This school has been running for 16 years, and an awful lot of what we’ve published here on the blog recently has been for DJs who already know their way around their gear – reviews, software updates, new features and more advanced techniques.
But every day, someone somewhere unboxes their first controller with no idea where to start. We’ve just launched a brand-new beginner course for exactly those people, so today, we’re going back to basics here on the blog too.
We’re starting with the skill that matters most: getting from one song to the next.
Here are the only five transitions you’ll ever need to do that, plus the one thing that 16 years of teaching and 50,000 students have shown us matters more than anything else for a new DJ. (And if you’ve been DJing for a while, it’s worth a few minutes to check your own habits against it.)
Pick the song first
Good DJs pick the song first, then work out how to get into it. That’s the secret.
The biggest beginner mistake is only playing songs you’ve already figured out how to transition between. It bores your dancefloor, it bores you, and you never learn anything new.
What lets you work the other way round is knowing that not every transition is a beat mix. Once that penny drops, you can play the song people want to hear, every time.
We first set this out in our book Rock The Dancefloor! back in 2016, and it changed how DJing was taught. (Every new free member of Digital DJ Tips gets a download of it, so grab your copy here.)
Where to mix: count to four
Before any of the transitions, you need to know where in a song to do them. If you can count to four, you’re fine.
Songs have beats, beats are grouped into bars of four, and bars are grouped into phrases of eight. At the end of every phrase, something changes – something arrives, something leaves, a chorus ends, a drop begins.
No DJ counts out loud at a gig, but you should while you’re learning. Count along with the video and you’ll hear the changes land exactly where you expect them. We get our students to scribble down song maps showing where everything comes and goes. They soon realise all songs are built the same way.
The rule is to line up phrases, not just beats and bars: the intro of one song over the outro of another, a drop landing at the end of a build-up, and so on. Pick the right song, work out where its phrases are, and start it on a phrase change in the song that’s playing. A lot of the time, you won’t even need to beat mix.
The Five Transitions
1. The basic beatmix
This works anywhere, as long as both tracks are a similar genre and you can get them to the same BPM with the pitch control.
Set a cue point on the first beat of the new track (which is also the first beat of its first phrase). Press play at the start of a phrase in the old track, and slowly bring the new one in. Leave everything else on the mixer at 12 o’clock and the crossfader in the middle – you can worry about the rest later.
2. The bass swap
The same mix, but with the new track’s bass EQ turned down as it comes in. Four bars into the eight-bar transition, swap them over: bass down on the old track, bass up on the new one. Two kick drums and two lots of low end at once sound worse, not better, which is why DJs use this one so much.
Moving on, hip-hop, pop, rock and funk (or better still, a mix of all of them) often have no long sections to beat mix over, or tracks that are too far apart in tempo and feel. As long as the timing’s right, the simplest things work and nobody will care.
3. The end-to-end
Wait for the song to end, and start the next one on the first beat of the next phrase. In the video, a radio edit fades out over its final chorus, and the new track starts on the “one” once it has faded to nothing. Get the timing right and things happen when people expect them to, and you can get away with pretty much anything.
4. The fade-out
Once you know a well-timed fade works, you can do the fade yourself, whenever you’ve had enough of a track. Time it so the old track has faded just as the new one starts on the first beat of a phrase.
5. The stop/start
There’s nothing wrong with stopping the track dead and starting the next one, with no volume controls at all. Again, it’s all about the timing. Make sure the new track opens on something recognisable or dramatic enough to grab attention straight away.
Finally…
We’ve got dozens of courses with some of the best DJs in the world teaching impressive, creative transitions, but the DJs who pull those off have already nailed everything here. Practise these five properly first. The clever stuff comes later
- If you’ve got a DDJ-FLX4, our How To DJ Fast On Your DDJ-FLX4 course is the quickest way to go from complete beginner to playing proper DJ sets. It takes you step by step through everything here and much more, on the exact controller in front of you.
