10 Commandments For Better Digital DJing, #8

Phil Morse | Founder & Tutor
Read time: 3 mins
Last updated 11 April, 2018

Loudness wars
This commandment is only as complicated as being able to use your ears critically.

If you have this skill, it won’t make you a great DJ – but all great DJs have it. It’s something that was relatively simple in the pre-digital days (hint: If you checked your needle for fluff, you were halfway there).

However, for digital DJs in particular, if you don’t understand what this commandment is about, your DJing will be inferior to that of other DJs who put the effort in to get this right, or of vinyl and CD DJs in general.

Today’s commandment

So here it is:

Know how to deliver great sound quality.

You need to be able to listen to all music critically, that’s for sure – but you also need some basic knowledge and best practice awareness in order to make sure that music you play to your dancefloor is of a quality fit to be used for DJing. Today’s video and extra content will give you all the resources you need.

As you’ll know by now, this is a special campaign by Digital DJ Tips to encourage better digital DJing, and as usual today I am asking you to press the Facebook Like button at the end of the article – if you enjoy it, of course.

Why? Because want these rules to go way beyond our normal audience to demonstrate to the wider world how we in the digital DJing community care about DJing just every other type of DJ does. Thanks for your help!

 

Video

 

Resources

Get up to speed on all the issues, and tons of practical advice on how to improve your own DJing sound quality, with these resources:

Extra tips

  • To train your ears to be critical, try this: Buy a WAV file (WAV is the best quality there is) of a song you know sounds great. Using any sound editing software, save that file as a 128, 192, 256 and 320kbps MP3. On your best speakers or headphones, listen to the files critically to compare the difference
  • Once you’re convinced, aim to eliminate lower bitrate or bad sounding music files from your collection entirely: If you don’t have them you can’t accidentally play them!
  • Nearly all music that streams on the internet is below 320kbps MP3 quality and should never be ripped, recorded or performed as part of a DJ set. That includes YouTube (although to get the best quality on YouTube in general, it often helps to select the highest quality video).
  • Can’t say this enough – trust your ears! If it sounds rubbish to you on your headphones, don’t inflict it on your dancefloor
  • Read our Platinum Notes 3 review to see if this kind of software is something you might find useful – there are some opposing views on it in the comments of that post

We hope this material has been useful to you, and thank you once again for Liking this post in order to help us spread our campaign for better digital DJing far and wide…

• Watch out tomorrow for the ninth of our ten “commandments”. And thanks again for your support – it’s really appreciated.

Check out the other parts of this series:

What are your views on our eighth commandment? Have you heard examples of DJs playing with poor sounding music files? Have you done it yourself? We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in the comments.

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