How To DJ On The DDJ-400! Absolute Beginners Guide

hey guys in today's video we're going to go right back to basics i'm going to give you your first dj lesson using the ddj 400. i'm aware these are one of the most popular beginner dj decks you can get out there so i thought it creates a whole video teaching you everything you need to know if you just plug these in and you just got started and you know absolutely nothing at all so if that's you you're in the right place okay now just so you know this video could go on for 10 20 minutes i'm gonna time stamp everything below so you'll be able to scroll over the bar below and go to the bit that interests you the most if i cover something that's a bit too basic for you but we're going to be covering lows today i'll be teaching you the basic overall theory behind djing i'm going to be teaching you the basics of using record box and how to import your music i'm going to be teaching you the basics of your dj deck so you can just understand them a little bit better now i'm going to be showing you how to do your very first mix as well okay so we'll be covering quite a lot but this is going to be perfect for you if you're brand new i also want to say just before we get into it that if you are brand new and you want to get quick at djing you want to get good at djing quickly you want to spend ages going through different videos on youtube looking at some advanced videos and some less advanced videos and having like a patchwork quilt knowledge of djing i have complete djing courses you can go and check out at beginnerdjlessons.com i'll leave links below this video you can go and check them out best thing about my course is it will just take you through the steps of where you are now to being able to put together a professional dj set without having to guess which videos you have to watch and figure it all out for yourselves it's really awesome but anyway hopefully we'll cover a lot in this video that's going to help you out as well so first things first i just want to cover the absolute basic theory of djing which is you have a track playing on deck a or this side okay and what happens is you then get another track and you blend this track hopefully seamlessly into track b and you let this play and you blend back over to track a and you just kind of go back and forth that's essentially what is going on with djing okay but really you want to do this in a slightly more creative way than just volume up volume up volume up you know swapping volumes on either side because the whole there's an art to dj you want to make sure that what you're doing flows nicely so loads of ways to do that we're going to be covering the basics today so based on what i just said then what you'll notice is this is kind of mirrored right so once i teach you what one side does you can apply it to the other side as well everything from this middle point basically affects everything over here and everything from this point effect over there within reason there's going to be a couple of different things that that doesn't apply to you but generally okay now you know what this does uh let's just cover some of the basic functions of record box first so let's just get some music loaded in okay now i always recommend that people get their music sorted really nicely on a hard drive and so kind of have all your music in all the different folders ready to go in a hard drive before you start loading it into record box and creating folders on record box the reason for this is it's nice to have your music neatly sorted on a hard drive that you can portably take around so you could take over a friend's house and dj if they have the same kind of setup also if you ever wanted to get a new computer or you had to upgrade or something you've got your music nicely sorted a mistake a lot of beginners make is they just throw all their music into one folder and then sort it really well within record box i wouldn't do that i'd do it the other way because then if anything ever happens and you need to re-upload your music it's going to be sorted nicely on your hard drive first and it also means you're not plugging up your computer with music okay you can get hard drives quite cheap right we can see our record box here and you can see my screen now so um first thing you want to do everything's plugged in you should be on performance mode here okay which i think happens automatically when you plug in your decks and what happens is you'll see a screen that looks similar to this you can see i've got some music loaded in but we're going to make a new playlist so we come to playlist here and you just click this little plus button and i'm going to call this youtube because this is a youtube tutorial okay so i've created a new playlist now i want to go and drag my music in so i'm just going to scroll across open up my music here and i've got youtube lessons ready to go and you just copy them all and you literally just drag them in like this okay and what will happen then is is actually happened automatically here here but sometimes it asks you if you want to analyze a track you just want to make sure you've got t and bpm selected and analyze tracks now what's happening is it's gonna work out how fast that music is so every song has a bpm which is beats per minute the more beats per minute the faster the track is so a 70 bpm track would be a slower track whereas 140 beats per minute track would be a really fast track which would happen quickly there'd be more beats per minute okay so what the program is doing now is it's sorting out what the beats per minutes are and it's working out what the key ever track is just so you know what the relevance of key of a track is all music is written in certain keys you've got a picture of piano right not all those notes work well together you've got to write a song in a certain key certain notes will work well together for music to sound pleasing to the ears why is this relevant to djs it's relevant to djs because if you've got songs that are in the same key and you blend from one to the other and you're layering them over each other for a small period of time to do that blend if you mix two tracks that are in the same key it's going to sound really pleasing to the ear which is what we as djs want to do we want to create pleasing sounds the other relevant thing is there's some keys that clash with one another okay you blend those it's gonna sound odd no matter what you're doing okay so this is really relevant now i've got another video on mixing in key which i'll leave up here but i'm just gonna quickly throw this in there i don't wanna throw too much information at you but i'm just gonna throw it in there anyway you'll see there's different things like 7a 8a you know stuff like that okay these relate to different keys on uh on a piano or any kind of music so it'd be like c major or a minor these kind of things as a dj you don't have to worry about that all you have to really do and this is a quick tip it's a little bit more complicated than this but look for keys that are similar so a 7a would go well with a 7a or you could go one up or one down a 7a would go well with an 8a or a 6a okay so if you stay around those ranges it's going to sound good but always just use your ears and the other thing as well is if you've got a 7a it'll go well with a 7b but you never want to go from like a seven a to like a six b okay you are going to want to go in and out which is like seven a to seven b or side to side seven b to eight b or six b or seven a to eight a or 6a i'm going way into much too much detail here but look trust me when it comes to keys just stay within the one or two range and it's gonna sound really perfect but don't even worry about it too much what are we doing we're going down the rabbit hole we want to get back to the basics here so we've also got the bpm over here as well this is also relevant because you get two tracks that are similar speed you can mix one into the other without it being too jarring to your audience it's going to feel like the same kind of beat and groove is continuing throughout now the other thing record box which will do which is really cool is it will put it to a grid for you so we've got these tracks in here and if i go and drag one into one of the lanes what i mean by dragging into the lane is if i just drag it and drag it up over to the left side you'll see it highlights in white and drop it and now that track is loaded into deck a which is this deck over here and let's just go and drag the exact same track over into track b over here okay now what you will notice is there's these lines that have been put in place okay now what record box has done is cleverly created a grid over the song so every single beat will have a white line attached to it and a lot of music these days is written on a computer so everything's dead to a beat okay the other thing you need to know about music is all music has beats bars and this thing called phrases now beats is obviously just a regular b there's four beats to a bar this is always the case so you'll see the white line for every beat and every four beats there'll be a red line or a red dot at the top of the line it suggests the bar has just passed and there's something else as well called phrases which are in a nutshell different sections of a song so a lot of dance music will have an intro drum and an outro drone for example when the music starts sounds like this [Music] it's an intro drum beat this whole section of the song is the intro drums this is a phrase of a song but again we're going into too much detail here we want to keep this light this is what's going on now if we look at the screen you'll also see some other information here like the speed of a track let me just make sure these are in the center we'll come back to that in a second you'll see that this track here is 126 and this track over here same track at 726. how fast the track is okay you'll see the name of the track appear and you'll see this kind of waveform here which is the different sections of the song you can often see where the heavier or louder parts of the song are because it simply looks thicker now this is interesting as a dj because you can visually look at a song and know when a more dancy part of the track is coming up because it will be a louder part of the track at this point what we've done we've created a playlist we've imported some music and we know kind of what we've got bpm and key which are relevant things let's come back to the djs now obviously music bringing one song in and one song out a big part of this is going to be volume okay so there's several ways you can affect the volume of a track first things first you have this thing at the top which is trim this is basically the volume that's coming in to the track in the first place but you don't have to worry too much about trim the secret is just keep it at the 12 o'clock position and leave it okay that's basically all you need to know then we've got these two volume uh sliders here this is obviously how much volume is on the right hand side and the left hand side okay then we also have the levels here this level basically is how loud is coming out of your speaker and as far as i'm aware that's everything oh there's one other thing when it comes to volume you've got something called a cross fader which obviously the way crossfader works is you move it over here it will turn down the volume of this deck and up the volume of this deck increase the volume of this deck over here and vice versa however something you won't know if you're brand new to djing is 90 percent of djs don't use that to actually do their mixing okay and the reason for this is because the way this works is it kind of just changes the volume like this whereas if i was to do a mix and say i was bringing this track in over this track i'd find myself bringing this volume up to about here before i even begin to bring this volume down i would never do a mix like this the reason for this is is because i do that there's a point where both tracks are at half volume which is going to be really quiet right you want them to both be pretty much at full volume before you take the other one away which is why the crossfaders use more for things like scratching with scratching what you want to do a lot of the time is kind of introduce a sound and bring it in and out quickly so you put it over to the right and just tap sounds in essentially but again we're going off on a tangent here we want to keep this light how many times i'm going to say this during this tutorial we've got volume covered the next thing which is actually the single most important thing on tjs is the play and pause button you guys know what the play and pause button do i don't need to explain that in any more detail the next button we've got is q button what the heck is a cube button and why does it say q here and q here i'm going to tell you q button is if you don't want to bring in the song right from the beginning you might want to go into the song a little bit to get a cute acute section done so say on this track over here i wanted to go in i could scroll in to this point here the beginning of this bar you never know what that i mean when i say that and hit a cue button okay you'll see a little yellow marker appear now when i hit this button it will play from that point but the thing you'll notice about the cube button is the second you take your finger off it snaps back to that point which is really useful because as a dj when you're practicing or thinking about bringing a tracking you can kind of tap along and every time you take your finger off it snaps back to that point now while i'm on cue buttons there's also something called hot cues here's the difference between hot cues and the cube button now we've moved into the song a little bit i can now hit the cue button again and create a new cue point right and we've now reset that button but the hot cue will always be anchored to the place where we first set it it takes me back to that original hot cue which is really useful because here's something else for you when you take that song out and reload it later at a later point that hot cue will reload on that track it's saved to that track for you so if you have a track that you know you want to bring in at a certain point it's going to be perfect right you just hit that hot it's there save you when you load it back in so that's really awesome as well now if you want to learn more about hot cues i've got a video up here where i teach you how to set hot cues like an absolute freaking pro but we're not we're going to move on to the next bit okay so the next thing is this slider here it's a tempo slider what does that do it speeds up a track or slows the track down there's going to be lots of times where you have one track that's 125 bpm one track that's 128 bpm and you need them to be the same speed so you would just move the tempo slider up or down like this to match the speeds okay now another thing you need to know is sometimes you'll move it all the way up and it just won't go high enough for what you want to happen if this happens there's actually a way to increase the percentage because the way it's working is it will increase or decrease the speed by a percentage like i think at the moment it's six which i think might be six percent i'm not 100 sure on that though and you can see if you look at the screen here it says plus or minus six but we can move that up on these dj decks you hit shift and master like this and it'll bump it up to 10 which i think is now 10 which means you can now move it higher or down lower right and then you can do it again you can even go all the way up to wide which i think pretty much doubles the speed of a track speeds it up or slows it down which is really awesome but remember there's a caveat to this when you increase it or decrease it it's still the same distance here which means it's way more sensitive which means it's going to be harder for you to get the two speeds matched up completely so i would always suggest kind of keeping it kind of 15 or 16 or 10 something like that okay now the other thing you need to know about speeding up a trap or slowing it down is this can cause the sound of a track to change in pitch imagine me right now kind of slowing my voice down notice how it changed pitch and if i was tweeted out we'd be like right that can happen with this music here and again you don't want to change the pitch of a song because of the reasons i explained before you want the keys of the song to be the same if you know they're in the same key right well you know the key of them check this out if you don't have this mt selected watch what happens if i speed or slow this track up and down and let's go to a bit of a song that may have a bit of singing and i got there just by clicking on the waveform let's have a listen [Music] probably not the best example let's go to a different bit of the track and i'm going to put it up to a bit more extreme i'm going to go to wide so you can really hear this [Music] right you don't want that happening so you've got to come and click this thing here mt it means that as it speeds up and slows down it will stay in the exact same pitch notice it didn't go up and down that's by the way that's freaking genius that's such a cool feature of modern technology you can do that so cool the next most important thing you need to know is how when you're mixing one track to the next you kind of get the songs to merge in a musical way well we've got these things called an eq which are basically filters okay now what i mean by filter is if i was to take away the highs from my voice you can get a similar effect by putting your hand over your mouth sounds like you're outside a nightclub so probably the worst example ever i'm just going to do on the dj decks rather than embarrassing myself anymore you filter out the high frequencies every song has loads of different frequencies from low kind of sub bassy frequencies up to the high kind of crispy kind of sounds okay with a filter if you filter it down like this it's going to sweep all the high frequencies away from a track okay you're gonna hear this you know i just did the muffling sound what it does is it kind of cuts all the holes of your voice same thing as like standing at certain nightclub have a listen you're left with just the base do the other thing other way it does the same thing except it removes the slurp so that's what the filter does now these three knobs here basically do that but on more independent levels so you can affect just the lows just the mids and just the highs so if i was to take away the lows and the mids you'll be left with just the highs which is the same by the way as filtering up you can do the same we can cut the mids and you're just left with the mids or just the lows okay now again don't want to go into a rabbit hole but the thing you need to think of when you're djing is the highs are usually going to be percussive sounds like high hats like right the lows are gonna be more like the bass and the drum and then you've got the mids which is going to be more like your instruments like your vocals or your pianos and stuff like that so just remember that when it comes to these three things the way you typically use this is if you had a piano playing over here and a piano playing over here and you felt like they were clashing and sitting on top of each other you could dip one out of the way it's a top level thing okay it's just think about it like that if you've got instruments clashing you can just remove them from one track another little tip you hear don't think too much about boosting frequencies you djson typically boost they just remove clashing frequencies we'll come on to that in a bit when i come to teach you about kind of mixing one track onto the next so hopefully you've got a good measure of that now the next thing you need to know about with music is looping looping is basically where you take a section of the song and you have it playing over and over and over okay why would you do that well all music is a series of loops if you go and listen to beatles music it's the same kind of four chords being played over and over and over right music is looping so with these dj decks all you do is you'll set an endpoint and then out point so if i was to loop the next bar i'd wait until i saw that red mark loop in loop out and it would repeat check it out [Music] and it loops but here's another little tip for you when it comes to looping you want to make sure you always have q turned on quantize basically means that it will be snapped to the grid you know i told you about the grid before with the beats and bars this will now snap it in if you have that turned off it means you can basically set input snap points wherever you want and you will never get it perfect so it means it'll never loop perfectly which is not what you want you want it to loop perfectly give you a quick example i'm going to turn quantize off and make another loop okay i'm going to get out of this loop by hitting this exit button here right just doesn't sound right wasn't in time put q on do the same thing see how is in time that's what you want the next thing you need to know is if you've set a loop like this you can actually kind of half or double that loop by hitting these two buttons here so let's try it and you can kind of begin to see why that would be useful if you wanted to create a really cool build or something like that you can kind of double it by pressing the second one or the first one here okay the next thing you need to know is this thing called memory points so you know how we set hot cues down here another thing you can do which is kind of cool which are permanently left there by the way is set memory points think of them exactly like cue points except you can't play from that point you can just get to a certain point of the song quickly so i said i wanted to go to the beginning of this kind of drop here uh oh we're on this side and i wanted to set a marker there i can hit my cue button and then come up here and hold down on the right hand side and you'll see a red button appears oh wait hold on you've got to hit on that and so you hit shift and this right hand button here and you'll notice a red marker appears again what's useful about this is say like we go forward to another point in the song and i put another red marker here by hitting q shift and this point here when i reload this song back in at a later point i can get these points really quickly by just going back and forth so as i go back and forth here it jumps between the q two cue points now if i want i can set my cue point again and i'm ready to go from that point typically i wouldn't worry too much about this and if you're using these decks i'd probably use hot cues instead okay now the next thing which you're not going to know about as a beginner dj is how do you listen to one of the tracks without your audience hearing it because this is what you're going to need to do as a dj you're going to have to have one track playing well you have another track that you're listening to which your audience members are not listening to so you can decide whether it's the right vibe or not this is where headphones come in okay so you just go and get your headphones like this plug them in there's a little hole at the front here like this and what happens is you can turn down the volume of a track and press play on the track but the way you hear it through your headphones and this took me so long to figure out when i was a beginner is you press this q button here so that cue button and this cue button mean very different things so hit that q button there and now when you play this track you hear the track but your audience don't until you bring up that volume so this is really really relevant it's really awesome next thing as well is you can add effect to sounds like for example like a reverb so the best way to do this is you come onto computer come to effects here like this and you can just go and select any kind of effect you want here like let's just put a reverb on this sound here and what happens is you've got these effect set effects here so what you could do is you could select an effect by hitting this effect button here and then you can press that button to filter through them all but i always find it easy to just click on one like this and then just go and select the one you want okay when you turn this button on and it starts to flash that effect is going to be active on either deck 1 here deck 2 here or the master which is both of them so what i'm going to do is i'm going to press play on this activate it and then bring this effect in this is how much of the effect is affecting that sound let's have a listen [Music] okay so you see i introduced all that reverb there um and by the way you can go and play around with these different effects in your own time and the other thing which i'm not going to go into way too much detail on today is these additional effects down here like beat loop beat jump sampler you can find other videos on my channel which cover that in a bit more detail but i'm trying to keep this as a basic lesson even though i've gone into way too much detail so you can go and check them out on my channel make sure you subscribe or again covered in you know pristine order on any of my courses that begin a dj lesson stuff cool so here we go that's everything that is the the program and that is the basics of your dj deck hope you're enjoying it if you are like the video give it a thumbs up all that good stuff let's get into doing your first transition and here's what i suggest when you do your first transition use the same song on both so on both sides so let's go and check these tracks out we got one here right tune off your effect okay uh let's go and have a listen let's see let's get one with a basic beat that's all right let's try this one uh i'm looking for one with just a very basic b and you should do the same that'll do okay so we're going to load this into both sides okay so let's move on to doing your very first mix and we're gonna do a beat match here which is the essential skill you need to know as a dj how do you beat match okay i'll show you how to do it now on my course what i do is i give you just a beat that has nothing but just a drum which makes this a lot easier but if you don't have that i suggest you find a song that just has a clear beat at the beginning and a clear beat at the end like this track we've got here if i go to the beginning you'll hear it's just like a drum b and if i go to the end you'll notice it's just a drum beat next thing you want to do is load that same track onto both lanes okay so we've got that track over here and this track over here so they're exactly the same means they're going to be the exact same speed the exact same key obviously it's going to be exactly the same it's going to make this a lot easier for you this is your first transition now the next thing you need to know is that we need to be bringing in this track at certain point specific points okay and this is going to go back to the beats bars and phrases so you want to make sure that your bars are aligned so remember we talked about these red lines every four beats want to make sure those are aligned but we also want to make sure that the phrasing of the song is aligned as well and what you'll notice is there's certain points of the song where the intro and out we're going to just deal with the intro and outro drums here which by the way more often not be the same length which is usually 16 bars okay so just remember that if you're new to this typically intro and actual drums are about 16 bars so this is what we're gonna do we're gonna start doing a bit of maths here to make sure this is perfect for you i want you to go right to the end of your track okay and you'll see where the track kind of ends here and to keep this simple turn the volume down and we're going to count back 16 bars because we're going to make a marker for where we know we need to bring the other track in okay easy way to do this look at the screen and count back 16 bars so that's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 to here okay just the easiest way to do it okay and we're going to leave a marker like setting a hot cue or a memory cue let's do a memory cue for now so we hit q and then we come shift and memory here we've now got a red dot we can see on this track here okay now we're going to come to the beginning of the track and we're going to do a similar thing okay so we're just going to hit cue point and we're going to hit memory q here so now we're going to come on to track b and on track b we're going to make sure we're right at the beginning of the track on the first beat and now we're going to do is we're going to come on track a and we're going to come just a little bit before the end of this track we're going to set a hot cue here because this is just practice so we're going to be able to hit that hot cue and play from this point and what you're going to notice on the screen is we'll see that red mark coming along we know that that as soon as that red mark passes this halfway point here this is the exact moment we want to hit play if we do this the intro and outro drum length the phrases will line up perfectly and the one song will bleed into the next song perfectly because we know i know that the intro drums are going to be 16 bars and the outro drums are going to be 16 bars okay so check it out so we're gonna do go back to the hot cue which is a little bit before the outdoor drums begins we hit play and we're gonna wait and we're gonna see that red marker coming closer and closer on this track over here and by the way we're not even using headphones for now i'm just teaching you the quintessential skill of beat matching we're just gonna have that b and we're gonna tap along to track a that's playing okay so we're going to bring this down and we're just going to tap along now you can start with just tapping on with your finger like this once you got used to tapping along with that beat we're gonna get used to tapping along with the cube butter so we go back to a and we'll do the same thing and you'll notice there was a point where i tapped on that red marker right as it came along i was tapping so i would have tapped at the exact point that red marker came along but when you tap on that red marker you keep your finger held there let's go back again try it again [Music] now your fingers held down in order to take your finger away you press the play button you'll remember this from earlier in the tutorial okay then the two tracks are lined up perfectly so let's go back and try again now the next thing you're going to notice is you might not get this perfect the two tracks might be slightly out it might look a little bit like this if you look at my screen so how do you get those two lined up well here's another cool thing for you you've got to touch the side of your deck if you touch the top of the deck it will move it like this or it will just stop the deck watch [Music] however if you touch the side of the deck and move it forward and back while it's playing it will just nudge the track forward or back so watch what i'm going to do is i'm going to align both the tracks i'm going to turn the volumes down because we don't need to hear it for now then i press play on both and i'm going to nudge one of the track in and out just watch the screen and you'll see that i'm nudging the tracks in and out so if you do press play and it's wrong touch the side and just nudge it until it's perfectly aligned okay so let's go back and do exactly what we've done up to this point go back to the hot cue oh we need to go back to the beginning of track b so remember we can hit this back marker here to get to the beginning of the track that memory point cue point and we're good to go and now they are perfectly aligned okay now at this point you can just bring the volume up on this side and remove it from this side if you want to we're going to do in a slightly nicer way we don't ever want to have the base and kick drum which is the part of the track playing on top of each other so the track that we're bringing in we're going to cut the lows we're going to take away the bass so it sounds like this we're going to bring this track up with just the mids and highs playing then what we're going to do is slowly just swap the bass here okay so we then have the base of this track and we've taken away the base of this track the original triangle was playing secret with doing this is you bring the lows up until about the 10 o'clock position and you leave that one where it is and the 12 o'clock and then you swap them so this one goes from 10 to 12 and this one goes from 12 to 10 okay so it will look like this you bring it up and you swap those two like that and then you begin to bring this one away like this okay giving you tons of information here but this is a really good little tip when it comes to mixing lows same thing with volume levels you bring it up until like the 90 position before you start mixing the two out and then you bring this volume down you never really want the two full volume well you can actually i do that all the time you can bring this all the way up and you can bring this down okay let's do it so we're gonna go back to this position we're gonna do our beat match we're gonna take away the lows bring it up bring it to the top bring up the lows to about 10 o'clock so we're beginning to introduce the lows of this track swap those two out and then bring this down and then bring this track away and you've got 16 bars to do this let's give it a go [Music] do [Music] and there you go that would be your first beat match so there we go this was supposed to be a quick tutorial but i've ended up teaching you guys loads i hope you really enjoyed it hopefully this is your first introduction to these dj decks you're like wow i know so much now so there you go that's it if you like the video make sure you leave a comment below hopefully this has helped and as i said before if you want to save yourself time you don't want to be searching through youtube for random videos here there and everywhere and having this patchwork quilt knowledge all you've got to do is go to the link directly below this video or visit beginnerdj lessons.com and i will give you a course that has helped thousands and thousands and thousands of djs across the world learn how to fast track their approach to learning how to dj it's basically this lesson on steroids this lesson here but it'll take you all the way up to being able to put together extremely professional dj lessons it's gonna be freaking awesome for you you're gonna absolutely love it and if you don't i give you your money back you've got nothing to lose so hopefully this is all good you've enjoyed it if you want to watch another video of me djing check it out click this link here i'll see you in the next bit ciao

Channel: Phil Harris

Views: 212,494

Keywords: how to dj, ddj-400, dj tutorial, ddj400 tutorial, how to ddj-400, how to dj on the ddj 400, first dj lesson, beginner dj lesson, dj, dj beginners, best way to become a dj, dj controller for beginners, beginners lesson dj, dj tutorial beginner, beginners dj tutorial, how to dj a party, pioneer dj, ddj 400, ddj 400 tutorial, rekordbox dj tutorial, learn to dj, beginner dj lessons, how to mix, dj phil harris, dj beginner lessons, how to start dj, phil harris dj live

Id: Y4dqD-g7SHE

Length: 36min 52sec (2212 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021