Audio Artery’s One DJ may just turn out to be the right DJ software at the right time after all. Tomorrow, the company will be launching a major new version of One DJ – v1.2 – that promises to fix many the niggles that this new DJ software title has had since it was announced in the summer, plus give support for numerous DJ controllers. And we think that – while when it first appeared many DJs scratched their heads and thought “it looks cool, but do I need it?” – things are now swinging towards this way of thinking in DJing.
What’s different about The One
For those who aren’t sure what this DJ software is about, it’s a new “modular” DJ system that lets you slot together the various “parts” of a DJ set-up in a way that suits your style.
But the video above will show you one of the most interesting parts of it, and the one we want to focus on today: “Timeline remixing”. This basically lets you do on-the-fly re-edits and mashups. This is software aimed at the bedroom DJ/producer as much as the DJ booth, that can let those with a bit of musical talent (but who aren’t producers) start to make stuff that sounds seriously good from the tunes they already own.
In the video, a DJ sits at a desk, using his mouse and keyboard, with a Midi keyboard in full view, too (no doubt to show this is aimed at DJ/producers rather than at DJ/Jesus posers 😉 ). He chops up and re-edits a tune on the fly, re-engineering the break, adding vocal snippets, and so on. It’s all about deconstructing your tune or tunes down to building blocks, in order to assemble them again in a way that works for you – easily and on-the-fly.
Sonz of a loop da loop era
And we thing this type of approach is gaining ground. While Ableton Live is the granddaddy of all this stuff, we’ve also got Mixed In Key Mashup and that company’s forthcoming section-based DJ program codenamed “Danceability“, both of which encourage you to treat your music as modular sections.
Then there’s Traktor’s Remix Decks, that come at the same idea from a different angle. Even Virtual DJ 8 has a timeline style feature and “sandboxing”, where you can experiment in advance with your mix while the audience hears something else. And now we’ve got One DJ, with its own way of encouraging you to stop treating tunes as the finished article, and start treating them as something to be broken down and played with.
Need help finding music that will work well in these tools? Beatport lets you sort and shortlist music by key, so you can audition and buy instrumentals to go with your acapellas, for instance. And there are some interesting online key tools gaining traction right now too, aimed specifically at helping DJs to find tunes that mach harmonically with the tunes they already own – take a look at Audio Keychain and OnChord, the latter of which even attempts to show chord progressions within the tunes it indexes. Just hitting “loop” and mixing something else in over the top is starting to look very old school indeed…
How to try it out
One DJ is available as a free trial download so you can see whether this new kind of “sit down and re-edit” approach to DJing works for you, and the update to 1.2 is due to drop tomorrow some time, so keep an eye on the One DJ Facebook Page where no doubt it will get announced first; I recommend waiting for the update so you get the best possible first play on the software. Details on how to buy if you like it are over on the One DJ website.
Did you try One DJ when it first came out? Can you see the appeal of software like this? Or do you think it moves too far away from the immediacy of DJing as we know it? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Phil Morse
