HOW TO DJ - A-Z Guide For Complete Beginners

hey guys Phil Harris here so listen in this video I'm going to give you a complete guide to DJing my goal is to make a video that's so good you never have to buy another DJ course ever again I just want to give it all away I just want to teach you as much as I possibly can that is my goal of this video now you can see how long this video is I have no idea how long it's going to be I've come down it's like 10: to 6:00 in the morning I'm just going to teach and teach and teach I've got some notes here about what I'm going to teach which I'm going to run you through now what I am going to say is I'm going right from the basic so if you've never djed before in your life I'm going to take you all the way to a point where you're going to be able to go out and confidently DJ a festival in this video but you might not be right at the beginning of your journey right so you might know some of the basic stuff so what I've also done is I've segmented this video you see that little red cursor at the bottom of the video you can scroll along and you'll see all the different sections of this video If you go into the description or one of the comments below you'll see all the different parts of the video and you can just jump to that part that suits you there should be something in this video for every single DJ out there it's super exciting you know I've never seen a video like this on YouTube so I'm really excited about it so what I'm going to do because this is an intro I'm going to give you a super quick run through of everything I'm going to be covering but like I said you can see these different sections below and I might even add in additional sections that I haven't even written down here this is not necessarily like pre-planned okay so that's what we're going to do um now just quickly before I run you through this just want to say my name is Phil Harris I've been a professional DJ for 10 years I've been teaching this for ages obviously this is my YouTube channel I'm also heavily active on Instagram um so you can go and follow me there at Phil Harris music you can follow along with my DJ Journey it's really cool daily DJ tricks and tips now obviously the plan of this video is to make sure you never need another DJ course in your life but just as a side note I do have DJ courses which I leave below hopefully you don't need but I'll put them there anyway and then there's another thing which I wanted to mention to you a massive part of DJing these days if you think about it is making your own music if you think of the top DJs on the planet you know a lot of them like dve vetta marshmallow chain smokers they're really there because of their numbers on Spotify in other words they got really really popular songs so what I'm going to teach you is how to go out on DJ festivals but unfortunately the reality of DJing these days is you've got to be making your own music now don't s when I say that because the reality is making music is awesome it's really really fun and I will teach you how to make professional music just in case you're like who is this guy just go to Spotify type in Phil Harris you can go and listen to my music I make Tech house music I DJ Tech house music so if you want me to teach you how to make professional music I also run a mentorship program over 6 months where I'll work with you even if you've never made music before to a point where you can make professional music every single time so that's a little bit of a a drop of all the different stuff that I kind of you know courses and stuff I do but like I said let's get on with the video so this is what I'm going to be covering I'm going to start with what is DJing then I'm going to cover the basics of DJ decks now I've decided to teach on the DDJ flx 4 okay these are one of the most popular DJ decks out there which is why I'm choosing to teach all of this stuff on here cuz I'm think that if you're brand new you're going to be starting on entry level DJ decks however I've got the CD J 3000s which I'm also going to do a little section on at the end of this video why is it important to know about the CDJ 3000s well because they're Club standard right now I know there's a bit of a you know people are not necessarily happy that they're Club standard people think there should be a whole range of DJ decks but the reality is whether you go to London Las Vegas barley and you walk into any club the DJ Decks that you're going to see in front of you a CDJ 3000 so it's also important that you have a bit of knowledge about the these because if you get on a festival stage they the DJs actually going to be looking at so I'm going to teach on these and at the end I'm going to do a small section on the CDJ 3000s I'm going to be covering DJ software I'm going to be covering where to get your music from I'm going to be covering things like BPM and grid that might not even make any sense to you yet but it will soon I'm going to be showing you about mixing in key which is important because it'll teach you kind of like how to make your mix sound perfect again I'm going to be covering all this I going be covering things like hot cues uh memory points uh buttons um I'm going to be covering where to set your hot cues this might all sound like gobbley goop to you but don't worry we're going to be covering it's all important parts of DJing understanding effects I'm going to be covering beat matching for beginners I'm going to be covering phrases beats bars and phrases which is really important because it'll teach you where at what point in the track you need to transition for one track to another it's a really critical part of DJing that I'm going to be teaching you how to transition from one BPM to another BPM I'm not even going to begin to explain it I'm just telling you what I'm going to be covering I'm going to be talking about mastering beat matching beat matching by ear introducing headphones into mixing I'm going to show you how to actually mix different frequencies from one track to another to another so it begins to blend really nicely um I'm going to be teaching you about the sync button and why it's controversial and why loads of DJs seem to don't like it but I'm going to be covering that as well I'm going to be showing you emergency transition so if you went wrong on the dance one it's like oh we just need to get away from this song to another song quickly how to do that without looking like an absolute idiot mixing between different genres so what if you got house music and you want to go to drum and bass or hip hop or a completely different genre I'm going to be showing you that I'm going to be showing you kind of some like James hype stuff and what he does because let's face it he's like one of the most technical DJs out there I'm going to show you a couple of things that he does that allows him to do the stuff he does and then I'm going to show you the difference between cdjs and these and then I'm going to end with some kind of final words of advice now I probably could have saved 5 minutes then by not reading that out cuz you could have gone to the bottom of the video and seen all of this anyway but to be honest with you we're in this for the Long Haul guys we could be here for the next couple of hours so make sure you bookmark this make sure you grab your popcorn and I'm also going to try and be as efficient as I can in this video I know it's going to be a long video so I'm going to try and get through it as quickly as possible till you're not sitting there bored at any point and hopefully that wasn't too boring for you and you're pumped and you're ready to go so without further do let's get into it okay guys so we're going to start with the most basic question what is DJing so technically DJing is the art of transitioning from one song into another song seamlessly so your audience kind of feel like they're just listening to One massive song progression and everything kind of flows back and forth that's technically what you're doing as a DJ but I can tell you as a professional DJ what you're really doing is playing music that the audience in front of you like dancing to and are enjoying that's basically what it all comes down to if I had 3 minutes before with you before you went to do a DJ set we wouldn't actually be discussing technically how to DJ we just be putting together a very very good playlist of songs remember this and I'm only going to say this once but I've been to events where people are going crazy and dancing around like mad people to an iPod that's plugged in and I've also been to events where the DJ is playing music that no one knows and he's doing technical Transitions and no one's dancing and I can tell you which party I'd rather be at the one where everyone's dancing and screaming and singing along to their favorite Tunes so that's the most important thing let's move on to the next section of the video okay guys I'm going to start with DJ software now I just want to explain these DJ decks here are just controllers so they have to be plugged into a laptop in order to control what's actually going on on a computer program right so you could technically DJ from your laptop if you wanted to but really you want to master of the DJ deck so you have to have software now there's two main programs there's sorat and record box and of course there's loads of others as well and I'm not necessarily saying one is better than the other just so you know they all basically do the same kind of thing that's basically it once you can kind of understand one program you can switch over to another program in basically an hour or so it takes no time at all so really do not stress about this if you have sorato and you've got DJ Decks that are compatible with sorato you you got DJ de that are compatible with record box go ahead and use them just to explain to you the reason why I made the switch from sorato over to record box is because I wanted to start DJing in clubs and as I mentioned the standard DJ de in clubs the CDJ 3000s and the software that you need in order to DJ with the CDJ 3000s is record box um and again I don't want to jump too far ahead but I'm going to probably do this quite a lot throughout the video just in case you didn't know with these DJ Dex controllers you will only ever control stuff that's on the program so music that is in the program will be controlled by these when you go to a club you actually just take a USB with you so it's very similar but essentially what you do is once you got a playlist you export it onto a USB and that's a USB you go and you plug into the CDJ 3000s so the CDJ 3000s are not controllers whereas this is a controller hopefully that makes sense so I don't know if I mentioned this but the software that is compatible with CDJ 3000s is record box it also works well with DDJ uh 400s DDJ FX4 which just so happen to be the most popular DJ deck on the planet entry level DJ deck which is why I'm using this so I just wanted to kind of cover myself there but the stuff I'm going to be teaching you in this video is not going to be indepth about record box I'm just going to be showing you the absolute Basics you need to know which is essentially loading music in and loading music onto the decks and creating a playlist so I'm just going to cover that so if I come down here we can see this is what record box looks like okay and I've obviously got some music in here so this is what it will look like and as soon as you plug your DJ decks in it should go to a different mode so let's go ahead and do that now so going to plug these in and the second you plug them in you usually get a popup like this that tells you to update it no one ever does if you're anything like me I just hit close cuz it's I just can't be bothered with it and you see it's jumped to this mode here which is performance mode and you can kind of see like there's one deck over here one deck over here so you kind of begin to get an idea of what's going on now obviously there's lots of switches knobs buttons let's just stick to the basics we can get you going so essentially you want to come to it'll say collections all audio all videos and you won't have any playlists but if you come onto playlist here and click on it there's a little button here called plus this is the way you would create a playlist you hit this little plus button here uh um uh let's H that and you can see it creates the playlist over here which you can come and you can just like double click in and then you can call it playlist or whatever you want okay um now a little note on playlist okay essentially my top tips when it comes to creating playlists is if you are going to a club and you're going to be playing a tech house DJ set you can essentially have one playlist when I go and play Ministry of s now and I know I've got an hour slot and I'm playing Tech house all night the reality is I know what songs I'm playing before I go and play that DJ Gig I've got them all there maybe there's a bit a couple of extras so I can swap them out if I want but I've got a really good idea and I know I'm playing Tech house music all night cuz I'm being employed to go and play Tech house music right so I will go with one playlist however I used to DJ at weddings and you can't go with one playlist because when you go and DJ at a wedding or just a broader event where you've got a wider spectrum of people there you need to have playlists that people are going to like or if you're going to play a house party and so my top tip for you when it comes to playlist is don't have too many songs in the playlist okay just keep your playlist nice and tight you know like 203 songs in each and the general kind of playlist you could create would be popular hip-hop songs you know songs that everybody's going to know popular dance songs pop songs throwback songs songs you know like just kind of old school songs that everybody knows like The Killers stuff like that then you could obviously have like indie rock you know this kind of stuff works well at weddings like blink when two killers all that kind of stuff and you just you're just going to get the top hits okay and then of course if you're playing like for people over the age of you know 50 you might want to get things like mtown tracks in there which would be like Stevie Wonder all of those kind of tracks so I mean you could go down a rabbit hole but everything I mentioned there would typically be what I would go and play a wedding when I used to do weddings with right and the main thing is what you do with playlists is you want to figure out what your audience likes okay so you'll dive into one you go right we're just going to start off with pop tracks and you play it and if people come on the Dance Floor you play more pop tracks if you're like oh this isn't really working let's try a hip-hop track and everyone goes crazy you play more hip-hop songs and it really is that now this is the part of DJing that no one really talks about which is what you've got to get good at is reading the room guessing what you think they're going to like and playing more of that okay it really is as basic as that so that's kind of like the psychology behind playlist everyone's always interested like you know what what playlist should we have that's basically it okay so the next thing is you got to go and get your music now I'm going to create a whole other section of where to get music so let's just stick with the program for now so let's say I've got one song Here an abber remix okay you've got your music another thing to note is I would get yourself a good external hard drive something that's going to hold all your music you don't want to store all your music on a laptop because it'll make your laptop really sluggish and slow and it's going to get frustrating so if you store all your music on an external hard drive then it keep your computer really quick okay so that's another really important tip for you another tip is I would actually put your music into specific folders on your hard drive because then it's really easy if you ever needed to move your music onto a different computer to go in and just create new playlists from the folders you have on your hard drive grab all that music and drag it in okay and it really is as simple as dragging it in so say for example right now I had three songs in a folder I can click control a or apple a which would select all of them and you just get it and you just drag it literally into your playlist like this so so far we've covered a playlist and we've covered how to drag and drop music in now when you drag and drop it in you'll see it kind of loads for a second where it'll create like the wave form here it'll give you the name it'll give you the key which I'm going to come on to later on and it'll give you the BPM here as well okay so it'll kind of load in information and it'll just kind of figure this stuff out for you so now we've got our music in a playlist getting it onto the different decks on here is as simple as grabbing it and dragging and dropping you see when I drag it up it goes to a white box there you can drop it like that that's now loaded on this deck and if I was to do the same over on the other side it's loaded on this deck now I'm going to leave it there for now but we will jump back into the software later on and I'll show you more technical stuff later on but the one thing I do want to note is notice when I move these up and down here on the screen the volume goes up and down there as well so we know that this is now controlling a lot of the parameters in the software okay cool let's move on to the next bit of the video okay in this part of the video I want to teach you where to get your music from ultimately is the most important part of DJing and a lot of new DJs are like where do we go to get music from so I'm just going to give you a plethora of places you could go okay so first things first for inspiration you want to go to places like Spotify you can obviously go to Spotify you can search for playlists and stuff like that so again if you're into hip-hop you can type in hip-hop you'll find so many different playlists with new hip-hop that's being released you could type in throwback hip hop you can type in whatever you want to get inspiration and of course the cool thing about Spotify is if you create your own playlist Spotify will recognize what songs you like and then rem recommend other songs for you so it's a really really good place to go to get inspiration for music now the next place you can go is YouTube so you can go to YouTube and type in one of your favorite artists like James hype for example watch one of his DJ sets listen to it and sometimes people will have put the track list in the comments or you could just get on your phone and get Shazam and hold it up and listen to the track that he's playing and then it'll tell you what the song is and then you'll will know what the song is to go and get it this is more kind of inspiration where you go to get ideas for the music you want to download okay now another website you can go to is called track list 101 track list okay and what this is is you can go here and type in any of your favorite artist and it will give you the actual playlist of all the different tracks they've played so you could go search for your favorite artist and actually look at the different songs that they're playing so you can find them to go and get them at a later Point once you've got a good list of songs the next thing is to go and actually download them or get them okay so are places you could go to download songs obviously you've got iTunes you can go there you can download music there um you can go to beatport um this is a great one for some reason it's not loading but essentially this is like a DJ s so you can go here and there's different genres of music you can go and there's beatport charts and you know a lot of the top DJs will go to the beatport charts to find what's really hot at the moment okay um so that's a really good one beatport and you can go and look at these in your own time uh we've got track source as well and you know this is another place you can go and download music band camp is another place you can go and download music Juno download is another place SoundCloud is really cool what's cool about SoundCloud is a lot of DJs will go and upload bootlegs and mashups and remixes onto this website and there'll often be a free download link that you can go and get so you can actually download free music off um off SoundCloud as well there's other things you can do you can go to to record pools these are pretty cool you can sign up for a membership and essentially download as much music as you want and they will also have really cool remixes mashups stuff like that which is pretty cool um obviously it's cool playing remixes and mashups out because it gives your audience just a different flavor of a track you can get a track that's popular and play a remix of it it just makes you look cooler as a DJ so different um record pools is a BPM Supreme is one ZIP DJ is one um DJ city is one and remember with all of this stuff you can just go ahead and Google it so for example if you were like uh where can I go to download music you just go to Google and type in download music and there'll be a load of websites you can go or if you're looking for DJ pools you can just go and type in DJ pools and it'll bring up a ton so if I miss any don't worry you can always just go and Google these at a later point now there's also ways these days that you can actually stream music okay so beatport you can actually stream music so it's a bit like you would with Spotify but straight to your DJ decks so beatport is one and there's another one called beat source which is pretty cool for streaming music but again this probably loads if you were to type in DJ stream music you'd find a turnon okay um now I also wanted to touch on briefly actually making your own music so I use a program called Ableton and this is a program you would use to create your own music from scratch I'm not going to talk about this for very long but as I mentioned at the beginning of the video a lot of the top DJs on the planet are making their own mashups remixes and original tracks and they will do it on programs like Ableton and there's others like um FL Studio logic but a lot of my favorite artists are using Ableton I use Ableton it's awesome so if you were interested in making your own music you could go and get a free trial of this um and if you want to learn more you can obviously get in touch just message me on Instagram if you want to learn more so now there's one other thing which I wanted to mention um which is kind of risky but it's a program called clip grab um this is highly illegal and you should not use this um but essentially what this is you can download it and any track on Spotify you can go and grab the URL and then drop it into clip grab and illegally download it and then you go into jail you're going jail so if you do that you're going to you know you're going to spend time um so so there's that and something else I want to mention as well often you can just go to Google and type in um SoundCloud down load and you can go to SoundCloud get go onto a track make sure it's not a playlist or anything like that and it's an individual track you can go and grab the URL and then you go to a SoundCloud download website drop and paste it in and you can download it um uh so there you go you do it you you're going to jail okay nothing to do with me um so that's essentially where you can go to get inspiration for music um and where to download music and and look in my opin op if you're starting out and you just want to have you know you're just DJing in your bedroom I think just rip it basically anyway there we go so that's where to get music oh and actually I do want to say one other thing the reason why people are against ripping stuff is because it can be lower quality and if you were to play it on a big sound system uh it might sound worse and obviously there's the risk if you're downloading it from an actual music video they might be like talking over it halfway through the the song and that would make you look very bad if you downloaded a track from a music video and there's like a car race and there's car screeching in the background and you play that out live you are going to look like a fool but the one thing I will say is I can't really tell the difference if I was to play and I've played music on big sound systems and good sound systems from like clip grab and music that I've downloaded and I've ABD and I've gone back and forth and I can't really tell the difference uh you know technology is very good these days so that's the reason why people are against and obviously people are against it because the artists don't get any money but let's face it we live in a world now where everything is streamed anyway I've got hundreds of thousands millions of streams on Spotify I make absolutely no money of Spotify at all you know I'd much rather people rip my music and actually play it than not buy it and not play it as an artist um so that's just another little note for you okay so I'm going to have a whole section here just on BPM and grid okay so let me just expl explain this to you first things first BPM stands for beats per minute okay so every single track has got a beat right a faster beat will have more beats per minute than a slower beat okay so if a track was 160 beats per minute it's a fast track or if it's 90 beats per minute it's a slower track okay now beats per minute is very relevant to DJing the reason it's relevant is because we need to blend from one track to another track so a lot of the time we got to make sure the two tracks are the same beat and the beats are aligned if we get the One Beat from one track to another beat of another track we can blend from one to the other and it just feels like people are just constantly dancing to the same song so it's really really relevant this this why I wanted to give it its own section in case you didn't know what beats per minute were now the second thing which I want to teach you about is grid now as we just talked about a lot of DJs well all music is made these days on like programs on a computer program right and the way it would work is say you had a kick like you would set that to a grid and you just say like basically just hit that beat on the beat for 128 beats per minute so like you know like think of a met tick tick tick tick well on music production software you set the match noome and you put a kick and you just say repeat the kick so then you got It's Made on a computer program and it's made electronically now this is all relevant right because there was a time when once when the dinosaurs existed where people would actually play real instruments right and the thing with that is there's room for error if I was to clap my hands to a beat I'm going to get it wrong it's never wrong on a computer program right I could set a loop on my DJ deck and on you know have this track and this track set to a loop on two tracks that be made on a computer program and walk away for a hundred years and come back and it's digitally perfect it will still be lined up perfectly you can't do that with when you got real instrumentalist okay so then we come to a grid so if you look at the computer program here we can see this grid now we can actually see the Beats now I can see instantly that this grid is off so I'm going to come here to export mode okay and we're going to set this grid properly this is really really important you need to make sure that the music that you've got loaded in is set to a grid properly because it's going to help you so much when it comes to actually DJing live now um the record box or whatever software you're using will try and set the grid but as we can see here it's got it wrong which I'm glad it has because I can show you this so we've come to export mode and I'm now going to come to grid right and uh let's see if we can zoom in a little bit here oh you can cool here we go now check it out every single track has got four beats to to a bar okay so it just goes 1 2 3 4 2 2 3 4 3 2 3 4 these are bars and there's four beats to a bar that's just the case in all music I don't want to go down a rabbit hole just memorize that this is important okay you need to know about Beats bars and phrases I've got a whole section on that coming up so we can see 1 2 3 4 and if I was to play it for some reason it's not playing so I'm going to come to the top here and go to preferences and I going to come to audio and I'm just going to change it to built-in output here just so we can actually hear it I do apologize my computer is unbelievably slow this is just this computer is just designated for DJ stuff and I haven't updated it for ages so right now we can hear it okay so if I come to the beginning here we need this first grid to hit here now something else which I haven't mentioned is you know I just mentioned beats and bars the beginning of a bar will always be a red line and then the others will be white or I think here you can see it's blue but they'll always be a red bar a red line for the beginning of a bar so we know this track is 128 BPM okay cuz it's figured it out and we can see it works we can see it kind of well I'll come on to how we know that's true in a second okay so we want to set this to the beginning here now just to show you how to do this in reckle box you just come to grid you just hit this button here and it'll bump it along and now instantly we can see that's going to the grid nicely okay so we now know this is set to the grid now how do we know that 128 is right well I want to come along further in the track and see if it still looks like it's fitting to the grid perfectly later in the track so I'll come to here and I can still see it's going to the grid pretty well and I can come and I can even listen to it and you can kind of visually see that the beat lands every time it passes this red line in the middle like that and I can come further along in the track and I can still see it's fitting to the grid so we know this is 128 sometimes it might get it wrong and sometimes it might say 28.2 three or something like that no one writes music to 20 128. 23 so you can pretty much bet your bottom is 128 so if you wanted to change it you just come and click in that and then you can just type it in whatever it is right and then you go right back to the beginning of the track and you set that first beat to the grid okay so now hopefully I've explained to you the importance of BPM and making sure it goes to the grid um and you just need to understand this but other stuff that's coming up in the video later on okay so in this part of the video I'm going to be talking to you about mix in key now I know you're probably thinking Phil there's a hell of a lot of theory here let's just get into the DJ deck but this is so important this stuff so let me just explain mixing in key for somebody who just knows nothing about music theory at all so essentially if you kind of pictured a keyboard right uh in front of you when you write a song the song is written in a key and what that means is certain notes are being used because certain notes sound nice together and certain notes sound horrible together there's certain Keys you can hit on a keyboard if you hit them at the same time it's like they just clash and they sound horrible so you've got to use notes that complement each other and that's how all music is written okay now you need to understand that because when it comes to DJing we will have songs are in certain Keys now in the same way with notes that will clash with each other if you have two different tracks that are in clashing keys if you were to mix from one to another and they overlaid each other and they were in clashing Keys it could sound really horrible right so it's quite important to make sure your mixing keys that complement each other okay now there's a whole like you know we could go into a whole rabbit hole about this but the main thing you need to know is this is particularly important if you're going to start doing mashups you're going to get a vocal from one track and put it over an instrumental of another track you need to make sure they're exactly the same key because you need to make sure the vocal sits perfectly over the key of the instrumental now I'm going to come on to this later on but just in case you did want to do that the way you do is you just go to YouTube and you type in whatever it is &m song name Acappella and you will find people have literally ripped the vocal away from the track so You' just got the vocal with no instruments and then you can go to another track that you like whatever that is and you type in the track name and then you type in instrumental and sometimes you can actually find people have done the opposite they've taken the vocals out so as a DJ this is pretty cool cuz now as long as you know that they're in the same key and the same BPM you can line them up on top of each other and it should sound good okay now I I'll kind of go on to remixes later on I'm going to make a note of doing that um but that's really important now what I will say as a DJ who's done it professionally more often than not the part of the song you are mixing is the intro and the outro which I'm going to be coming on to more in a bit but the intro and the outro of the song if you think of a dance song you know it sometimes just comes in with a beat and it ends with a beat well that's for the DJ to mix and there's not usually that many instruments going on on the intro and outro so I'll just tell you this I'm going to tell you all about mixing in key now but as someone who DJs professionally I don't actually worry that much about mixing in key because the intro and the outro don't often have many instruments that would Clash drums in a track don't have a key right if you think about it drums like there's no like tone to that whereas if you sing a no like that that's got a key to it that's got a note so drums are more percussive and baselines and chords have notes so as soon as they have things like that they run the risk of clashing so an intro and an outro typically don't really Clash that much plus and I know I'm riffing on this but I just want to kind of teach you stuff right so here's the reality say you're playing a DJ set and you're playing an absolute Banger that people love and you're like oh I know what song they're going to like they're going to like this one right and you bring it in and oh my gosh they're in clashing C Keys shock horror there are some people out there some purists out there who would say no what you've got to do is join them so you'll go from this song to this song which is in a similar key and then to this song which is a similar key so you can finally land on that song then you've done the transition from keys that work well to with each other other from this one to this one and I think what a load of nonsense what happens if you got a banger and you want to play this other Banger and those two tracks in the middle are not bangers you've lost the audience I'm telling you now as somebody who DJs professionally you want people in your room you're often going to be playing a club whether you're not the only person there right like people can choose to leave your room if they don't like the music think of all the times you've been drunk in a nightclub you're oh I hate this song you just leave the room right and so you've got to think think about this this is the most important stuff I'm saying this a lot but it's important even if you got to a point you're playing a festival there's going to be other tents people can go to so I don't worry about mixing it key and and honestly the way I do it is I'll just go find a playlist of songs that I like and I actually if you want to know the truth I order the songs in order of the songs I love the most down to the songs I obviously I'm playing songs I love but I just play the biggest songs first cuz you just want to keep them you just want to get them excited you know so that's how I do it anyway we've gone way off on the tangent but hopefully you can kind of appreciate these thoughts in my head hopefully it helps you in some way shape or form so let's go back to key so as we know Keys could be things like all the different notes on the keyboard like you know a b CDE e you know all this kind of stuff but luckily for you you don't have to memorize what keys work well together because in the DJ world they're coded right right so you can see here underneath key it says 12 a 8 a 2 a 4 a right those relate to scales like C major a minor blah blah blah right um but we don't have to memorize those and which work well together all we need to know as DJs is that a 2A and a 2A is the same key so you blend from one of those songs to another song it's going to sound perfect they're in identical Keys now the next thing you need to know is you want to go go from if you are going to change key keys that will typically sound really good together is a 2A to a 3A or a 2A to a 1 a so up or down one and I think you can even go up or down two and there's some DJs that would argue you can go up and down three really the bottom line is you just got to use your ears but it will sound really good going up or down one or or two now you're also going to notice there's a and b a i here's here's the thing I don't know a I think is minor and B I think is a major scale now you can go from 2 a to 2 B but you shouldn't really go from a 2A to a 3B you can start to get into clashing territory there okay and I just want to keep this as simple as possible two keys that will work perfectly together are exactly the same and typically you can go up or down one or maybe two as long as it's an A or a b or or you can side step across from a 2A to a 2B and if you do that and you follow that your mix will sound perfect and that's basically it honestly and and by the way the thing you want to go and check out is if we go to here you can type in um harmonic wheel okay this is what you want to go and search for and just go to images and um and it's going to show you this right so we come to this and open this up here and and we can see on this wheel the bigger image we can see um 11b a major so I was right about B being major and a being minor and you can see how they all relate and so if you were to look at this you can go one to either side so I'm basically saying the same thing I said a second ago so 12b you could go to 1B or 11b or you can go in so you can go down one so you can go from 12b to 12 a and then you can go slide to slide or like I said you could go to either side okay that's all you really need to know about it it's not rocket science once you know that you can just use it every single time now there's another thing that I want to stress to you here the software that you use Recco boox sorat all of the others will go ahead and they'll have algorithms that'll just guess what these keys are okay they don't always get it right okay now I would say if you're starting out on your journey just use the buil-in in detection software in record box or whatever software you're using however I find the most reli and I'm I'm not getting paid to say this by the way but I find the most reliable software is called mix in key which is a completely independent software that looks like this got mix in key 10 it's probably on mix on key 13 by now but essentially this is a software that's really quite good at detecting keys and and so I find myself using this first so what I would typically do is say I had a track or a load of songs let me just move these out the way so I can get to the flipping thing there I can get a song and I come and drop it into mixing key before oh that didn't work here we go do it again before putting it into record box now what this does is it takes that song figures out what the key is and attaches it to that song prior to bringing it into record box so what I've got now is a just slightly more reliable program again I'm not telling you it's like critical I'm just telling you what I do okay and I know a lot of other DJs do this as well I know James hype does it I know David G like a lot of the top DJs do it it's just slightly more reliable but as I just mentioned the second they're completely pointless cuz they don't mi in key 90% of the time um now if you're going to use this we come back back to record box you have to make sure that you disable record box figuring out the key is because we've already figured it out in mixing key so you put it in mixing key first let it run through and then you get those songs and drag them into a playlist so if it comes to record box you just have to go to preferences and then you go to analysis and you just turn off key and phrase here well just key basically and now when you load it in it will take the existing key that has been attached to it from mixing key okay this might sound really complicated hopefully it's not it's really very basic and remember I don't really any mix and key anyway myself um so that's uh everything on mix and key I don't think there's much more to be said on that so we'll move on to the next section of the course okay we've been here about an hour we haven't even discuss the DJ decks yet so let's get into it I'm going to teach you the absolute basics of these DJ decks I'm going to try my hardest not to go down a rabbit hole with each of these things and just explain it in the simplest and easiest way possible so right let's do this first things first if you want to get back to this mode with the DJ deck on either side of the decks you just got to click this and go to Performance mode instead that's what we need to be for this okay so looking at these DJ decks I'm going to pretend you've never seen DJ decks before in your life and I'm just going to explain it so you'll see that this section here and this section here are identical they are identical so you only really need to learn that much and then this section here because once you know this you know this okay um this will control lots of things to do with that track and same with this side and then this section here is primarily used for mixing from one track to another then this section here is just effects and all DJ decks will be slightly different but once you kind of understand this you're laughing and then this is kind of like Master settings okay so let's just dive into it first things first play and pause button that's obvious I don't know need to insult your intelligence there then we've got the CU button this is really important okay so with DJing you don't often want to come in right from the beginning of the track sometimes you want to come in a little bit further in so let's say for example I wanted to come in one bar in four beats one bar in okay I can put my finger on this platter and you probably work this bit out this will move the track forward or back it does a little bit more than that we'll come on to that in a moment so I can move forward on the screen one bar to here and take my finger off and it'll stay there cuz I haven't got it playing it's technically paus right now I can hit the CU button and now I've set this point that I may want to bring the track in from but the cube button does so much more than this so just so you know when you hit the Q button the song will play second I take my finger off the CU button it will snap back to the point where I set the Q button okay now this is really important because when this track is playing over here and it's playing out to the audience I in my ears or my headphones will be queuing this track in over here and testing it and just generally like listening to what's going on and to start getting the beat ready to line up with this one I'll often tapping along to the beat of this track over here now I'm going to be covering beat matching in a second but it's really important that that Cube button will snap back now the second I hit play and pause I've lost the Q button cuz watch if I hit play and pause and now I hit the Q button it sets a new Q point right so you never really want to touch the play button until the track is kind of playing so what you would do is you go back set a CU Point tap along and when you're ready commit and hold down the cube button and then you can hit play with your other but finger so your thumb and then take your hand away and it'll continue playing so if I hit this then hit play I take my hand away okay so that's essentially what the cube button does more on that later on next most important thing is the platter here so as we know this will Fast Forward the song and Rewind it what you might not know is that there's two functionalities to this when the song is playing if I hit the top of the platter it will stop think of it like an actual vinyl okay you know like the oldfashioned vinyls that go around if you touch the top it stops like this and then I can do a hard rewind or forward which is obviously used to scratch worst scratch I've ever done in my life um now that's the one functionality of it now the other functionality is you can touch just the sides so if a song is playing and I touch just the sides it won't stop but what I can do is nudge it okay so there's many times and what I mean by nudge it is I can spin it forward and it will micro budge it forward or micro budge it back almost like speeds it up or slows it down so and it's not really that audible but if I do it to an extreme you'll hear it speed up or so down right did it to a bit of an extreme then so what is the and by the way if it's paused and I touched the slide it will just do a hard fast forward or rewind okay now so what is the purpose of when it's playing touching the side well one thing we're going to be doing in a bit is beat matching where we get the two beats lined up and sometimes you'll get them just slightly off right it's like and you want them to be going perfectly together so at that point you would nudge It Forward okay so that's the platter the next most important thing is tempo remember we talked about BPM you want to get the two bpms exactly the same now I can put my finger here if you look at the screen it will speed it up or slow it down you can kind of see a visual representation there and if you look at this number in the circle you'll tell you what the BPM is and you can go up or down now this is sometimes really sensitive and as you'll see on these DJ decks it's not very long on the CDJ 3000s is much wider now you can change how sensitive this is if you come here you can click this button here wide and it'll go to six which is essentially if I go all the way to the top or all the way to the bottom it would be a 6% change right but if I hit this it'll go to 10 which should be 10% or 16 and I think it just goes to wide after that wide means it'll you could literally put it to zero right it just won't move or you can double it I think okay now I would typically have it on 16 this is just where I have it um but if you find that that's too sensitive for you you can obviously bump it down to six yeah I don't think I need to say much more on that it can be used in many creative ways but this is not the right part of the video for that the next most important part of the decks is the looping feature so as we know the music is set to a grid and music is often repetitive even if you were to go back to like Beatle songs there's usually four chords that just Loop and loop and loop so looping is a massive part of Music anyway but as a DJ one of the best things about looping is it's going to just buy you time so for example let's say we're at the end of the track here and we could see the track is slowly but surely coming to the end and we're like oh my gosh we're going to run out of time here we can put a loop on so you got these in and out here essentially all you do is you hit in where you want the loop to start and out where you want the loop to finish okay so I'll just show you and remember what I said about the Grid at the beginning a bar is indicated with these Red Dot so you know that's a bar so we really want to be looping a from a beginning to a bar to an end of a bar so we'll do this and that Loop is set it'll just Loop infinitely and it buys us a load of time now if we want to get out of the loop we can hit exit and we can also half the loop using these buttons here so it can hit back and it'll half it or I can extend the loop of a Wu and it'll double it so these kind of half or double it here okay um and uh that's just really interesting and again that can be used for Creative effect which will come on on to later on okay so that's looping uh the next thing I want to talk about is hot cues okay so this is really important as well so let's just exit that and I'm going to click on this waveform and come right to the beginning okay now as you know we've got the the cube button here which is kind of like a temporary Cube button but we can set permanent Cube buttons and they're called hot cues so you've got these effects here it'll be the same on all DJ decks you just got to select hot qes and it brings up these hot qes here now you can essentially set a hot que by going to any point and setting it in the same way word a CU button and you can remove them by hitting shift and this button here so say for example we say well we want a permanent queue point to be at the beginning of the track and when I say permanent I mean I can set this hot Q load a different track in and load that track in later on and that Q point will still be there which is why these are so relevant and you can say set eight of these okay so I might say I want the first one to be at the beginning oh by the way there's something really important I didn't mentioning about looping I knew I'd miss something with looping sorry to jump back but I'm not re-recording this um with the in and the out button you want to make sure there's something called quantize turn on turned on quantize essentially is the computer's way of saying he hit that in button C close to this beat and so we're going to assume he wants it to be exactly on the beat and it went same thing with the out it will snap it to the grid you now begin to see why the grid is really important as well right um you see like and and by the way you can turn quanti on and off you come to the screen it's this Cube button if I turn it off and now I set a in and an out point it will just set it exactly the millisecond I hit it which will be wrong here it's just slightly out out there so you never want to risk that you always pretty much always want to have quanti on and now it will snap it to the grid that's really really important which also brings me back to the hot cues right so let's just jump back again if I come here and I put this here with quantize on it'll assume that I want it right at the beginning of this so I can hit that and now it'll play from that point and it'll act exactly like the Q button but just permanently there so then maybe I said well I want to come to the breakdown of the song and I'm going to be covering that later on but say I came to here and I like right I want to set one at this point here I come and set one here you see this is really cool and later on in the Pro in the program in the program what is this BBC later on I'm going to be showing you exactly where to set your hot cues like a pro so stay tuned oh I'm such a dork right so there's that we've done this um okay so that's the main thing now there's uh do you know what I'll cover I'll cover two other things as well here beat jump beat jump is actually really important now the reason it's important I'm going to be coming on to this later on but all tracks are written with two certain time frames okay we obviously done beats and bars but all tracks are written in phrases phrases a section of the song um and a phrase would be like the intro or the outro or the drop or the build right all these sections of the song we know and I'm going to be covering this more later on but beat jump is really relevant because it will jump forward a certain number of Beats I wish it was bars because when it's there's four beats to a bar and you'll see this now because I've got beat jump loaded you'll see there's four here and that's just one bar so as soon as you start going to 32 Mass gets involved I know 32 beats is is eight bars you basically got to divide 32 by four see why it's annoying it'd be better for it to just be bars no one cares about Beats so I came right to the beginning of the track here and did this and I had this on 32 so this four and eight so will relate to these buttons here and this eight here will relate to these buttons and blah blah blah so this is 32 this will jump for eight bars notice how on that waveform there it jumped perfectly to that section and I can jump forward to the next section and all tracks are written in eight bars or 16 bars going to come back to that later on but this is great because when it comes to setting hot cues I could jump forward and set one there I could jump forward again you know to you know uh the next section here and I could set hot q and go back to hot qes and set another hot queue here which should be the beginning of the drop like this so it's really relevant beat jump and then you've got pad effects here not all DJ decks have this but these are kind of automatic effects you can just bring in so for example at top here we can see there's Echo Echo and spiral so oh here they are echo echo backspin vinyl break and this is just something that's kind of unique to record box so for example if you can see backspin I could play the song and then hit this and it'll create a backspin [Music] effect which might be quite useful if you wanted to do a kind of cheeky transition from one to the other so they're just kind of effects that are built in anyway that's more unique to these DJ decks and this so I'm going to stray away from from that for now so the next thing we have you will always have a universal knob up here which you can twist so you can go through and select different songs Okay um so if I came down to this track here I can then hit load and it'll load it onto that deck like this okay and same thing on that side so that's loading stuff in we've got the M the mic level okay so it's obvious just the level of the mic um we've got the mix here which is uh when you got your DJ when you got your headphones plugged in it's when you're listening to your headphones um it will be how much of the song that's playing out to the audience you can hear and how much of the song that you've queued in and I haven't come to the queue button yet but it's the song that you can hear when your volume Tempo is down and the mix from one to the other so I turn it all way up all I'd hear is what the audience are hearing if I turn it all the way to the other side to the que the Q is what I'd hear in my headphones and we haven't covered headphones and stuff yet so don't worry I'm coming on to that and then this is just the volume level of the headphones you got plugged in and this is a smart fader which is unique to these DJ decks I'm not going to go into too much detail about it but it essentially will sync two decks together I'm coming on to the sync button later so I'm going to leave that um so let's actually jump into the queue button right because there's three Cube buttons you're going to see um on these DJ dcks and you're probably wondering what the heck is the difference between all of them this Cube button I've already explained these CU buttons here once You' selected it you will now hear whatever's playing on that track out of your headphones remember second ago we just talked if I turn it all the way to Q I would hear just what's being queed now the beauty of this is I can turn the volume down and I can come and play around with this song over here and I will hear in my headphones what I'm doing but the audience won't so now this makes more sense right master and Q so I can turn that off if I want to this is really important and then we've got Q over here which is just the master so this is just Master Level how loud the volumes coming out of the speaker is right but if I hit that Q on it means in my headphones I will hear just everything that's going on okay or yeah that's right um okay then we've got this this section here so these are obviously volume right so it's like full volume no volume okay this is a cross Vader now what essentially this is you can move it from one side to the other and it will fade it's essentially doing this okay now there's a huge debate about this about whether you should mix using the cross Vader I'm telling you straight up don't do it okay and the reason is which we're going to come on to later in the video the reason is is because when you bring when you're doing a mix oh my God what am I tell you what concentrate Phil when you're doing a mix and you got one track here and you're bringing up this other track which we're going to cover I will typically get to about this volume and even I'm going to be honest with you 100% of the time when I'm mixing from one track to the other there is a bit of time where both are at full volume and I'm using these to bring volumes down which I'm going to come on to in a second um so there will be a point where I'm mixing two tracks and they're both at full volume essentially before I bring the other one down with a cross Vader it's impossible to do that because you're only ever going to be kind of doing this so cross Vader really in my experience is used for doing scratching worst scratch ever but essentially what it does is I can use it to cut in a bit of this like that okay but I'm not covering scratching in this video because I just no one scratches live I mean they they do but if you I don't know my my opinion on scratching is it's kind of cool if you know how to do it but you know I I've never listened to a song and got wow that scratch really enhanced that song Sorry I know I probably just insulted a load of scratch DJs out there but I never use cross data bottom line okay so uh so these are the volumes now you also going to see at the top trim right which is also volume and you're going to think to yourself well like you know and by the way there's this whole thing about like volume and gain it's basically how loud it is right that's all you really need to know volume and gain are basically the same thing I know that's going to cause a load of hate comments in the the thing but it doesn't matter this is the basics video right so trim is how loud it is now you might say well why is there trim here and volume here well because when you're dejing you really want to be able to utilize these like I might want to slam that into full volume right and I just need to know as a performance I can go right to the top right to the top there and bang we're in okay trim will set how loud the top volume will be bottom line here guys set it to the 12:00 leave it there honestly the only time I'd ever really move it from this position is if it was clipping if it was going into the red so when you play play on a song There's a little graph that jumps up and down here and all you need to make sure is the red isn't showing too much um so that's good if I turn the trim up we're now clipping right so if that was happening you just turn it down a little bit um that's basically it the other thing I will tell you just as a little anecdote is quite often you're in a club or you play like you know I've played a couple of places where they're like don't move the Master Level any louder than that cuz all DJs just as a DJ you know the louder it is the more people are screaming basically so all DJs secretly want it to be loud um and so they'll say right you can't move past that point but you could secretly move the trim knobs up a little bit um but you shouldn't be clipping and and clipping is like in a nutshell waveforms go like this you know like if you were to look at a waveform looks like this this if if you turn it up too loud the speakers are vibrating back and forth in the same way the waveforms are going up and down that's how it kind of pushes the sound out there there's only so loud a speaker can go like it can't go out you know like I can't turn it up so loud it's like wo w w it just can't so it gets to a point where it just can't physically move back and forth anymore and so it it literally Snips the waveform off right which is called clipping it's not necessarily the speaker that's doing that there's things built into the technology now that will digitally clip it but essentially when you snip the top of the waveforms off it Clips it and it introduces Distortion so and you might say I like Distortion well maybe you do but you shouldn't really be clipping so there's that keep it at the 12:00 position then the next most important thing is cut off this is a very well-known sound in the world of DJing cut off will essentially take away I'll tell you what I'll come on to cut off in a second because it'll make more sense I've explained these these three knobs here High mids and lows this is relatively obvious these are all volume everything here is volume There's No Effects going on here that's really important I didn't realize that when I started DJing you think stuff is going on here that's you know like additional effects it's not just volume so if I turn that down I'm turning down the highs just takes the highs out and you just think of the highs are high notes like and the thing that you're controlling with the high is the percussive sounds and white noise so and you know what sounds they are cuz if I cut the other two that M you hear them so you're controlling the highs with that the mids is vocals and instruments like saxophones posos obviously vocals right if you take that away it will reduce the volume of those areas but it's really just the mid frequencies the frequencies in the middle like you got to think the lows are down here the mids here the highs are up here you're just turning down the volume of the mid so you got the highs you got the lows youve got nothing in the mid middle and obviously that's just a drum Loop and then Lowe's is the kick and the base so it's the sub frequencies it's the low frequency so it's the sounds you'd hear if you were standing outside a club right um so you turn down the kick in the base now general rule here don't boost them some DJs will say you can boost them sometimes I've made a track and I'm playing it in the club and I'm like oh it's lacking high end and I'll just give it a bit of a boost but the reality is the track has been made exactly how the artist wanted it to be heard if they wanted the HIV to be louder they'd have made it louder it's not down to you to dictate which frequencies need to be boosted you're using these really to mix from one track to from another and make sure there's no clashing frequencies on either side I'm coming on to that in more detail later on okay and and then we come to the cut off the cut off is essentially doing this if I turn it to the left it turns down the highs and the mids leaving just the lows have a listen if I turn it up it does the opposite it turns down the lows and the mids and leaves just the high so listen which is the same as doing [Music] this now you will hear this kind of kind of sound with the cut off and this is called resonance and in all honesty you really don't need to know about it but if you kind of picture this literally sweeping down so youve got the highs bouncing here the mids here the lows here and it sweeps down well it doesn't just kind of turn down the volume it also creates a slight Peak at the point it's turning it down which creates this kind of kind of sound it's really complicated you really don't need to know about it at all now you can change the res an as well using this thing here called Pam if I turn this down it'll get rid of that kind of sound listen but if I wanted to I could turn it up by turning this up and you'd have more of that kind of sound I'm going to turn it really high so you can really hear it you hear that just set it at 12:00 guys honestly don't overthink that one um and so that's that and then finally we come over to this little section here which is the effects okay so essentially you've got the Master Level Q we've covered this this is which deck is being affected by the effects deck number one deck number two or one and two so you can switch them across you can select the effects and do it this way but honestly no one does it like that cuz it's clunky you just come over here click this button and then you go and select whatever you want it for example delay right um and then I'm I'm going to come back to this section in a second this turns the effect on and off and this is how much of the effect is being used if it's at minimum and I turn it on nothing changes uh let me just go to beat jump and go back to the beginning of the track okay so watch if I turn this on at minimum nothing happens but as I introduce this depth now we're going to hear it like this and the way you have to think about it is this will introduce the effect fact at this point there's equal amount of the effect being introduced to the sound that's playing if I go past this point there's now more effect than there is original sounds you if you go all the way up to 100% it's just 100% effect right but and I guess the best way to describe this as well if I went to reverb and I put it all the way to the top it just completely washed that sound it's just 100% rever that is the sound that you're adding in if that makes sense so now the beat is interesting this is uh like the the beat of the effect okay so say there's a delay and the beat was like this and I put a delay on and I went ah ah ah ah ah ah the delay is happening to the beat of the grid again the reason why it's important having a grid if I made that shorter to half it would happen doubl so go ah see how that works it's like it's how quickly the effect is happening now it doesn't really really work with rib cuz rib is just a wash out but if I went to delay you'll hear [Music] it see it's it's changing the space so I'm not going to explain that in any more detail hopefully that makes sense so there we go guys that is the basics of the DJ decks I'm pretty sure I covered everything let's move on to the next section there's one thing I wanted to mention really quickly there's something called sampler you can select it you can drag indiv visual samples onto these sounds so you know like James hype has got James hype you could load that in and go James hype but in all honesty I don't know anyone who uses the sampler I'm not going to spend much time on that at all I don't use it you could put like an air horn but just don't bother it's cringy and I'll tell you something else James hype doesn't use the sampler James hype has a whole deck where he has James hke bit just loaded in and he uses the cube button um don't use the sampler I'm just going to say that just going to say it in my opinion don't use it all right let's move on to the next section I'm sure there's going to be a load of DJs that disagree with me there but it's just my opinion okay so I want to do a quick section on hot cues versus the cube button versus memory points um so essentially these are all three different ways to set markers in the song okay um so we've obviously done the CU button I'm not going to repeat myself that's just a temporary set point that you can use when whenever you want hot qes are basically Cube points but they are you can set multiple of them throughout a track and they function in the exact same way but they stay there permanently then we've got memory points now this memory points are specific to record box and cdjs I actually find myself using these quite a lot so I will regularly kind of already know if I'm doing a DJ set at what point I'm bringing a track in so you can actually see here um on this wave for right I could come to a certain point and I could set I could drag this along and I can set a q point and you'll see this little like orange button appear here so I know that's exactly where the Q point is now I can come to hot qes and I can set multiple CU points like this right and you can see a b and I can see these different CU points and you could come in and you can set them using this as well but I always use the controller to do it and so we can see them then you've got these little red arrows which are memory points okay now the thing with memory points is there's no way to snap to it's not a playable thing a memory point a memory point is just for you to get to that part of the song quickly so as you can see I've set one right at the beginning of the track and if I want to get from where I am in the track to that point I can hit back and it'll take me back to the next memory point that I've set so if I hit it cuz there where I am here which is at B if I hit back it'll take me to this red one here Bang and I'm at the beginning of the song or maybe I've already set Mark here saying well this memory Point here is where I'm going to start mixing in the next song but I could jump to that point here boom like that we've jumped to the end I when I started DJing I was like what's the point though I could just I'll just use hot cubes for that which you absolutely can but I just find myself using them now they're just they're just good they they're good because if I want to jump to a hot Cube to like be here I got to hit this which I'll actually play it for a Split Second which is like I don't like that I want it to be clean I want to jump to that point so I can just go boom like this or boom like this um so I typically use memory points for the moment I know I'm going to bring it in and the moment I'm mixing out the next song which is typically the intro and the beginning of the outro which I don't really need them for at this point but it's just a little safety thing you know just here's a little Point View okay really with DJing you want to just make it easy for yourself performing live is kind of stressful right because it's on you you're standing there you got to know it and yeah okay I can look at this waveform here and I can eyeball different parts of the song and know roughly and I can hear phrases and stuff but how nice is it I just set myself a little point I'm like oh that's the exact point that I need to bring in so say there's someone in the booth speaking to me or whatever something else is going on and I look down and I've had a lapse in com concentration I can just go oh it's coming up now you know and the cool thing is like you can see these points if I hit play here I can see that point coming along so it's like I know the exact moment so there we go that's Q button hot qes and memory points you can use hot qes for everything I did for the first couple of years I've just started using memory points now because I just find them cleaner and nice and I actually don't use many hot cues the reason I don't use hot cues on the cdjs is because on these decks and I think there is a way to change this now but I haven't figured it out yet but on these decks I can hit this and and it'll play I hit my finger off and it's called trigger mode like this on the cdjs doesn't work like that once you hit the hot que it just plays it jumps to that point and plays which I always found kind of irritating and I know you can change it now but I haven't figured it out yet so I just found myself using it less so on the cdjs I find myself using memory points and the Q button right and I think most DJs who DJ on the cdjs do that as well the that's why these DJ decks are actually in many ways easier to use so so there's that let's move on to the next section so sorry quick note I just realized I got some information wrong there you know when I said you hit it and it plays and snaps back that's actually called gate mode and then the CDJ 3000 where you hit it and it plays that's called trigger mode not that it matters at all I just know there's going to be some people you know he got that wrong well I didn't get it wrong okay okay guys so it's got to the point in the video I want to teach you the most important thing which is song structure and understanding it now I'm going to try really hard not to go down a rabbit hole so I'm going to stick this stick to this being just house music um because house music is quite easy to kind of explain here and it can begin to sound some of these rules can potentially change with other music again I'm already over complicating it 99% of the time and stuff I'm about to teach is going to apply so a beat is usually the kick drum if you think of the kick that's a beat obviously um and so you get four beats in a bar okay and you can see see it you know 1 2 3 4 and the way you would count as a DJ is you go 1 2 3 4 new bar 2 2 3 4 new bar 3 2 3 4 so this is important because some of the stuff I'm teaching you now is going to I think it'll actually blow your mind okay then we go on to the next bit which is phrases a phrase is usually something changes in dance music every 8 or 16 bars if you don't believe me pause this video go to one of your favorite dance tracks press play and count eight or 16 bars and notice how something changes a new instrument will be brought in maybe the drums will be taken away maybe the build will start maybe the drop Will land and just keep going eight bars 1 2 3 4 2 23 4 and just sit there and it will blow your mind okay and it's it's really cool and the whole reason behind this is because the DJs the producers who are making this music need to make the music DJ friendly so everything is done to a very strict kind of set of rules really and sometimes it won't be 16 it'll be 32 but it'll always be to that structure 8 16 32 um so that's really cool that's probably blown your mind if you didn't know that you should go and test it straight away now with dance music is the structure is always this introd drums breakdown build drop second breakdown build drop outro just to kind of dive into this slightly intro is just the intro drms the breakdown is usually where everything kind of breaks down it kind of goes quiet maybe the singing comes in at this point it's the kind like quiet bit then the build is usually when everything gets a bit repetitive I'm like build repetitive rise the noises you know what this is I'm I'm preaching to the freaking choir here and then the drop the drop is the bit where the drums the base line all that stuff comes in is the bit where everyone jumps up and down obviously I don't want to insult your intelligence then we go into the second breakdown which similar to the first breakdown the second build which is similar to the first build the drop which is often very similar and then the outro drums which is similar to the intro drums these are the different phrases of a dance song now what I've got here is song A and song b and I'm just going to show you the most common places that you would mix one track to the next now each of these sections is typically 16 bars okay and eight is usually halfway through but something will always change halfway through but it's typically 16 bars so each of these lines from this point on represents 16 bars in a track now the most common place to do a mix is the outro drums and the intro drums and if you line these up at exactly the same point so you hit play obviously the track has to be going at the same speed and if it is if you line the 16 bars of the outro drum of track a the track that's playing and the 16 bars of the outro Drums of the intro Drums of track B the two will blend perfectly from one through to the next and and it's it's made this way you'll notice now when you listen to outro drums instruments start to be taken away you know the Baseline will go the percussion will be taken away same thing with intro it's the opposite instruments start to get added and I'll show you this in a second but if you just hit play at the outro and intro at exactly the same time you don't actually have to do anything and the two tracks will kind of BL blend themselves from one to the next but I'm going to come on to that in a bit so that's intro then the second most Comm so that's the most common place to mix the second most common place to mix is the drop so what you can do is as I said the second Bild drop outro is very similar to the first half so a lot of DJs will just play the first Big B breakdown build drop and go on to another song especially with like big EDM festival type tracks um so what you can do is you can put the intro of track B at bring in at the exact moment the drop of track a starts and then what happens is towards the end of the drop you do your blend and you remove the stuff and then this instead of it going into the second breakdown of track a it goes into the first breakdown of track B and therefore you skip the whole second half of the song so that's the second most popular place to do a transition and then the third most common place is what I would call a drop swap so what you would do is you set your Q point at the beginning of the build of track B and as track a hits its build you bring in the build of track B and you do your blend there so when people are all expecting one drop that they already know you're busy blending from one track to another track and at the last moment you swap out the drops so people suddenly start dancing to a different drop even though they're expecting a different one so that's the the third most common place and you've also done a transition right and that's pretty much it honestly I don't want to over complicate it any more than this um but it it's just as simple as that 16 bars something new happens in the track all dance music follows the same rules and we can use this as DJs to perfectly blend different parts of the track and actually one last thing I want to show you let's go back to beat jump now and it'll make a lot more sense so let's say I came right to the beginning of this track here now you can eyeball as a DJ these different sections so I look at this as a DJ and I can go well this is the intro here this is probably the bill cuz I can see this thick area here is where the track gets louder so I know that this first thick part here is going to be the drop so then I can kind of see well this is probably the breakdown maybe around here is the the breakdown of the build then this will be the second breakdown the second build the second drop and then the outro drums will be around here now check it out I'm going to come to beat jum 32 bars which is as 32 beat which is eight bars and watch as I hit this one button here it's going to jump to very relevant points in the track so I hit it once halfway through the um the intro hit it again takes me perfectly to the breakdown or build hit it again takes me to the beginning of the drop hit it again takes me halfway through the drop end of the drop here hit it again takes me to the second build hit it again and it takes me to the see it's landing at exactly these points so you can cut to see how relevant this is and how we're going to use beat jump in a moment to help us set really relevant hot cues okay let me show you how to set your hot qes like a pro okay so just so you know as I've already mentioned I typically don't use hot cues um I actually use memory points and the me two memory points where I bring the track in and where I'm going to start fading out where I'm going to bring the next track in over it so it's usually the intro and the outro and I just have them there but for the longest time I did use hot qes and I actually recommend you do especially as a beginner now this is the way most beginners go wrong with hot Q's they just set them randomly like I'll set one there and I'll set one there and you know before you know it they've got all different tracks there's no Rhyme or Reason to any of them and it doesn't really help them at all so here's the big secret you set the CU points at exactly the same point of every single track so whenever you load in a track you will know instantly which button will get you to what point of the song which is going to be really useful for you for knowing what will line up with what on different tracks this is really important so first things first the first this is what I would recommend but obviously you can set your own cues random points and but as long as they're all the same it should be the same kind of thing but I would recommend this so you've got eight these are the ones I'd recommend the first would be on the first beat of the track the next will be eight bars into the intro this is where beat Jump's going to come in handy go to beat jump make sure it says 32 in this corner here and we're going to jump forward eight bars and I'm going to go back to Hotes and set the second one there now I'm going to do the outro okay so I'm going to go to beat jump and I'm going to jump all the way along to the second drop and then we've got the outro drums here so I'm kind of eyeballing it but you know if you follow along with the song structure the build the drop and you just follow along with the whole eight bar sequence we know that this is the beginning of the outro so you can come back to Hotes beginning of outro and then you've guessed eight bars into the outro now this is really really really important because we know that if I hit that intro button there at the exact same time as hitting this button the beginning of the outro on another song at exactly the same point and press play as long as they were lined up they were just Lin up perfectly so you might say well why have we set when eight bars in here and eight bars in here well it's just a fail safe what if you're in the club and you get distracted and you've missed it well don't worry we now know that this button here is going to be eight bars until we get to the breakdown and this second button here will be eight bars to the end of the song so it would be the same thing I know I could hit this button here at the same time as this button here or as long as this button aligned with this button here and I'd have exactly the same overlap on both hopefully this makes sense now you might be wondering what we're going to do with these two well this is really just the build and drop okay so this will be the first build and drop and this will be the second build and drop so the best thing to do is go and set the drop first so we're going to go back to beat jump and we're going to go all the way to the beginning of the track here and I know from eyeballing it like I said there's the build there's the drop come back to hot q and set the drop and I know if I hit this now I'll play the drop there and now I can go eight bars back from that to set the build beat jump eight bars back back to hot qes set the build so now we've got intro halfway through the intro build drop and then we're going to do second build and drop so I'm going to go back to beat jump we're going to go all the way forward until we get to the drop which is this point here hot Q There beat jump back eight bars hot Q there and so that will be the same on every single track so I now can look at the screen as a visual representation to see well there's the intro there's the build there's the drop there's the second build and drop and there's the outro drums so hopefully you begin to see how cool this is so we now got these marked on every single track we now know what well if I was to hit the intro of this track at the exact point of the outro of this track they'd line up perfectly and you can literally see them coming along so say this is the beginning of the outro this button here which is G if also to come back a little bit here you can see G coming along so at that exact moment I could hit the intro of another track and it' be 16 bars let's say we missed it well don't worry we can just go to H and as H is coming along here just as it passes H I'm going to hit the second marker here so I know now only got eight bars to do a mix rather than 16 bars let's say I wanted to do a drop swap well we know that c here is the beginning of the build so as that comes along if want to come to the second track and hit the beginning of the build here it will line up perfectly and I can do my blend and I can do a drop swap see how genius that is it's so cool and if you were to structure it like this it would massively help you out hopefully that all makes sense and let's move on to the next part of the video okay guys now we're going to cover beat matching which is the most fundamental type of transition from one track to another you might find it weird that we're this far into the video and I haven't actually taught you a transition yet but I've taught you in a really specific way so you get a really really solid understanding of Music how it works when you would do these Transitions and now we're going to move on to actually doing beat matching actually doing a transition so I have provided you with two tracks below this video there's a link to a Dropbox folder with two beat tracks in it okay now this is relevant because what we're going to be doing now is beat matching now we could beat match with real songs but the problem with real songs is there's lots going on you don't just have the kick drum you have percussive sounds you have vocals you have chords you've got so many more things going on that actually if I want to teach you how to just beat match easily I want to just provide you with a beat track so below are two tracks that you can download okay uh just beat track 128 BPM and just sounds like this it's literally just a beat so we are going to get you beat matching in the next two minutes okay so what you're going to do is you're going to create a playlist drag these beats in now I've got two tracks beat track 128 and then this mysterious other track called beat track 2 which is a different speed to beat track one but the funny thing is the second you drop it into record box you just analyzes it and it tells you what the speed is anyway which tells you how easy all this stuff really is after a while so what we're going to do we're going to drop beat track into track one just drag and drop it like this get the other one and drag and drop it into the other one over here now we'll see that my cross my Tempo sliders here are off so what I'm going to do now is just snap that back to the middle and you'll feel it kind of clunk into the middle like this and now they're both 128 and so what we're going to do both volume faders all the way up to full we're going to uh come to uh one of the tracks go to the beginning and set a q point now if we hit this we can tap along so what we're going to do is on track a we're going to hit play and we're going to tap along it's the first thing I'm going to get you to [Music] do okay that's it now that's obviously incredibly easy so the next I'm going to get you to do is I'm going to get you to tap along and when you feel like you're tapping along perfectly we're going to hold down the cube button and hit play so we hold it down and hit play with our thumbs now there's another thing I'm going to get you to do we want to make sure we do this on a bar okay we already know where that is it's where that red line Falls so hit play here tap along and when you see that bar come along at the exact moment hit q and hit [Music] play great the two beats were slightly out I hope that happens for you too in fact I kind of slightly did that purposely because I want to show you how to we're going to how we're going to use that nudge feature you remember remember I told you at the beginning 17 hours ago about how you could nudge it forward and back we're going to do it now if you're anything like me you probably get a bit confused as to which way is which right so just kind of keep your eye on the screen and nudge it and if it's going further away go the opposite way just touching the outside of the of the deck so I'm just going to hit play at the same time and ludge one them in [Music] boom you just did your first beat match and it really is as simple as that you tap along with the que hold it down hit play and Bam you've done it that's actually kind of it that's kind of it really I mean honestly if you just rewatch this little section and go and do it again you're going to get it um now of course let's talk briefly about um mixing two tracks at a different speed so drag beat track two into the lane and you'll see it come in at 131 so what do we do we could either bring this TR track up to 131 or we move that down to 128 so the same speed it literally is as simple as this we just go all the way down to 128 like this uh let's get it perfect like that and now we'll do the same thing so we can um you know bring the volume down from all the way to the beginning of the track if we want like this hit a q button hit play and we'll do the same [Music] thing and there you go okay so that's it now if you wanted to start practicing like bringing in at a specific point you could potentially if you wanted to come right to the beginning of the track here get beat jump go forward eight bars come here like this set a hot queue like oh sorry set a hot queue like this and now we're going to say we are going to bring it in at that exact hot Q now you already know about phrases and stuff like this so you can now go and apply this to real life but you know if you want to put that additional pressure on yourself you could just say well we're going to bring in uh this track at the um we're going to bring in the beginning of this track here c q point at the exact moment a part classes cuz this is what you're going to be doing when you're DJing with actual songs there we go okay so there you go in about 30 seconds flat I taught you how to do your first beat match how cool is that um so what we're going to do now is bring in some headphones okay so we're now going to introduce headphones obviously we're aware as DJs that we're going to be playing one song out to the audience and we're going to be doing stuff and queuing up and listening to other songs privately to ourselves as we know we'll do that by turning the volume down and hitting the cube button here just going to do a quick uh like subote here on what I would actually take to the club with me I think you'd find this interesting so I take this little pouch here um this is these are my headphones I use they sha SE oh God here we go se846 I'm going to spare you the time of going and searching this these These are ,000 headphones which is Extreme I'm just going to explain this to you why I use these in a second um but I'll just show you what I take to the club with me I always take two USBS um with exactly the same thing loaded on both and one thing you'll find interesting is I always go to the club with somebody don't want to look like a loner you know you want to walk in with somebody you want to look cool I will always give the second USB to somebody the minute I see them that day I'll go just put that in your pocket right because there's no point in taking you two USBS and then you go and lose this you know and then you got no music at all so I'll put one of these in my pocket and I'll put the other one in my friend's pocket obviously he'll put it in his pocket I won't put it in his pocket and uh and therefore I'm just covered now I've spoken to a lot of DJs who say they actually do three USBS and I don't um so that's that um I also Take Along these little things here these are ACS in ear ear plugs okay so these have been molded to my ear I actually went along to to have this mold put in my ear and the woman looked in my ear and she went uh yeah we won't be doing that today and I was like why and she said because your ears she said there's a scale of like how blocked your ears are she said your ears are 100% blocked she was like I can't even see your eardrum I was practically deaf um so I had to go and put you don't need to know I have my ears syringed then I went back had this stuff done another little funny thing for you when they're doing it they basically put a bit of um like foam really far down your ear with like a string it's like a mini tampon for your ear they put it all the way down and then they squirt this stuff into your ear and it molds to your ear right I don't know why I'm telling you this but it's just funny and the woman was like oh uh you'll cough when I put this down she said when it touches up against your eardrum you just cough I was like what you want I'm not going to cough she stuck it down and all of a second you start all of a sudden you start coughing it's really weird anyway so you do that then you get these things arrive in the post a couple of weeks later and what's great about these is they don't muffle the sound it's it's it's literally like you buy these and it brings them down 12 DB and it's great I'm going to tell you something really sad now when I go and see other DJs play I'll often wear these because I'm a DJ and I'm so precious about my hearing um I hate my ears ringing remember when you were like you used to go Club and you'd go out and you come home your ears you'd be lying in bed with your ears ringing I hate that now so if I go and see like dead mouse or any DJ really I just last time I wore these is when I went to see dead mouse and literally the windows were vibrating and I knew I was there enjoying the music just as much as everybody else I left and I just took these out and I was like no ringing in my ears it was freaking awesome and also if you're going to be playing in clubs a lot you know people go out clubbing once once every two weeks you could be in a club every night of the week if you were successful uccessful you've got to protect your hearing so I've banged on about that long enough now um now let me tell you about these headphones as well these are pretty cool right they've got these little squidgy ends so you squidge them down just like you would if you were to use those regular you know the cheap crappy um headphones and then you stick them in your ear and then it expands in your ear okay um and what's good about this is It's essentially wearing earplugs but the music is delivered straight to your eardrum which is really good now you might say do we have to spend all that money no you don't sure even have other headphones that are cheaper than this the reason I got them is because I travel quite a lot and I actually use these to produce music so you have to be able to have good headphones that have really good frequency response when you're producing music because you want to hear the full sound you know like if I played a track for my laptop now you're not hearing all the frequency right I'm actually going deaf cuz it's filling up in my ear um but yeah these are really high quality headphones so I don't just use them to DJ I use them to produce music and I wanted incredibly high quality headphones which is exactly what these are so that's why I've got expensive ones just to explain that to you okay so plug these in now the beauty of this is I can turn the volume all the way down put Q on and you can't hear it but I can hear it in my ear at this point okay so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to have the volume all the way down okay on one we're going to press play on one track doesn't matter which one you do have the volume on down on the one we're going to bring in we're going to beat match we're going to line up the beats and then when we've got them good we're just going to slowly bring this up and take this one away that's the next exercise so uh I in fact I don't even need to show you because you just be watching me doing what exactly what I told you to do so go ahead and do that now the next thing we're going to do oh no I'll do it for you quickly Come On Let's Do It Let's Get Serious here F so this track's playing turn q off before you bring it up so you can hear what everyone else is hearing [Music] and if you got it right no one would know that you just swap from one track to another which is the basics of DJing really so we've done that um and uh I think that's pretty much it honestly it doesn't really get much more complicated than that well it does it does CU I'm going to show you frequencies and blending from one track to another um in fact I could show you that with these tracks and then we'll move on to real life so here's what you need to do all you need to remember and this is what I do 90 9% of the time when I'm beat matching is you don't want to have baselines and kick drums sitting on top of each other okay so this is a little introduction to these frequencies here okay so we know that the lows will control the Baseline in the kick drum so the track that I'm bringing in I'll just cut the base and the lows so as we bring this in what we're actually hearing from this track is the top end of the kick and percussive sounds and I'll I'll put it in my headphones queue it in beat match it and begin to bring it up and as I begin to bring this track up the percussive sounds of this track might St start to clash with this track over here so as I'm bringing it up as I get to about 80 90% I then start removing frequencies from this track because I don't want these clashing high hats so I might begin to bring this up and just begin to take away some of the highs and mids here and if you wanted a kind of hard and fast roll I'd say bring it to 80% then cut the highs to about the 11:00 position or maybe even 10:00 position cut the mids to about the 11:00 position and bring it all the way up so now we'll hear primarily the percussive sounds from this track here and we've cut them so they're not clashing too much with this track on phrase right so every eight bars you know halfway through the intro or you know at a phrase point you know which is the hot qes we just sent a sec set a second ago I'll just swap the baselines that's what I do because often you'll have a baseline playing here and a baseline playing here and you can't have them playing at the same time so I just swap them so you know we were doing Hotes a second ago we said this is the intro and this is halfway through the intro and this is the outro and this is halfway through the outro halfway through I swap and I'm going to give you a real life demonstration of this and maybe this is the wrong point in the video to explain it but I feel like it's just a good process for you to follow so halfway through swap okay and then I continue sorry I swapped them the wrong way then swap so I turn one off and one on now this track is now playing with all full volumes and what I do now is I begin to take these away bit by bit while bringing the volume down that's how I do it honestly I'm pretty much going to say 100% of the time now we can practice this I'm just going to do this for Vi now from zero beat match it turn it on bring it up we're just doing it with a beat and then obviously afterwards I'll do it with actual songs so let's go ahead and do this you see what I did there now obviously that was probably totally underwhelming for you probably stupid for me to explain that to you but I wanted you to see what I will be doing on an actual track but just with a kick drum playing in the background right now we've done that let's go ahead and load in real tracks and we're going to do exactly this so let me go ahead and do that okay so we've loaded in two real tracks they're both tracks I've created myself one is called R you can go and check it out on Spotify and the other one is called stay at this current moment of filming this video it is not not been released yet um so if we were to put these both back to their default positions in terms of tempo one's 125 one's 128 so let's bring ra up to 128 now if you were playing live you would bring it up gradually up to 128 you wouldn't just move it quickly you've got to bear in mind right unless you're a superstar DJ and everyone's come to stare at you your job as a DJ is for people to not stare at you you don't want to do something like whoops speed the song up really quickly cuz the last thing you want as a DJ is people going what the hell is the DJ doing like that's the last thing you you don't want people looking at you you want to be invisible really unless you're like me and you're insecure and you want to stand on the stage you want to have 20,000 people staring at you to try and you know make you feel good about yourself anyway let's not talk about my psychology let's do this so we're going to go to we're going to move this up to 128 to start now as you can see this is quite fiddly and H honestly if you get to 28.1 you're good you know don't worry about it don't stress out being there I've been there in the club before it's like you're trying to get it perfect don't worry about that remember you can always nudge it back on if it starts to drift out but it won't at 0.1 so what I'm going to do is I'm going to come back a little bit on this track just to there and set a q point so when I hit play I will see it coming past this G here oh hold on we got to get the G which is here so let me redo that I'm going to come back and I'm just going to set a q Point here so this is going to play one bar and then it's going to go into the outro or the beginning of the outro of RA as soon as G passes this is the point where I'm going to be queuing in and beat matching the first beat of stay over here okay and then I'm going to go ahead and do everything I just told you so I'm going to cut the base from stay halfway through I'm going to swap it so eight bars in so so you can see here at H and B so h on this track B on this track I'm going to swap them um and I'm just going to do everything I just said you know like as I bring it up I'm going to begin to take away the highs and mids swap the base uh you know as soon as I bring it up to 80% here begin to take away these frequencies here um swap the base continue to take these away and take it away and you're going to see this is going to sound pretty good I just know it is okay so let's go and have uh let's go and have a [Music] go and there you go you just follow along you just do exactly that if you just follow that system I just did then you know like what I want to say to you is use your ears you know like make sure you're clearing space but honestly I would just follow that formula you know it works every single time um I could drag in a completely different track now and it would probably work again so let me go and do that okay I just brought another track I made this is a track called vibrate I made it with an awesome DJ called Ash and this will hopefully be out soon as well so what I'm going to do is come to the end of this track and I can see this is just before the outro G and H and I'm going to do exactly the same thing so I'm going to have this one playing I'm going to cut the base over here um I'm going to get this at the very first beat over here and I'll do exactly the same thing again so as we come up to G and this passes I'm going to do the whole beat match and they're both 128 so this should work [Music] perfectly [Music] straight into the breakdown it's freaking awesome by the way one last thing I want to show you remember before I said you could pretty much just hit play and it would sound good because one track is bringing in instruments and one track's taking it away since this is going to be like a 7 hour video anyway I'll just show you this okay so I'll do the exact same thing then but I will do nothing I'll just beat match it and bring the volume up in fact you know what I won't even even do that I'll leave them full volume and we'll just listen and notice how it sounds pretty good and I'm doing nothing at all and this is the beauty of phrase matching so uh let's do [Music] this [Music] see how freaking cool that is that's just beat matching and phrase matching and I can tell you now if I did that exact transition in a club no one would would think twice about it so that's beat matching for you okay I want to touch briefly on just developing the skill of beat matching by ear it's not really that important and because you're going to be using visual representations like the SC the grid all the time but it might be a useful skill for you to just practice so what you're going to do is go and draag drag the 128 BPM track into both set the Q point on one press play on the other but what we're going to do is just not look at the screen try and get it on point and then we're going to nudge it until we can sound it sounds like there's two kick drums are sitting right on top of each other because we're playing with Ki drums sometimes when you start queuing it in it might sound a bit confusing so sometimes it's nice to tap just to the right hand side and then just hit play because if you because we're tapping along a kick drum while listening to a kick drum you might actually start to confuse your brain as to which Kick Drum you're listening to so you might be worth just tapping the side I should probably have said that earlier on in the beat hack in section but this is another tip so here we [Music] go yeah it's kind of weird listening to that isn't it but you just want to get to a point where it just sounds like they're sitting on top of each other now if you wanted to make it slightly more difficult for yourself you can nudge one out so it's like 28 five or something like that and now we're going to do the same thing so let's just make sure this Q point is right if you want to jump back to the Q point you can hit play and hit q and it'll jump back to the original Q Point okay so now we're going to do the same thing but they're going to be slightly out so now you just got to constantly play with it and try and hear those two kick drums sitting on top of each other let's have a quick [Music] go and you get the idea you just try and keep them on top of each other and nudge it along along a little bit just in case it's quite good because there might be ttimes where you're playing in the club and they're slightly off and if you can use your ears to line them without just looking at the beak grid sometimes that's pretty good so that's a little thing that you can try there now once you've done that you can of course go and practice this with two real tracks so let me just go and get two real tracks loaded in okay so in this next section we're going to head into probably the most advanced part of this training which is beat matching by ear with real tracks now this is difficult because when we just beat matched the Beats by ear we didn't know if we're doing it on bars phrases anything like that now we got to be able to hear for Beats bars and phrases now just to kind of give you an example It's relatively easy to pick out a phrase when we're talking about going from the bill to the drop you know like the the drop is the moment all the drums come in we all know the drop cuz it's the bit everyone jumps at in the festival so for example that moment was the beginning of a phrase like it comes in and it hits you or for example the end of an intro you know the end of the intro drums where the drums get stripped away and it goes into the breakdown it's relatively easy to just hear what this [Music] is It's that moment there usually there's like this little drum fill or something that happens just so so you might even just want to go and listen to these different phrases to be able to hear it where it becomes more difficult is halfway through the intro drum so for example if I went to the beginning of this track here uh and I put this point here and I just jumped beat jumped forward to eight bars into the intro right so what we're going to do is we're going to come back and we're just going to listen and see if anything changes on you'll see it across the screen here so I'll leave this on the screen so you can see it just listen to see if anything changes in the track at this [Music] point well it does is stuff changing right before the drop there was a little bit of a preo like the and then when it hit the phrase more percussive sounds like came in and it went like this have another listen so you begin to get quite good at this and so like let me even show you the end so where it goes into the outro drums here so you can see I've hit G and H of these two points you'll see that the drums literally get stripped back here but this isn't about visual this is about listening so have a listen and see if you can pinpoint the moment the outro drums come [Music] in do you hear it now this is I I feel like an idiot standing here going there it was there it was so little things you can look for you'll hear white noise like build to one of these moments sometimes drums will be stripped away at the lot just before it and then the kick drum will come back in so have a listen to that white noise and the kick drum being taken away and being brought back in and we're back into it again okay it's little moments like that you want to hear for now this is Advanced and I would suggest you go and get a load of your favorite songs set eight bar intervals and go and watch and listen and see if you hear something change at all these different intervals this is how you're going to get good at this so let's beat match this by ear so I'm going to go to the beginning of this track here so sounds like this and I'm going to literally close the laptop and press play and at the exact moment I hear that phrase happen press play on this track and correct it I'm doing it with the volumes all the way up it won't be perfect don't worry let's have a listen [Music] okay that might not be perfect don't worry we did it we brought it in at the right moment we corrected it now I'm just going to make a quick Point here um that that mistake and that correction would have been done with the volume down in my ears right I don't even think it's a mistake it's just like no one's perfect right so that would be done in my ears secondly if I was playing live or if I was playing you know doing a DJ set for YouTube I'd be looking at the screen I'd be looking at my DJ decks so I would wouldn't even have to use my ears to make that correction there I just i' know I'd be like oh there we go I just correct it there so that's straight up what would have happened there but to be honest with you if you rewound the video and listen to that little mistake I just made I couldn't care less whether they all who heard that fraction of a mistake before I corrected it who cares they're all drunk they're all drunk no one has a clue sometimes weirdly this is a strange thing to say as a DJ she quite like it when I hear the DJ make a mistakes I'm like oh cool he's actually DJ you know like so so there we go but anyway so you can just go ahead and practice this set intervals at eight every eight bars go and watch go and listen close it see if you can recognize it happening without even looking and then move on to actually practicing this is really I'm not going any more advanced than that by the way that's something that honestly will take years to really perfect but you can speed it up by doing what I told you to do here nice okay now I've taught you how to do it properly and how to get good at it let's talk about something that all DJs seem to love bitching about which is the sync button I'll just explain to you what the sync button does it essentially does a lot of the stuff I just taught you automatically so for example I got a track in here that's 125 BPM and a track that's 128 what I can do is if this track here the one on the left is playing that's essentially the master that's the one that's playing at the moment it's the master track that if I came to the other track and hit beat sync it would do two things it will automatically move this from 128 to 125 to match the BPM with this track the master track this is the slave track this is the master it will sink it to that but secondly when I hit play it will kind of automatically snap it to the grid for me which basically makes beat matching very easy so let's just go a little bit before this outro here and I'll play it I'm going to hit sync and then just hit play and the two tracks are completely different [Music] okay and that's done that's that's it and and and loads of DJs like to about this and say oh you shouldn't use the SN button and stuff like that well my opinion on it is it's so freaking easy to not use it anyway you might as well why would you be reliant on it you know just don't that's my opinion on it but if you want to use it use it look we're all using the technology this is snapped to a grid for us we are looking at waveforms we have perfect little Tempo sliders here to get it to the exact BPM I'm just as reliant on this technology as someone using Tech sync if I'm honest I'm aware of that so I'm got no like I'm not a vinyl DJ who does it all by ear and I'm mixing two tracks that were made by people playing instruments and it's really hard like and I've got no interest in being that like all props to you if you are that but that's not me I play house music that's made on a computer everything's synced everything's perfect BPM so sync button is only a couple of notches off what I'm doing anyway using the technology to help me so that's my little take on the sync button use it if you want but honestly it's easy you like so what you got to set the tempo slider by yourself and and nudge the wheel a little bit if you get it off that's it do it you know um now if you want to get rid of the sync button you've got to hit it again to deactivate it but it'll still say 125 so then you got to kind of like bump around the BPM a little bit until you get back to this point here now that's the sync button um but what I will tell you is it can be used creatively okay so let's say we've got one track that's 125 and One Track the 128 the cool thing about using beatsync is once it's done if I move the tempo slider over here it will move both Tempo sliders and it will lock both tracks that's very cool because it's literally impossible to do that you can't balance the tempo sliders perfectly look how sensitive it is you move it a little bit and it's like oh 24.4 7 try getting those two EX exactly like that forget it it's it's impossible so I'm going to do this example now with a track from 128 125 to 128 but you could do this with a track that goes from 125 up to 140 if you wanted to what I'm going to do is you sync and then essentially just alter the both track speed at the same time you know if you were clever with it you could be doing a fade at the same time I mean I'm not going to go into that in too much detail but I'm just going to show you how this could potten VI so let's go back a little bit here I'm going to press play hit sync um bring in the track and then bring the speed of both tracks up at the same time I'm I'm not even going to do the transition I'm not going to over complicate this demonstration oh one last thing I wanted to mention as well when you're bringing the speed of the track up you've got to use the tempo slider from the master track that's one last thing to say so let's do it hit play Beat sync hit play and then and then uh you know yeah [Music] he [Music] and there you go I moved them both while they were synced up from 125 up to 128 and it's literally it's impossible to do that without the sync button so uh that's pretty awesome there's one other thing which I want to mention cuz I quite like kind of going off piece when I'm teaching you guys something that's really clever about the tempo slide that you might not realize is it's locked to a key remember I was talking about the at the beginning of the video about all songs being in a certain key well typically if you had a vinyl and you slowed it down it would slow down and it would kind of go all like slow um and but and you speed it up we do the opposite now you can actually do this you can uh let's take this track here okay so let's just snap it out of Beats Sync here okay and turn that off I'm going to just kind of make sure it SN back now watch if I speed it up and slow it down the key shouldn't change and let's put it to an extreme so we can really hear it I'm going to put it to wide so it's really going to change but it will stay in the same key the music sounds the same oh God I changed the wrong one sorry I'm wasting everyone's time here put it on this one [Music] set now I can turn this tuning off so if I go to here Master Tempo I can turn it off and now when I speed it up and slow it down it will pitch up and down which sounds [Music] terrible so I just wanted to point this out you want to have Master Tempo on and how clever is it how clever is it that we' got technology that we can speed a track up and down and it keeps it an ex exactly the same te um key it's just really clever this because you got to bear in mind if we were going from 125 to 128 and we didn't have that all of a sudden this the tracks would be clashing and the whole mix and key thing wouldn't work now something to bear in mind as well which I'm not going to cover in this video but this can be used to creative effect so for example let's say I did have an Acappella so I got this vocal here now one way are you could use this and I'm not going to go I'm not going to give you the full example of this cuz it'll take time for me to get another track that's the same BPM and key and stuff like that but something that James hpe does quite a lot which again I might show you this at the end of the video is he Loop a vocal turn master Tempo off and then pitch it up so the vocal is going because remember when there's ever a riser in a song it's like a snare Rises everything's building and you can use this with a vocal so let's say we just have this vocal I'm just going to Loop a little part of it I'm going to half it so it's really quick turn tempo um the um Master Tempo off and I'll pitch it [Music] up see how cool that is and you could kind of Imagine That being on another track now remember as you speed it up it will go out of SN but if you make it really tight it just becomes like a sound like a so it doesn't need to be in sync with the other track anyway it's just a little sub thing that I wanted to mention in there um so yeah so that's that okay so I want to take a little bit of time now talking about emergency Transitions and it's not really the right term to call them emergency transitions because you could use these if you were transitioning between different genre of music or different massive different BPM ranges and really these transitions I'm about to show you now are very very simple and if you like I said if you're doing like wedding DJing you're not really going to be able to beat match between tracks because it's really difficult to beat match between a Michael Jackson track and a Justin timlake track it's it's just like the problem is pop songs don't have intros and outros so they come straight in with vocals and they often end with vocals you can't blend vocals on top of vocals it' be a nightmare um so these kind of transitions now kind of become your bread and butter when it comes to just doing you know like open format and when I mean open format I mean think of weddings like we're going from the Frozen tra soundtrack to Stevie Wonder now we're going to play some 50 Cent and it's like H there's no real smooth way to transition between these tracks there's just not I'm just being real with you there's just not so here's a couple for you and they're dead simple these okay so first one down first one is couple of concepts for you okay you want to bring in a track at the most memorable moment the most recognizable moment okay that's really important so for example I've got a track here and I could play two seconds of it and everyone on the planet knows what track it is everyone knows it right now I could go back to the beginning of this song to the beginning drum no one knows it I could go even further into the track and play this but here no one knows it so I'm going to in these moments find that exact point which is as I just said that's the point where everyone screams when they hear it okay now that's really important for these emergency like Transitions okay so now say we got another track over here badan I'm can't play much of these tracks CU I really don't want this video to be taken down for copyright but say we get right to the end of this track what you'll often hear at the end of a drop is like a or like a who or like a like so have a listen to this track it's like a long tail off it's it's a phrase It's the End of the draw so what I'll do wait till the phrase and I'm literally going to filter down and just as it kind of almost comes to silence hit play on this other track now another thing I'll do here I'll filter down with the these fingers and then with this finger here I'll push the volume fader down so I'm kind of filtering and putting the volume down at the same time and I just practice this you'll get better at it over time and uh let's just do it everyone screams most basic transition on the planet there you go so that's one thing you can do there's another one called Echo out now on the DJ decks it's just an effect you can go to pad effects and uh you'll see uh well it's things like Back Spin you could essentially use that if you wanted to that's the one which sounds like this we covered it earlier on so let's go back to this exact point you could potentially use back this is the beauty of these kind of decks having these pre-made settings in there I've never done this before but let's give it a go and see what it sounds like so it's this button here so that kind of worked as well didn't it um and there's a load of different ones but the one we want to look for is Echo out okay so it's just called Echo it's not called Echo out I think it's called Echo out on sorat um so let's go and check out this let's bring this back a little bit and here we go so that's another thing you can do um and now here's the thing there's loads of these different effects and you could just pretty much apply any of them just go to pad effects and you could try a load of them out now the one thing I will say is as soon as you move on to CDJ 3000s you don't have Echo out at your disposal which is kind of annoying because I love to Echo out and Echo out you can use that like almost anywhere in the song and it kind of works honestly I've put on tracks before in the past and within the first like 10 seconds of like this song isn't going to work I've echoed out and B in another track you know like so I'm just being honest so okay here we go so if you don't and you're on cdjs and I'm going to do a little section on the cdjs at the end but what you can do is you could go and just get an effect um Reverb okay so we're going to put Reverb as the effect here and what you'll do is you'll set Reverb to quite high and we'll set it to track one because we're going to use the same track again so we come back to here and at the end of this drop we're going to activate Reverb and then filter it down and out we're kind of creating our own kind of echo out in fact you could create an exact Echo out so you could do Reverb or if you want to do you could come to Echo so what I'm going to do is I'm going to activate Echo we'll try it with both and I'm going to activate it and then bring it down I'm setting it to quite high so it comes in quite aggressively so we got to get this track back to the beginning and let's give this a go so that's one thing you could do or you could do it with Reverb instead so we come to the top click this and we're going to go to reverb I think Reverb actually sounds better if I'm honest so we'll go back a little bit here and we'll do it Reverb instead so here we go so any you get the idea there's a couple of little emergency transitions you can do there um which are just easy things to do from one genre to another and you might think they seem cheap and they seem a bit tacky but I'm telling you from experience they just work Echo out is definitely the winner um so there you go there's a couple of emergency Transitions and how to go from extreme BPM ranges and different genres okay guys so I'm going to briefly touch on doing mashups on your DJ decks now mashups are what we call in in the UK a complete faf they take flipping ages and you're going to quickly realize why so when I say I'm going to touch on it I'm literally going to touch on it I'm not going to go into a full breakdown of exactly how to do it because it could be another hour of this video taken up and really I can't see many of you doing these mashups kind of anytime soon and the ones who do want to do it will probably be able to do it from what I'm explaining first things first where do you get Acappella from the answer is YouTube I'm not going to demonstrate it here go to YouTube Type in the top your Acappella I've got one here T Pack Hennessy and just type in two pack Hennessy Acappella go and clip grab it which I explained earlier in the video go and drop it into uh mixing key and then you can go and find another track which could be you know I've got one here Eminem Without Me instrumental okay and I just type in Eminem with At Me instrumental find an instrumental on YouTube and then just clip grab it and download it and rip it off YouTube um that's the best way to do it now straight away I can hear you saying how do we know what vocals work well with what other tracks well that's really difficult you basically have to look for tracks that are in a similar key and a similar speed rap vocals typically work really well over a lot of things because rapping is just speaking and it's not really singing so you can find like 50 Cent In the Club I find works over so many tracks just because it's more like a rhythmic kind of thing than a than a note so rap Works quite well so if you're going to start try with rap um and then you'll say well where do we get ideas from well that again is the difficulty you just have to kind of have a lot of music or even better if you've seen someone else do a mashup go and do what I'm saying here and follow along with what I'm doing to know it works you know I mean the answer is this if you got a good Acappella and you make sure it's going to the grid properly which I'm going to cover in a second then you can go to a load of tech house tracks and find loads of tech house tracks are in that key and you'll probably find the vocal works well over most of them as long as the key is correct okay um so here we've got this track now first thing you want to do is make sure both of them are going to the grid that's pretty obvious with the instrumental so if I was go to export here and I was go to Eminem Without Me let's go ahead and do this so I go and drag it in here and I can see quite clearly as soon as we get to a bit with the beat then it's going to the grid and you can play it oh it's not playing cuz it's R doesn't matter you can see it's going to the grid and any part of the track I go to you can see it's going to the grid now with the Acappella this is difficult you need to because it the computer will try and set it to a vpm right and it doesn't really know because there's no beat going to an Acappella it's just a vocal so if I'm honest what I tend to do and again I can tell I'm going to lose most of you by saying this but I put it into Ableton and I make sure it's going to the grid perfectly in Ableton because here's the thing what you could do is say I've got this track here Acappella T Pack Hennessy right and I put it in and well you could say well the first you could do is go and find out what the BPM of the original track is and then you want to go and find out what words land on the one the one being the first beat of the bar one two 3 4 so that's what you want to do so for example I went here and I've got to change the settings cuz uh let me just go to preferences here um actually I'm not going to bother that I'm just going to come back over to um I've already showed you how to set the grid so I'm just going to explain it over here instead I worry about this part of the video whether I'm just kind of going into too much detail at this point and worst thing is I'm not kind of giving enough information so I'm going to leave most of you scratching your heads anyway but if I come here and I put this acapella in here I can say at this point in the gut I was born in the gutter right that born lands on the one right and you'll probably be able to figure this out better by listening to the original and Counting one 2 3 4 2 2 3 4 and finding that moment because he he starts by saying now I was born in the cutter if I lined up now I was to the first beat it wouldn't work cu the word born is on the one okay so listen again born in the I was a thug the thug lands on the one as well right so you got to go to the original song and find out what word lands on the one and find out what the BPM is now now again this is going to be really confusing but sometimes the BPM of the AC capellas isn't the same as the original and it's very frustrating which is why I use Ableton to go and warp it and make sure it's perfect and then I export it out of Ableton if I ever have a Acappella that's not very good or slightly strange BPM sorry guys this is what I mean this is a fath this is an absolute F right so we now know borne lands on the wor and we've got it set to the grid and we've got the BP M right now we know that we can go and put the Without Me instrumental in and we got to go and find the moment that there's a one in this track so there that moment and you can see this Grid it's not to the grid that's a one right there so I might come and just set hot point here right so we've got two tracks one of them is uh what's the BPM of this let me just go have a quick look look oh there's not even any key set this is terrible I just know these two tracks work cuz I've done this mashup in the past but you would just go and find the right key by dropping the original of both tracks into mixing key to know what the keys are um so we're beginning to see why this is a nightmare right um and there's no easy way to do this there's not there's not like oh it's easy just do this it's like trial and error trial and error and finally you'll land on something you're like oh my God that works really well um so and and I think your best bet by the way is finding a vocal that's around the 120 130 range you know get like an aichi acapella something like that then go and get a load of tech house tracks that don't have much singing because a lot of tech house tracks don't and then just get the bpms lined up make sure you know what so word lands on the one and tral it with a load of tracks that's the easiest thing you can do or like I said before a like a hip-hop vocal or something like that but let's just stick with this now cuz we're we're in it deep at this point so now we can see this track is 112 and this track is 94 now the issue is going from 94 to 112 that won't get there right so we've got to increase this all the way to wide and now it'll get there but it's going to be really sensitive so I'm going to put this all the way down to 112 and you'll see how sensitive this is it's almost impossible to get exactly to 112 so I'll probably just land at that point at 132 and then sorry 112. 32 and then I'll come over to this track and then I'll get this to 32 you know and I've got to say the chances of me doing this live are next to nothing next to nothing if I was going to do a mashup live I would do it on abl turn get it all sorted and then just play it out loud out live knowing full well it was going to be perfect that's what I would do I I think the only person on the planet who puts V capellas over over instrumentals live is James hype and you know it's a lot of practice and a lot of preparation he's doing all of this beforehand I promise you that when you watch James hype and he's like that AC capella that goes over that that goes over that don't think any of it is happening live and he's making it up on the spot it's all premeditated he knows what track he's bringing in over what other track at exactly what point he's going to bring it in the way he does it is he kind of clumps three or four songs together he's like right I know this track goes with this Acappella which will go into this track with this Acappella and the four clumped together and then you'll put like a marker between every four clumps of songs so it's like every song he plays is like a mini routine it's a nightmare it's a nightmare I'm telling you it's just it's crazy that he does it live and no one can believe he does it live anyway so let's stick to this so we've got 132 and 134 maybe we could bump that down a tiny amount no see it's too sensitive so so let's just leave it 131 so so now you can if you wanted to set a hot Q to land right at the beginning of that vocal now to do this you have to turn quantize off CU it's going to try and jump to the grid right so I could come here and turn quanti off and then come right to the beginning of this vocal and then set a hot Q here and then but I wouldn't do it that way I would actually have a hot Q set to the grid and the reason I'm going to do this is because I know I need to bring it in at this point for it to land on the one here and I so I know that if the one of this track I've probably lost you at this point but if the one of this Eminem track lands on is is here I need to bring this track in at this beat here right so let's just go back a little bit and I'm just going to literally kind to tap Along Watch The Grid and one beat early I'm going to bring in that V okay you got to make sure the Mt is selected on both cuz we've changed the bpms quite dramatically here so let's have a lesson and as soon as it's in I'm going to nudge it along by ear to make sure it [Music] fits it's a lot of effort guys it really is I wish I could tell you it was easier than that but it's not there's no website there's no way that's going to tell you this you just have to have lots of music lots of acappellas have some ideas in your head you know and and really I think if you want to be doing good mashups you've got to have good knowledge of Ableton in order to do it I may have just wasted like 20 minutes of everyone's time hopefully you got something out of this remix as you can see it's complicated and for me to run through the entire process with you sometimes finding a good mashup can take me two hours three hours so why not many people do that that's mashups for you and and also I touched there upon you know James hype and how he does it you know and and Bear in mind you know say this is obviously over a hipop instrumental but if this was a tech house track as the tech house track goes into its build you can do that thing I said where as long as they're on the same grid you can Loop them half the speed and then the vocal could go and you can even get it and Pitch it up like I showed you earlier on and maybe I could go ahead and do that um and maybe you're all screaming at the screen please show us B but like it's it's it's so much e and I feel like I'm I don't want to overwhelm this video so uh maybe it was a mistake adding this bit in so there you go guys that's me briefly touching on remixes hopefully you can realize it's kind of complicated um it is complicated and but look I'm going to wrap it up there hopefully I taught you something hopefully you understood about the vocals landing on the one where you go to get acappellas and instrumentals and I just hope it helps I'm going to leave it in the video and hopefully it's help someone finally guys I said I was going to jump on the CDJ and point out some kind of major differences between these and the entry level DJ decks so the first one is obviously you load your tracks on with a USB now I was going to show you this but it's relatively straightforward what you do is you just put the USB in record box will recognize it you get a playlist and you just right click on it and then you go through and say export to USB and then it appears on USB it's very straightforward I see the point in J running you through that once you put it in you can come and just select the USB and then you go down to playlist and you can go to you know playlist and it's there and you can see your bpms you can see your key of the track the track name and it's all there now of course you can do touch if you want or you can just use this and you load a track in and there it is and you can kind of scroll in if you want by zooming in like this or zooming out like that um you can even put your finger on this marker here which is pretty cool because for example you know we were talking about the phrases earlier on well with cdjs I can put my finger at the beginning and it'll show me 16 bars to that point 6 32 bars to that that point 48 bars and what's cool about this is say I wanted to find the outro drum so I come here and I go right okay this is the outro drum right at this point here um what I'll do is I can find it it'll say 16 bars to the end and then it'll give me a count down here to that point I put my finger on so you can see how like it's quite cool for once you know these 16 bars and you can kind of go okay well there's the drop there so there's 16 bars to the end there and you can start to kind of map it out in your head as you're going through another really cool thing is when You' got your headphones Plugged In which I currently don't um but you wouldn't be able to hear anyway if you go to browse you can come to these waveforms and put your finger on the waveform and it'll actually play that bit of that song so you don't actually have to load it into a track to start playing the song you can hit it and you know like obviously I'm not going to do it but you wouldn't be able to hear it anyway have to somehow hold my headphones up but you can literally sample a little bit of the tracks so whatever bit you put your finger on it starts playing that bit of a track which is really cool um so so that's that you know you can load these in everything else is relatively similar um play Q button you can skip forward and back tracks so you can skip forward in the track if you want here um so I can load the next track in load the next track in it'll just go down that list I can search by just scanning forward or back in a track really quickly like that which is qu kind of cool um which you know there's things is like um reverse mode where if you put it in reverse mode it plays it backwards so like that and really that mode there is in case there swear words or anything like that in the track you can hit it into reverse mode briefly and it'll blank out the swear word uh now the interesting thing about this is something I didn't touch on earlier on in the video is called slip mode slip mode is interesting what happens is when slip mode is on whatever you do to the track during that time it will continue to play in the background so for example if I had this track now and I'm going to turn the volume down press play and then hit slip mode I can pause the track if I want and you'll see this line keeps running that track is still playing in the background so when I press play it jumps back to the place it was going to be so slip mode means the track just continually plays in the background so you could do a scratch if you wanted to or if I brings me back to this reverse mode here I can put it into reverse slip where it'll play Backwards but the track will keep playing and when I take my finger off it'll snap to where it was so if there's a swear word in the track I reverse the swear word and then it jumps back to where it was I don't find myself using that very often at all you got beat jump right here on the decks um and at the moment it's 32 but I could hit shift and make that 64 or 16 if I wanted to 32 is eight bars so that would be used perfectly like that's the one I'd use most of often Loop in and out and the exit button here obvious these are your hot cues as I said there's a slight difference where these once you hit the hot queue it just plays it's trigger mode so it's not like I TI my finger off and it stops playing I think there is a way to change that now I just haven't done it yet but for the longest time using these decks there was a big difference which I think is why I actually stopped using hot qes as much so then you've got this is quite interesting as well this is um jog wheel adjust so if I put this to heavy and I did a back spin it would stop it quickly but I can put this to light and now what Watch What Happens it just runs and runs and runs so I usually have it about kind of like 12:00 marker there um so that's quite cool you don't get that on entry level DJ decks really um and then there's vinyl speed so this is you can change this in the record box settings as well under preferences um but it's basically how quickly the track comes to an end so I can make it quick but I can make it really long you can do that in press is in record box as well by the way um and then there's job mode which is you're always going to have it on vinyl vinyl is basically What It's Like on entry level DJ deck if you put it on CDJ mode it stutters um and I think the reason I think the reason it did this is because there was probably a time where there wasn't a screen on the cdjs so you'd be able to find that exact beginning of a kick drum by listening to it I don't know why it's still there anymore and finally guys we come on on to the mixer here so let me just give you a quick run through obviously we have the cross Vader at the bottom it function the same way but of course with these different columns or Lanes here you can set them to wherever you want them to be so I can set them all over to a so if I go over to B they all turn off so you know you can set them to a b or through so you can set them however you want so that's basically that um the next section we've got is the delay section over here so obviously we've got whatever effect you want to grab over here um and then you can set it to whatever Lane you want so as you turn this along you can see which you know Lane here it's on um and then you've got the different time signatures up here so this is just an easy way to select a quarter note eighth note you know if it's going on the beat you know what I explained earlier on about how the effects actually happen to a grid to a beat like that or you can kind of flick up and down quite easily with this section here which is the exact same as the entry level deex over there now another thing you can do is you could tap in a BPM if you wanted to so you could tap it in and it'll be whatever you tap it in like I never really do that um and if you wanted to get it to a specific vpm you can hold tap and then you can just come all the way down so I know this tracky here is 125 so it come all the way down to 125 if I wanted to set it to 125.5 I can hit tap and then autotap here and I can set that to 05 if I wanted to but I'm not going to do it because it's not the right BPM so that's that the effects can affect different bands so it can have it just affect the highs of I want do if I deselect the lows and mids and I come to this track and let's go to the outro of this track we'll hear it now if I uh set it to this and I go to delay and then I turn it on you'll notice if I introduce it it's just affecting the height so if you use delay correctly you could actually add a bit more of a swing or Groove to the track um if you wanted to do that by just affecting the highs I typically don't do it and all most of the effects I add I have effect all the effects at once you know I just that's just how I do it I guess I'm kind of lazy like that um the only other thing is this thing here time so you don't have to have it to a specific time you can just have it to any millisecond you want so it's not necessarily go to the grid now the only time I'd really use this is if I went to delay I will typically use an effect where I put delay to one then if I come to the build and introduce it it creates this like tininess to the sand which creates is kind of like high pitch frequency have a [Music] listen that's a track called vibrate me and Ash made that one as well anyway hopefully you could hear that so that's the effects now the next thing is this filter it's not by default filter you have to turn filter on so now I've selected filter it will now filter [Music] now underneath these filters there's something called parameter and this is how much of that affect you here so in the same way I explained earlier in the video I can increase the Resonance of the filter by turning this up you'll hear this kind of sound listen whereas if I turn this down it softens the resonance we've taken away the which is the resonance which is the peak of the point where we're filtering up or down I explained that earlier in the video so now we've got noise noise again if I use parameter here just turns the noise up or down and noise is essentially a great sound for increasing tension anything that goes anything that builds in sound anything that go or repeats or whatever it creates this tension with which is why white noise is used in most bills of songs and of course if you wanted to you could hit it across the a here and just go which is the whole James hype kind of white noise being filtered in cut in and out now obviously he uses this but I find it much easier to just tap it an effect like this that's relatively easy to do just put your thumb against it and just slam it like you would like a a a nail a hammer hitting a nail and you can open and close it quite easily like that cool so so that's that effect crush is a cool sound so Crush basically is exactly what it sounds it kind of makes the sound sound crushed it's hard to put like sounds into words sometimes but if you listen to it it does it now if I filter up it creates a high pitch Crush sound I filter down it creates a low pitch Crush [Music] sound you see that kind of crunchiness it almost sounds like an old video game type thing so that's that now sweep is an interesting one you sweep up and creates this uh kind of delay and Reverb and it also adds that tinniness that I kind of explained when I said you put a delay down to 1 millisecond have a listen but when you actually filter sweet down it does something really interesting what it does is it begins to gate the sound so only the punchier sounds will actually come through and everything else is silenced have a listen you notice that like the main sound is the kick and as I sweep it down it just lets the kick through and nothing else really cool I've never really figured out a cool way to use that but I just like the sound of it it's like it gets rid of all sounds and just kind of keeps the main bits that are punching through the mix coming out it Gates the sound so next thing we got is Du EO this is basically delay verb and as you turn it up the delay gets closer together and if you do it down the other way it kind of filters it down and does the same thing it's like it puts the filter on the effect rather than on the track so you filter it up it's a high pitch delay in Reverb on the effect is high pitch delay Reverb and then the opposite is you filter down and then finally you got SP space here and this is essentially similar thing Reverb delay and a bit of that kind of [Music] tinniness kind of add a bit of white noise in that's what I'd say space was doing delay Reverb and white noise now as you know you don't have Echo out on these decks but you could use space or do Eco to create the same kind of effect so that's how you create an echo out on these Z deck so you could do the same with durco let's go back and try the same thing [Music] again so that's how you do it now obviously it's kind of interesting because you've got to introduce the effect allow the effect to take hold and start echoing and then bring the volume down and then decrease the sound as well so a bit more complicated I wish there was just a button where you could do Echo out I just wish that these DJ decks have that I don't know why they don't but those are those different effects there um and they're pretty cool now there's one final thing which I wanted to touch upon which is the headphone settings now there's a headphone setting called stereo that's the one we're all used to which is where you hit Q you can hear what the club are hearing and then you hit the Q button in one of the individual lanes and you can hear what's happening on that individual Lane right now the issue with that is you're still left trying to differentiate between what the track is that's playing on the lane and what this track is playing in the master right so what you can do is you can put it on mono split what this does it means whatever's coming out of the master is in your right ear and whatever's on one of the individual strips one of the individual Lanes is coming out in your left ear which is I've become obsessed with this now I just really like it um it just it just feels really clean and it's good especially if you got headphones like this that go in your ear and dampen everything that's being played in a club you can set the levels to a nice low level and you can hear quite clearly what's one track and what's the other track um so it's really good so you put Q on you'll hear in your ear right ear what the club is hearing and then you hit Q on this lane and then you can line up the tracks quite nicely because you can hear the beat in both tracks one ear and then the other you can clearly Define which one is which then once you've got it beat match nicely you take it off and you start to bring it up now obviously at this point as soon as you take Q off you can't hear it in this ear so you're just mixing with your right ear but it's really nice cuz you can you've already heard the track so you know what is coming and as you start to build it up you can mix really nicely in your ear and you can have the volume levels nice and low it's basically the same as you know when you see DJs in the club with one ear and one ear exposed and they're doing the mix well it's essentially that but you get the noise protection from these headphones I think it works best with these inar headphones like this okay so that's that I absolutely love that it's mono split and I swear it's made my mixing better it's like it's like being able to clearly differentiate between the two tracks helps with beat matching and then helps with mixing as well being able to clearly hear that one song coming in and you know avoiding any frequencies that might be clashing I just really like it so there you go guys there's the final run through of the CDJ 3000s I'm actually going to wrap up this video I've been recording this for about 6 hours so I'm sure the video won't be 6 hours but I've been doing this for ages now I'm really hoping that this video does well I've really poured a lot of information into this and I want this to be the video that just everybody on the internet will go to to watch to learn how to DJ I try to just give away as much as I possibly can I really hope you enjoy it please leave a comment please leave a like um and you know send it to some buddies who want to learn how to DJ um that's pretty much everything as I said just in case you're like oh I still want to know more if you Phil I do have additional DJ courses before where we'll go into more detail about things like doing mashups and stuff like that and advanced like DJing live but really this should cover the vast majority of it what I've taught you in this video is what most professional DJs are doing up on Festival stages like if you take in everything I said in this video you'll be able to DJ at 99% of shows but if you want there's courses below and just in case you do want to get to a point where we saying playing big festivals there's a whole strategy to that making music how to make professional music quickly how to get something to record labels how to grow your audience how to grow on Spotify how to get your name out there one thing that I want to finish with here is the creating songs as a DJ is like buying a lottery ticket you just need one song to blow up and you could be headlining festivals and unfortunately it's probably not what you want to hear it's the only way to get on Festival stage is is having lots of streams and recognition for the music you make if you want to work with me this year I'm running a 6mon mentorship program where I will work with you to teach you everything you need to know about producing professional music and actually I just said 6 months it's not I work with people until they get record deals which is something that no University no other coach no other program out there will guarantee because I want to make sure that the people I work with get results so if you're interested Ed go and open up my Instagram @ Phil Harris music and you can message me the word mainstage or just say hey Phil I'm interested in your mentorship and we can literally chat to see if you're a good fair I speak to every single person before they sign up I want to know that I'm working with people who are serious and if you are I will teach you everything you need to know to make Pro level music you can go and listen to my music on Spotify just go and type in Phil Harris really hope this video helped I don't think there's much more to say I've been filming for freaking hours if you're still here God bless you see you soon ciao

Channel: DJ Phil Harris

Views: 107,619

Keywords: How to dj, learn to dj, beginner dj lesson, how to dj for beginners, dj tips and tricks, how to dj Phil Harris, dj phil harris, dj beginner lessons, how to start dj, beginner dj lessons, dj for beginners, dj course for beginners, first dj gig, dj tutor, club ready dj school, digital dj tips, mixing beats, serato tips, top 5 dj tips, how to transition, beginner dj tutorial, phil harris dj live, dj school, Learn to dj, Learn how to dj

Id: NxR6SdHP2jI

Length: 158min 49sec (9529 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2024