There are plenty of videos showing clever house mixing tricks, then leaving you to go off and do them on your own.
What they skip is the stuff underneath, the things that make those tricks work. Without it, copying a transition you saw online won’t make much sense, because you won’t know why the DJ is doing what they’re doing.
These are the seven things we teach at the start of all our courses. Learn them, and you can mix house music while understanding what you’re doing. I demo every one of them in the video above.
I’ve also made a free handout of all seven for you to pin up near your decks – download it here.
1. Mix phrases, not beats
House music is built in bars of four beats, and those bars are grouped into phrases of eight.
At the end of each phrase, something changes. A riff comes in, the bassline arrives, the drums drop out for a breakdown, or the full track crashes back in on the drop.
Sometimes producers double it to 16 bars, or halve it to four, but it’s always built around eight.
Anyone can line the beats up – hit sync and it’s done. But if the phrases of your two tracks don’t line up, so things come and go at the same time in both, your mixes will never sound professional.
You can count bars in your head and tap along with your foot, but the easiest way is to listen for things coming and going.
Everyone on your dancefloor already knows where they are. They know when to throw their arms in the air, and when they’ll get a breather. So trust that instinct, and always keep an ear out for the phrases.
2. Be careful with anything but drums
House tracks tend to start with just drums, and finish with just drums.
Drums have no melody, so you don’t have to worry about musical key, clashing basslines or two vocals singing over each other. If one or both tracks are just drums at the point where you’re mixing, it’s hard for it to sound bad.
That gives you the simplest (if most boring) way to mix house music. Wait for the drums-only outro of one track, start the drums-only intro of the next one over it on a phrase, let them play together for a phrase, then move into the new track.
You don’t have to wait for both tracks to be just drums, though. One track’s drums-only phrase can play over the other track’s music, bassline and all, and it’ll still sound fine.
3. Pick the right place to mix
Don’t mix for no reason. The safest place is the intro of one track over the outro of another, and that’s where to stick while you’re starting out.
Another good place is the drop, once a track has already been through a breakdown and drop or two. By then your dancefloor has heard it go round a couple of times, and they’re ready for something new.
Just let a track do its thing before you mix out of it.
4. Mix in key, but trust your ears
If you want to play the musical parts of two tracks over each other, set your DJ software to show musical key in Camelot (or alphanumeric) notation. All DJ software can do this.
Ignore the letter and look at the number. You want the numbers on both decks to match, or to be one apart. So if one track is a 3, the other wants to be a 2, 3 or 4.
Most DJ software lets you shift a track’s key up or down with a couple of buttons. The number doesn’t simply go up or down by one when you do this, but within two steps either way you’ll find a number that works.
You don’t need to understand why this works (although if you’re one of our All-Access members, there’s a whole module on it). As long as the phrases are lined up, you can play music over music and it’s likely to sound good.
But key is a tool, not a rule. The algorithms that detect key sometimes get it wrong, so trust your ears.
And always play the right track next, not just one with a key you know will match. Get the song right first, and worry about the mixing second. There’s more on this in our article on fuzzy key mixing.
5. Always know which track is dominating
Two tracks playing with everything turned up loud clash with each other rather than complement each other. Your audience needs one track to listen to, with the other as the backup act.
You can do this with the volume alone, but the classic way is the bass EQ. Turn the bass down on one track and you take out its kick drum and bassline in one go, so the other track automatically dominates.
To switch which track is dominating, swap the bass over – down on one, up on the other, on a phrase of course. When you see DJs doing that, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Do it this way and when you finally take the old track out, it doesn’t jar, because people were already mostly listening to the new one.
This is all basic stuff, but it needs to be in your muscle memory. Until it is, no demo of a house mix, no transition you’ve copied off the internet and no YouTube video of a cool trick is going to make sense.
6. Balance tension and release
Producers build tension and release into every track.
The intro sets out its stall and hints that something’s coming. The bassline arriving releases a bit of that tension and gets a groove going. The breakdown is a release too, as the drums go, but its second half is the build-up, where people start to wonder what’s coming next.
Then, just before the drop, producers often take everything out for a beat or two. When it all comes back in on the next phrase, that’s the big release.
Different dancefloors want a different balance of the two. In a smoky little basement where everyone’s locked into a groove, there might be no big breakdowns at all. With big trance anthems in a stadium, the beats are almost just there to get you from one huge breakdown to the next.
As a DJ, you can influence this with the tracks you pick (the groovers and chuggers, or the ones with big peaks and troughs), and with how you play them. Do you play all the breakdowns, or mix out of tracks before they’ve had too many?
There’s one more big rule here. The quicker you mix between songs, the more tension and energy you build, and the more you let songs breathe, the more relaxed your dancefloor will be.
So in a warm-up, let the songs play. As the energy builds towards the peak of the night, play less of each track.
7. Emphasise and complement what the producer has done
This one is your secret weapon. The producer finished the track without knowing the people in front of you. You do, and part of your job is adding that final little flourish.
To emphasise something, such as a little synth riff before a drop, you could turn up the mid EQ. The bass EQ is where the kick drum and bassline live, the high EQ is where the hi-hats live, and everything else is in the mids.
The filter usually sounds more musical, though, and it’s something you hear in house music all the time. Start with it turned a little to the left, and bring it back up through the eight-bar phrase.
Whatever you do, be finished when the first beat of the next phrase arrives. People expect everything to be back to normal there, because that’s where the release always happens. You can mess around just before it, but not on it.
To complement the track, borrow the producer’s trick of taking everything out just before a new phrase. Find a spot where one eight-bar phrase simply repeats, with nothing marking the join, and make your own little gap.
For a beat or two, pull the volume down, cut an EQ, or turn the filter to the right so only a bit of sizzle is left. Then put it all back as the next phrase starts.
Little, subtle things like these add that extra bit of sparkle to your mixes.
Put All 7 Together
Mix in phrases, be careful with anything but drums, pick the right place to mix, mix in key without letting it rule you, always know which track is dominating, balance tension and release, and emphasise and complement what’s in your tracks.
Do all that, and you’re halfway to playing house music competently, and doing the things you see your favourite DJs doing.
Take your house mixing further
Our House Mixing Mastery course covers all of this right at the start, then shows you world-class house mixing tricks and techniques that play with these rules – and sometimes break them, but by then you’ll understand why.
Phil Morse
