro mentioned above, which is super-cheap) and learn to beat-match and mix songs without using the "sync" button. If you can learn to do this effectively then you can start DJing. Things like loops, effects, and other goodies are all secondary to the ability to pick one song after the other and figure out how to let one ride over the other.
Simple starting tips: most dance music has four-bar phrases. Learning to count out the bars and get the one of your new song to start on the one of your playing song will get you a LOT of the way there. With practice you'll be able to stop counting. You also want to choose songs that have keys that go well together. That's a tiny bit complicated, but you can find out the key of almost any song online. Finally, don't aim for a beat difference of any more than about a few bpm between any two songs. If you want to go from a 70bpm dubstep track to an 87bpm drum and bass track? You'll need to get several intervening songs in there to ramp up the tempo.
posted by 1adam12 at 7:45 PM on June 27, 2013
Simple starting tips: most dance music has four-bar phrases. Learning to count out the bars and get the one of your new song to start on the one of your playing song will get you a LOT of the way there. With practice you'll be able to stop counting. You also want to choose songs that have keys that go well together. That's a tiny bit complicated, but you can find out the key of almost any song online. Finally, don't aim for a beat difference of any more than about a few bpm between any two songs. If you want to go from a 70bpm dubstep track to an 87bpm drum and bass track? You'll need to get several intervening songs in there to ramp up the tempo.
posted by 1adam12 at 7:45 PM on June 27, 2013
Best answer: I would really recommend getting a console - even a cheap one is going to be a much better interface for DJing than the keyboard and mouse. The thing is that you want to be able to make smooth changes to certain things (volume, bass/mid/treble, etc), and ideally more than one of them at a time. This is difficult or impossible to do with a keyboard and mouse. If you're going to do your own beatmatching (which I recommend), you'll also want a jog wheel. And perhaps most importantly, as others have pointed out, the *feel* of it is just completely different. A decent console will run a few hundred dollars, but you can pick up some very inexpensive ones from Amazon for fifty or sixty bucks, or look in to finding something used.
For improving your technical skills, my biggest recommendation is to make a lot of practice mixes, and listen to them *as soon as possible* after recording. They don't have to be very long, but getting that rapid feedback about what worked and what didn't -- while you can still remember what you were doing! -- is super useful. When you aren't recording, spend some time playing around with transitions, trying them different ways to see what works well.
Equally important (maybe more so) is reading a crowd and controlling the flow of the mood. This really only comes with practice, so try to play some house parties or get some guest slots at a local club. One common technique is to gradually build to a crescendo and then drop back down to a slower set before building back up. Some people like to dance to high energy stuff, and some like the smoother, mellower stuff, so this cycles both crowds on to the dance floor, gets them sweaty, and cycles them off to go buy a drink and chat with their friends.
Otherwise, I mostly agree with the usual beginner dj advice. Learn the structure of your musical genre of choice (it's probably 4/4 with some very common conventions of track structure). Practice beatmatching with two copies of the same track, then with two different tracks with the same bpm, then learn to match the tempos. Loop tracks to extend intros and outros (probably not necessary if you're playing mostly house, but if you want play industrial or something, you will *need* to do this). And so on. There are a lot of great online resources and youtube videos for specific techniques and such that you can focus on once you have the basics down.
posted by djspinmonkey at 8:06 PM on June 27, 2013
For improving your technical skills, my biggest recommendation is to make a lot of practice mixes, and listen to them *as soon as possible* after recording. They don't have to be very long, but getting that rapid feedback about what worked and what didn't -- while you can still remember what you were doing! -- is super useful. When you aren't recording, spend some time playing around with transitions, trying them different ways to see what works well.
Equally important (maybe more so) is reading a crowd and controlling the flow of the mood. This really only comes with practice, so try to play some house parties or get some guest slots at a local club. One common technique is to gradually build to a crescendo and then drop back down to a slower set before building back up. Some people like to dance to high energy stuff, and some like the smoother, mellower stuff, so this cycles both crowds on to the dance floor, gets them sweaty, and cycles them off to go buy a drink and chat with their friends.
Otherwise, I mostly agree with the usual beginner dj advice. Learn the structure of your musical genre of choice (it's probably 4/4 with some very common conventions of track structure). Practice beatmatching with two copies of the same track, then with two different tracks with the same bpm, then learn to match the tempos. Loop tracks to extend intros and outros (probably not necessary if you're playing mostly house, but if you want play industrial or something, you will *need* to do this). And so on. There are a lot of great online resources and youtube videos for specific techniques and such that you can focus on once you have the basics down.
posted by djspinmonkey at 8:06 PM on June 27, 2013
I am a part of a pretty sweet dance co-op in WA and we rotate DJ's and try to get new people in on the DJing action just to keep it fresh and fairly egalitarian. It isn't about DJ's but about the dancing, which is great, because it allows all of the focus to be shifted to the community and not to DJ worship. We start fresh with new people, usually on the co-op's controllers, at least once a month, keeping old DJ's for the other 3 weeks. It keeps it light, fun and everybody has a good time.
I started out in pretty much the same situation as you. I didn't have cash, had lots of mp3's, knew what I liked and didn't like and didn't want to sound like a complete fool when I got on the stage for my first set. This is my progression.
What I started out with was Mixxx, mostly because I was booting Ubuntu. I don't really suggest this unless you are super into free software because the cross compatibility of controllers can be nonexistent but there is support out there. I fell it doesn't run as smoothly as the other options, but realistically it is a great program and free for commercial use. I used it for about a year.
Then I started using Virtual DJ which is great if you aren't making money. It's smooth and works well. I've used Serato and Traktor, they both work well and are fairly intuitive if you put in the time, but really work best and are designed to work with controllers. The most useful budget item for getting started was a cheap USB soundcard, like this. Essentially you can plug in headphones and a line out. At this price level it will not put out quality sound, but that doesn't particularly matter if you are just learning the ropes with purely digital DJing.
Most of these programs do transfer skills fairly easily. I mapped out what I wanted more frequently to use in Mixxx, then did the same in Virtual DJ, and have had a good time without controllers. I put in a lot of hours just because it is really fun.
It is really nice to have a controller, even if it is just a basic one, because it makes everything soooooo much easier. It can be really frustrating to not be able to make the sounds that you hear in other peoples sets. Well, you can make the sounds, but it took a lot more time for me, to get good at those skills to the point where I was pleased. Kittens were raised to cats in that amount of time.
I stopped having time for it all but I was getting pretty bored with just DJing at this point, and was looking into getting a cheap midi controller and using Ableton Live more, simply because it gives greater control and gets into actual music production. Anyway, hope that helps! Good luck, it's lots of fun!
posted by burntbook at 2:46 AM on June 28, 2013
I started out in pretty much the same situation as you. I didn't have cash, had lots of mp3's, knew what I liked and didn't like and didn't want to sound like a complete fool when I got on the stage for my first set. This is my progression.
What I started out with was Mixxx, mostly because I was booting Ubuntu. I don't really suggest this unless you are super into free software because the cross compatibility of controllers can be nonexistent but there is support out there. I fell it doesn't run as smoothly as the other options, but realistically it is a great program and free for commercial use. I used it for about a year.
Then I started using Virtual DJ which is great if you aren't making money. It's smooth and works well. I've used Serato and Traktor, they both work well and are fairly intuitive if you put in the time, but really work best and are designed to work with controllers. The most useful budget item for getting started was a cheap USB soundcard, like this. Essentially you can plug in headphones and a line out. At this price level it will not put out quality sound, but that doesn't particularly matter if you are just learning the ropes with purely digital DJing.
Most of these programs do transfer skills fairly easily. I mapped out what I wanted more frequently to use in Mixxx, then did the same in Virtual DJ, and have had a good time without controllers. I put in a lot of hours just because it is really fun.
It is really nice to have a controller, even if it is just a basic one, because it makes everything soooooo much easier. It can be really frustrating to not be able to make the sounds that you hear in other peoples sets. Well, you can make the sounds, but it took a lot more time for me, to get good at those skills to the point where I was pleased. Kittens were raised to cats in that amount of time.
I stopped having time for it all but I was getting pretty bored with just DJing at this point, and was looking into getting a cheap midi controller and using Ableton Live more, simply because it gives greater control and gets into actual music production. Anyway, hope that helps! Good luck, it's lots of fun!
posted by burntbook at 2:46 AM on June 28, 2013
Best answer: You need to get a controller. What's your budget? See this list on amazon and do some research.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_kk_2?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Amidi+controller+dj&keywords=midi+controller+dj&ie=UTF8&qid=1372428665
posted by OuttaHere at 7:11 AM on June 28, 2013
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_kk_2?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Amidi+controller+dj&keywords=midi+controller+dj&ie=UTF8&qid=1372428665
posted by OuttaHere at 7:11 AM on June 28, 2013
Response by poster: My budget is pretty minimal at the moment. I took a first shot at mixing with mouse and keyboard today, and yeah, that's going to be excruciating. I see a few sub-$100 controllers on that list, with...not great, but okay reviews, and I'm wondering if it's worth picking up a really cheap one (knowing I might want to replace it fairly soon) or waiting until I start my next job (which could be a few weeks), picking up a slightly higher-end piece of equipment that would last longer (like a used Kontrol S2), but running the risk of losing a bit more if this doesn't go anywhere. I mean, I love music, always have, but as much as I want to I can't say I'll ever really have an opportunity to do this for anyone else.
posted by Merzbau at 8:40 PM on June 28, 2013
posted by Merzbau at 8:40 PM on June 28, 2013
Response by poster: A quick update for the jetpack-wearing Mefites of THE FUTURE: I've done some additional research and it looks like Traktor is te best choice for software. Serato is seemingly a simpler interface more suited to basic DJing (Traktor has a robust/intimidating set of options for fx and sampling), but a Serato Scratch setup is crazy expensive whereas I can get started with Traktor for considerably less. I know I'm going to be spending a lot of time and effort on this, so I'm starting with native Instruments' Kontrol S2 controller; I've found a used one (including software) for about $300 on Craigslist.
When I've for things up and running and to the point where I only suck a little bit, I'll upload some mixes and link them from my profile page.
posted by Merzbau at 9:33 AM on July 9, 2013
When I've for things up and running and to the point where I only suck a little bit, I'll upload some mixes and link them from my profile page.
posted by Merzbau at 9:33 AM on July 9, 2013
Response by poster: There's also the new Serato DJ, which replaces their controller-compatible Itch software and seems designed to compete with Traktor, but I've seen reports of instability (to be expected with any new program), and Traktor's broader acceptance and controller compatibility made the decision easy for now.
posted by Merzbau at 9:36 AM on July 9, 2013
posted by Merzbau at 9:36 AM on July 9, 2013
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by justonegirl at 5:06 PM on June 27, 2013