In this video, I will provide a
high-level overview on how to DJ intended to get beginners off the ground
and make a learning process a little less intimidating.
Now, DJing is the act of playing pre-recorded songs back to back and
mixing them together for some form of an audience - for example a club, party,
festival, or the radio. Your main goal as a DJ is to play the music that engages
with your crowd the most and provide them with an exciting atmosphere. This
all happens in DJ software - this is where the magic happens.
However, it can be difficult to perform all the actions needed in the software
with just a mouse and a keyboard so to help you're gonna need to get your hands
on the proper hardware in the form of a DJ controller. In this video I'll
specifically be walking through how to use the Hercules DJ Control Inpulse 200 -
and while there are certain features specific to this controller, for the most
part the concepts I'm about to go over are universal to most DJ controllers.
Similarly the software I'll be using in this video is called DJuced. And again,
this may have unique features or a different interface when compared to
other DJing software, but the concepts can be transferred to whichever
application you may use. So let's get into the meat of this video, starting off
let's make sure we have all the equipment setup as needed. Plug your
controller into your computer and open up your DJ software. If you so choose you
can send audio to speakers by using the master output on your controller - this is
what the crowd will hear - and you can plug in headphones into your controller
- and this is what you will hear This allows you to mix your tracks and ensure
everything goes smoothly before you send it out to the audience. Now, let's mix two
songs together. In general it's best to pick two songs of a similar BPM, or beats
per minute. This is essentially the speed of the song, where higher BPM tracks tend
to be faster and more upbeat, and lower BPM tracks are slower. You can find the
BPM of your songs in your DJ software as a reference. Now ideally you could even
pick two tracks with the exact same BPM This is so when we mix between the two
songs, the transition is seamless as the beats line up with each other - otherwise
if the beats don't line up the transition is jarring and won't feel as
natural for the audience. Now if the BPM of your tracks aren't identical that's
not the end of the world, in fact that's even part of your job as a DJ, there's a
workaround where you can temporarily speed up or slow down a track until they
match. This process is called Tempo Matching - we'll get into how to do
this in just a moment - so for now we've chosen two songs with the same or
similar BPM. The next thing to do is load these songs up in their respective DJ
decks. Deck one is on the left half of your software and hardware and deck two
is on the right. You can have more decks going at a time but for a beginner I
recommend only working with two. We can load a song in your software by clicking
and dragging a song from the library onto a deck or on your controller by
navigating your library with this knob. Rotating left and right changes which
song is selected and pressing down on the knob moves into and out of
directories. Once you've highlighted your desired song you can press the load
buttons for either deck 1 or deck 2. So whichever method you prefer, load up two
different songs with a similar BPM in decks 1 and deck 2. Now you can play either of
these tracks independently of each other by pressing the green play button on its
respective deck (pressing this button again also pauses your song) the slider
in the middle, called the Crossfader, determines which deck is sending audio.
The slider being all the way on the left will only send the audio of deck 1, all
the way on the right will only send audio of deck 2, and in the middle will
send an equal amount of decks 1 & 2 everywhere in between will send a
proportionate amount. Essentially sliding this between your decks is your main
tool in mixing your two tracks together once they've been Beat Matched. Beat
Matching is when your two songs are playing simultaneously on each deck,
they're Tempo Matched, the beats hit at the same time, and the tops of each bar hit
at the same time. This sounds like a lot but we'll walk through this step-by-step.
So let's learn how to beat match these two songs so we can transition between
the two. First ensure you're only sending audio from either deck 1 or deck 2 (your
choice, doesn't matter) by pushing the crossfader all the way towards that
deck. Next hit play on both your decks and notice what happens in your software.
You can see, visually, the audio of your track playing over time as well as where
your beats hit in the form of these vertical lines. The vertical lines with
the red arrow indicate the start of a bar and our goal is to manipulate the
song on the deck that's not sending output until is playing in sync with a
track that is sending output and we can do this not only by lining up the
vertical lines but also matching the lines with the red arrows. So the first
step in the beat matching process is Tempo Matching. If you chose two songs
the same BPM, then this step is finished otherwise you can speed up or slow down
the track that's not playing by moving its tempo fader which is right here. This
adjusts its BPM by a certain percent the more you move this fader and we want to
move it until the BPMS are matched. This controller is pretty neat in the fact
that it provides a Beat Matching Guide where these arrows will light up to tell
me what direction to move this fader to adjust its BPM when I land on the
correct value to sync the tempo is both the arrows light up for just a second
and then go away this allows me to see that hey these tempos are matched even
without looking at my computer. Adjusting a song's BPM will warp the track and speed
it up or slow it down which if you're playing it may sound funky but keep in
mind this is intended only to be used for the transition of your songs and
then you can always slowly adjust it back to its original BPM once the
transition is over. So now that we've matched our BPMs, let's line up the beats
of our tracks. You can move a track by spinning this Scratch Deck on the song
that's on standby. You can turn on the vinyl setting on the deck, you know the
*wikki wikki* for major adjustments since you are rapidly fast forwarding or rewinding the
track, or you can spin the outer wheel of the scratch decks for fine tuning, a more
precise adjustment. And again this controller, Hercules DJ Control Inpulse,
provides me with the beat matching guide so I can see which direction I need to
adjust my beats by using these beat aligned arrows. Again I can verify I'm
all lined up and don't even have to look at the software - I think that's a pretty
neat. And now at this point we've successfully Beat Matched our tracks you
can move the crossfader slowly to hear the transition into your other track if it doesn't sound perfect you may need
to adjust your Beat Grid. Remember the vertical lines we're using as a
reference was created by the software which is usually pretty good at
detecting where the beats land but sometimes it's not 100% perfect and
could be off by a few milliseconds. To adjust where these vertical lines are
you could adjust your beat grid. In this particular software, you can do so by
clicking this arrow next to your track name and selecting edit beat grid. Now I
can adjust where the beats are labeled for this track so the next time I go to
play it the beats will be lined up properly if you only have to do this
once per track at most sometimes it's good enough the first time you import it
so consider going through and verifying your beat grid is set up correctly for
each song you plan on playing before you start your DJ set that'll just make your
life a little bit easier at this point once you transition between the tracks
you can stop the track on the deck that's not sending audio load up another
song and start the process all over again you know let your current track
play for a bit for the crowd to hear and joy but behind the scenes your beat
matching with the new song that's coming up whenever you get to the point where
you want to transition it start cross fading or instant repeat the whole
process in addition to transitioning between the tracks you can also
manipulate the audio of your songs by either adding in filters EQ in the high
or low ends or adjusting the gain the volume of your tracks by moving these
knobs and for the most part that's the basics of DJing there's more to go out
and learn of course including queuing up certain points of your tracks adding in
samples as other effects but for a high-level overview that should be
enough to get you off the ground and help you ease into the world of DJing so
I hope you found this video helpful Thank you for watching and as always
I'll see you in the next video. Bye
