HOW TO DJ FOR COMPLETE BEGINNERS DURING LOCKDOWN

they was upbeat hackers in this week's video I want to go all the way back to basics and teach you how to DJ if this is your first time behind DJ decks so I've broken the video down into two parts the first part is me just teaching you everything you need to know about your DJ deck so you probably don't know and then the second part I'm going to teach you how to do your first transition it's called a beat match so without further ado let's get into it okay guys so let's just get straight into this now I'm gonna assume that you've got some DJ decks and you've already learned how to plug them all in but I'm just gonna quickly cover some extremely basic stuff which is generally the controls at the back of your DJ death will allow you to plug your DJ Zak into speakers so your audience can hear the music you're playing and at the front you'll see a headphone jack at the front of your DJ decks which if you plug in you'll be able to listen to the music but only you will be able to hear which I'm going to come into in a bit more detail in a bit also at the back of your DJ decks you're gonna be able to connect your DJ decks to your computer via a USB the reason for this is because these are not necessarily DJ decks but actually just DJ controllers and by the way this applies to whatever DJ controller you have and whatever software you are using a game so this controller here is only really controlling stuff that's going on on my computer program for example if I put my hand on this wheel here and move it you will see my computer screen moving over here if I was to unplug these DJ decks they would do nothing by themselves so that's the first kind of thing you need to understand now the next thing I want to do is quickly just run you through some critical settings that you need to know about on these DJ decks now I know you're looking at them thinking they look really complicated there's just mobs and switches and buttons everywhere but I'm gonna instantly make this half as easy or half as difficult for you to understand which is this side of the DJ decks is identical to this side of the DJ decks so you now only have to learn half of the stuff on the DJ's X so here's the absolute basics of Dee all you need to be able to do is have one track playing here on track a and blend in track B vis playing over here and then just go back and forth if you can do that for a long period of time you can perform a DJ set and you can have any audience of people rock it so let's go into the actual controls on these DJ's X here and I'm gonna start at the absolute basics and then move through to slightly harder things but it's all critical stuff you need to know so the first thing you need to know is where the play and pause button is which is down here it's going to be in the same place on all DJ decks and by the way just the stress if your DJ decks look different to this don't worry everything I'm gonna be covering in this video will have you will have the same settings on your DJ deck as what I explained here so first thing playing pause is down here pretty straightforward you just press play and pause you press play important you didn't hear anything it takes me onto my second most important setting of the DJ decks which is the volume fader now at this point I wanted to tell you something else right now you can see four sets of lanes here with four different controllers well there's a middle one as well which is just a master that is just four sets here now your DJ decks might just have - well don't worry all I'm going to be doing in this video is explaining about the - so on this DJ dice I'm just using these two strips here so don't worry about any of these settings here or here for now okay so so far we know where the play and pause button is and we know where the volume button is those are the two most important settings the next thing you need to know if you are DJing is you might not always want to bring in the track right at the beginning of the song you may want to go in a little bit of a song and play it from a different point which brings me onto the next point which is cue points so for example if I decided I didn't want to play this song from the beginning and I wanted to go in where a bar here and start playing it from here I can set a cue point by hitting this button here now once I hit like you point I can hit that cue point again and the song will play from that cue point and as soon as I take my finger off the cue button it will snap back to where the cue point is [Music] now the next point it brings me on to is hot cues hot cues are basically the same as a cue point but with one big difference the hot cues are based on your DJ decks here and you'll need to make sure you've got hot cue selective now I can do the exact same thing with a hot you've just pressed this button as long as there's no colors there and it will activate a hot you on this point which again will do the same thing as the cube butter but with one big difference with the cue button here if I accidentally go off my mark and hit the cue button again I've now set a brand new cue point that may not have been at the point that I wanted the cue point to be no I wanted it back here now the beauty of a ha q is wherever you are on the track if you hit the hot cue it will snap back to exactly where you set the hot cue and that even better thing about hock uses they are saved on your DJ program here so if you decide that was a great part to start that individual track and then you load in a different track into your deck when you go and drag this track back in at a later point that hot cue will still be there now the next thing I wanted to tell you which is extremely basic here which is if you want to load a track in to track a or track B all you literally have to do is drag it like this into track a or into track B like that and it will literally just load them in exactly as you want so at this point we know the play cue button and volume now all these other settings moving forward are going to help you with your actual transitions so the next thing I want to talk to you about is the actual jog wheel here now as we all know from watching other DJ's if you put your hand on top of the jog wheel and move it up and down you can basically scratch but something you probably didn't know is there's two parts of the jog wheel that you can touch the top bit which you touch any will literally stop the track playing but there's the side bit of your track here which you can touch and spin and if you look at my screen you'll see that it moves the track really really gradually forward or back now you might be thinking or what's the point of that well the point of this is when you go to do your first beat match which is essentially going to be having two beats of a track playing at the same time you may hit the play button slightly late and you can use the outside of your deck to allow you to catch up or align the two beats perfectly okay so that's the jogwheel the next thing you need to know about is the tempo slider here so with DJing not all songs are the same speed and what I mean by speed is beats per minute that's how it's judged that's how the speed of a track is judged in DJ how many beats are there in this minute a faster track would be like 140 beats per minute and a slower track could be 90 beats per minute now what's going to happen when you're DJing is you're quite often going to be playing a similar genre of music that will have a similar vpr but they won't all be perfect so sometimes you'll have a track that's 124 and track there's 128 so if you look at my screen now one track it could be a hundred twenty-four here and another track could be a hundred twenty-eight well in order to do a perfect transition you need to make sure that the two tracks are exactly the same speed so this is where the tempo slider comes in you can move it up or down to align the two speeds so you can make the one track 128 like this or you can make the other track 124 now my top tip here is as you'll see there's a smaller decimal place here always make sure that those two are identical as well so don't make sure the one is a 124 point one or point three make sure they are absolutely identical because then they will run in line perfectly at all points okay so we now cover the jog wheel and the tempo the next thing I want to talk to you about is headphones so something that's really critical to DJ's is to be able to hear the next track that they're thinking about playing while their audience dancing to the song that is playing so for example on track B you've got this volume all the way up the audience are dancing to track B but I want to listen to track a so I've loaded a track in and the secret is all you got to do is hit this cue button here which will allow me to hear the track that's currently playing even though my audience can't hear it so if I was to hold my headphones up to the microphone you'll hear the volume come out but it's not coming out to the speakers so that's a really awesome thing that took me so long to work out when I first started DJ finally I want to come on into this mixing power here so what you've got here is different filters that will filter out different frequencies in a moment I'm going to be teaching you guys how to blend one track to the next well so blending we usually think of things like food right but with music how do you blend well you can take a work way certain parts of the music and that's where this EQ or these frequency knobs come in so the first thing you need to know about is the bottom one that simply says filter if I was to turn this to the left it filters out all of the high frequencies and if I turn it to the right it filters out all the low frequencies simple enough to know this it wants to ask you to speak in a high-pitched voice you go I said speak in a low pitch or you should go home my name is Phil so turn to the left it gets rid of all the highs let's have a quick listen kind of sounds like you're standing outside a nightclub doesn't it they change to the right you'll hear all the lows ghosts you'll just hear the high hats and the tinny kind of sounds then these three knobs here basically will do a very similar thing to what this one knob does these three knobs here the highs mids and lows now these are just more detailed controls of what's happening one I'd use the filter knob at the bottom the lows will get rid of all of the low frequencies which would be things like the bass line or the drum the mids would get rid of the mid frequencies which is typically things like pianos or synthesizers or vocals and then the highs by turning the house down it would get rid of all the high frequencies you should be things like the high hats or the white noise and the kind of so let's have a quick listen if I turn away the lows notice the drunk shouldn't is that say what the mid you'll hear things like the stints turned out and then the height will turn down the high hats another way of looking at this is if I was to filter to the left and filter out the highs all I'm essentially doing is the same is tuning down the highs and the mids like this let's have a quick listen I post a filter up getting rid of the base is the same as removing the lows and some of them it's the only of the north you will be looking at here wondering what it is is the trim button this is only used to tune than the volume of a track if it's clipping or going into the red so if you see a track and it looks like it's doing it you want to just turn it down until it no longer goes into the red just like that just to avoid damaging speakers and stuff like that so the final thing which often is to talk about is the cross fader down here so the cross fader essentially blends the volume from track to track B it's all the way over to the left it's just plain track a ifs all the way to the right is just playing track B and in the middle it basically blends the two volumes so it would be like doing this perfectly swapping the two volumes at the same time now the reason I have already talked about it is because I always say to my students just deactivate it and don't use it I would never really use my cross fader at all the reason is because there's lots of times where I want the two volume levels playing at a relatively high level over the top of each other I would never do a blend where I just perfectly move the ball at the same time pass each other I always like to have a lot more control over exactly how much volume each track is playing so I just completely deactivate it if I wanted to activate it I would just have this to track a and this to track B and it would allow my cross fader to work but I just have it in the middle alternatively if you don't really have controls like this just leave it in the middle at all times so guys at this point you know all the most important settings on your DJ decks and all the settings I've covered would be available on any of the DJ decks you own so at this point I want to move on to helping you guys do your first transition then the transition we're going to do is called a beat match now as you know all tracks come with the beat that just runs throughout the entire song and with a beat match what you want to do is get the two beats layered at the same time which I'll allow you to move from track a to track B while the beat is still going most of your orders will always be dancing to the actual beat of a track so if you keep that beat going between the two tracks and just blend from one track into the next your audience are constantly grooving which is really important for a DJ to be able to do that because if you just press stop on track a and then came over and press Start and track B it's jarring for your audience so DJ's like to keep the energy going at all point which is white beat match beat matching is one of the most essential skills of a DJ okay so with that being said I'm now going to teach you how to do your first ever beat match so the ingredients that you're going to need is a track that's got a really strong intro beat and a really strong outro beat so go and find a song that starts with a strong beat like this and if you were to come onto the wav file and scroll all the way to the end down here you'll see that it's also got a beat all the way up to the end of the track [Music] now the next thing you might want to do is go and find another track that also has the same thing a strong beat at the beginning and a strong beat at the end and make sure they're the same speeds but remember if one of the tracks is slightly faster than the other you can just use your tempo slider however what I'm going to get you to do here something slightly controversial I'm going to get you to drag in two tracks that are exactly the same so you're gonna have the same track on both sides and we're gonna beat match from one track into another but they're the same track so the first thing you need to do is go right to the beginning of track a and from this point on we're gonna call this track a and this track B we're gonna go right to the beginning and you see this white marker right in the middle of your screen here we're gonna make sure that's lined up perfectly with the first beat of the first bar and we're gonna start a cue point you can either use your cue point here or you can use a hot cue it's completely up to you now just so you guys know what I'm talking about beats and bars a beat would be the drum that's a beat and a bar would be every four of those so every four beats is a new bar in fact if you come and look at Serato here or if this will be the same on your DJ program as well every four beats there's a white line a thicker white line with a number at the top here in a moment when we do our first beat match we want to make sure that we're not just aligning the beats but we're also aligning the bars so the next thing I'm gonna do is gonna get you to go to the end of the track on track B and we're gonna count back 16 bars from the last bar so we're gonna go to here we're gonna count back 16 bar so this would be one two three four five six seven eight nine 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 to here and we're gonna put a cue point 16 bars in before the end of the track just by hitting this button here you'll notice it puts the cue point on both cuz they're the same track now the reason we've gone 16 bars in from the end of the song is because that's typically how long the outro drums will be and we want them both to line up perfectly okay so we now got everything set in place for you to do your first beat match we've got a hot few set right at the beginning of track a and we've got a hot cue set at the beginning of the outro drums of track B so what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to track B get it to that exact point and bring it back a couple of bars now in a moment we're gonna press play on track B and you're gonna see it scrolling along now you want to press play on track a just as that purple marker that we just set or the hot cue that we just said passes over that white line there okay we're gonna bring it back a couple of bars I'm gonna bring the volume all the way up I'm gonna make sure that the two tracks are the exact same speed which they are because of the same track and we're going to bring the volume all the way on track a now I'm going to press play on track B and what I'm gonna do is just tap along in this little space between any of the buttons here to track B just tap along right next to the play button keep your eye on the screen and as soon as that purple cue point passes press play on track a let's give it a quick go now I remember guys at this point if you've got them slightly out and they're not perfectly lined up you can use the outer ring of your jog wheel to just perfectly align the two so they are absolutely perfectly lined up at that point you should have done your first ever beat match and it should sound really perfect because we counted 16 bars back if you just let that play the two tracks would bleed perfectly into each other but as we know that's not what DJ's always do they do a bit more blending so I'm gonna give you another exercise now where I'm gonna teach you how to start blending two tracks together and this time we're gonna need our headphones now something you'll see a lot of teachers do is they'll have one headphone on on one headphone off that's because it allows them to listen to the song that's currently playing and also listen to the song that's currently in their ear so what we're going to do is the exact same thing exact same setup bring you back a couple of bars like this and bring this track all the way up and this time we're gonna bring the volume down to about half ways little in the half way and what we're gonna do now is press the cue point so we can hear in our ears and we're going to tap along using that first cue point or cue button here so we can hear the two in our ear when we're ready to go we're going to just hold that button all the way down and then press play with our thumbs so we're going to tap along with the cue point then what we've see that purple marker past hold it down and press play with Arthur and then you can take both hands off and it will continue to run now then we're going to do a bit of a blend so we're going to slowly bring the volume up and when we begin to hear track a coming in full volume we then begin to slowly take away the volume of track B so let's give that a quick go now [Music] [Music] [Music] and you guys would have seen that is the exact reason why I don't like the crossfader you'll see that I didn't just do this I actually brought this one really high before I even began to take this one away now finally I want to teach you really quickly how to do a very basic blend using your frequency knobs up here so we're gonna do the exact same thing we just did then but this time we're going to take away the lows the mids and the highs we're going to bring them all to the 9 o'clock position then what we're gonna do is the exact same thing we just did then but as we bring the volume up and you're beginning to hear track a we're gonna start to introduce these frequencies we're gonna start with highs then the mids then the lows now in the same way with volume I have to bring the volume pretty high before I began to hear the track it works the same with the frequency knobs so you're gonna have to bring the highs really high to about the 11 o'clock position before you can even begin to start taking away the height of this track you want to make sure you can really hear the highs of track a before you take them away on track B so you're gonna bring it up to about 11 and begin to take away the highs then we're going to do the same with the mids we're going to bring it up to about the 11 o'clock and then begin to take it this track be down to about 9 o'clock and then the same thing with the lows and then when it's done we're going to begin to just take these away more and more and remove the volume and when you will have done your first very basic blend of frequencies and beat match so let's give this a really quick go now [Music] there you go voice in this video I've taught you the absolute basics of DJing and taught you how to do your very first beat match now obviously this is the absolute tip of the iceberg when it comes to DJing and there's so much more to it than this so if you want to learn how to do a perfect DJ set every single time make sure you go and check out my website at beginner DJ lessons comm where I've got three courses I'll teach you how to put on an incredible DJ set every single time quickly and easily and you'll be amazed at how quickly you get good at DJ finally I just want to say if you like this video leave a comment below like the video share it with your friends and of course as per usual if you want to see more videos just like this subscribe to this channel by hitting this button here and hit the bell notification so you get told about future videos hit that button down there if you want to go and see some free beginner DJ training right now and finally hit this button below if you want to see a video or teaching you how to blend between different bpms of music see you guys in next week's video ciao

Channel: Phil Harris

Views: 46,550

Keywords: dj controller for beginners, beginners lesson dj, dj, how to dj, dj beginners, dj tutorial beginner, beginner dj tutorial, djing for beginners, first dj lesson, how to dj a party, dj controller review, Pioneer DJ, rekordbox dj tutorial, learn to dj, beginner dj lessons, how to mix, beginner dj lesson, ddj 400, learn how to dj, dj lessons, how to dj with a laptop, phil harris, phil harris dj, dj သီခ်င္းမ်ား, d.j, dj lockdown, lockdown dj, ထုိင္းသီခ်င္း dj

Id: 5Tt5xi8O1Ug

Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Sat May 09 2020