Ever wanted to play a song in your DJ set but couldn’t, because there’s nothing clean to mix in or out of?
Lots of tracks, especially pop and older music, start and end without the clean beats you need to beatmix. The usual fix is hunting for an extended version in a DJ pool, and older tracks often aren’t there at all.
In the video, I show you how I got ChatGPT to make me a DJ-friendly edit of This Charming Man by The Smiths, a 40-year-old track that doesn’t end cleanly. It took about 15 minutes, and watching the video is the best way to learn this, because you need to hear the before and after.
What ChatGPT did
It added eight bars of beats to the start and the end of the track, with the beatgrid and the phrasing spot on.
The track has no clean drums to use, so it ran a stem separation engine in the background all by itself, pulled the beats out of the song and built the intro and outro from them.
At the end it did something even cleverer: it left a short pause and added a little drum fill, so everything stays on phrase, as if the band had just carried on playing.
The two prompts I used
Upload your track to ChatGPT, then start with this:
It didn’t get the ending right first time, so I followed up with this:
Your track will have its own quirks, so change the second prompt to describe what’s wrong with your edit, in plain English.
You’re still the DJ
AI only gives you good results if you understand what you’re asking for, which is why it pays to be able to do this manually first.
So listen back to every edit. Are there a full eight bars, and does the outro land on the phrase? If not, tell it what to fix.
Do it inside a ChatGPT project and build your corrections into the project’s instructions, and it won’t make the same mistakes next time. After half a dozen tricky tracks, it’ll be pretty bulletproof.
The result is a version of a song nobody else has, ready to mix into any set, for good.
Now make the mix
Once your tracks are ready, the next step is recording your mix – and we’ve all had a transition go wrong at the end and had to start all over again.
Our Pro Mixtape Formula course shows you how the million-selling mix CDs were actually made: real DJs doing real mixing, no cheating in a DAW, with mistakes that are easy to fix.
Phil Morse
