Clifford Anderson
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Clifford Anderson
ParticipantHi, Maven!
I’ve been DJing for about 3 years now, and I also don’t do a lot of fancy stuff myself… I am starting to do a bit of 4 deck mixing, but it’s mostly just not all that useful for the kinds of music I play, as I play music with heavy vocal content, so I am already plenty busy keeping them from clashing and it doesn’t seem to bring anything to my mixes that I really want or need.
Same for FX, I just don’t really find that I need them much to have a mix that sounds awesome to my ears.
Like Chuck, I make heavy use of EQ all over the place for shaping the music, as he says, that’s our hammer and screwdriver set right there.
Unlike Chuck, though, I am not a mobile DJ, but a party/small festival DJ, so I do tend to be focused on a subset of genres… but that is mostly related to how I pick and curate my collection. Most of the skills I’ve developed have translated just fine to other types of music when I’ve had reason to play other styles, though honestly, I tend to find mixing styles that never have vocals to not be very interesting for me personally.
I wouldn’t stress too much about your “technical skills timeline.”
ParticipantFun track… good sound separation, even on my lowest quality speakers, I could hear the different parts pretty clearly.
ParticipantI’m not a huge sample user myself, so can’t help you much there, sorry.
ParticipantEspecially with the gang that hangs around here.
ParticipantSounds like a good session!
ParticipantI’m going to add to what you said a little… stop practicing when you are getting frustrated, but if you are not, then keep goin’ so long as you are feelin’ the groove.
It’s the point of frustration when I let myself stop for the day too, usually because some song has a weird structure that’s hard to work with or what have you. “Why won’t this track mix with anything else? It’s so awesome, I want to play it out!”
Had one earlier today… the song had some truly bizarre phrase lengths. 7.3? Really? Why do you hate me?
ParticipantIn other words… practice, practice, practice! This hobby right here is one where you can easily spend hours every day perfecting the skill.
I have slowed down slightly… when I started, I was doing 4 hours of practice pretty much every day… these days, more like 2-3 (and I have more off days now where I let myself not feel like it than I used to), but still, this is something where you can easily spend all your free time doing it if you so desire.
ParticipantIf they’re a compatible key, it won’t really matter. I’d pick which one you think is cooler sounding.
January 29, 2016 at 8:43 pm in reply to: Downloading videos to use with Serato Video plug-in… #2348611ParticipantThe demoscene is going to be a good resource for that… most of the releases are real-time, which won’t help you, but a lot of them have at least been captured as video that can be downloaded.
http://www.pouet.net or http://www.scene.org
Wild would be productions that are video to start with, though you can find video downloads attached to a lot of the normal demos and intros too.
“fr-025: the.popular.demo,” for example, has a dancing shiny guy, a disco floor, a big disco ball… lots of great imagery for you to use, and includes a downloadable video capture. http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9450
ParticipantHey, Smitty, welcome to the board!
I wouldn’t stress too much about it, it takes time to get the chops. You’re on the right road, and you know what it is you want to get good at right now – namely, learning where the phrases are at and how to key mix. Of those two, understanding phrasing is much more globally important, though key mixing is certainly something you’re going to need to figure out.
So… before you can identify phrases, first, you just need to be able to identify bars. That’s not too hard, you should pick that up from the DJ Fast course… To the beat, 1-2-3-4… at least, usually. Don’t even try to mix tracks that aren’t a 4/4 beat right now (and don’t even worry about that that means for now either).
Phrases are usually just a certain number of bars… it depends on your musical style, but it is commonly 8 bars… in Hip-Hop, though, it is often 4. So, when you count beats, it’ll be, like:
1-2-3-4, 2-2-3-4, 3-2-3-4, 4-2-3-4, 5-2-3-4, 6-2-3-4, 7-2-3-4, 8-2-3-4… then repeat.
That will usually be a phrase, maybe only 4 instead of 8, whatever.
Practice, practice, practice. That’s the biggest key. You’ll get to the point where you will just feel where the phrases are at because the biggest indicator that you’re at a new phrase is that the music will change in some way. Either it will feel like it starts a loop over, or it changes up to a different this or that. A lot of the time, you’ll also get things like a drum roll leading up to the change, or a cymbal hit right after it, for example.
Hope this helps at least some, rambling as it is.
ParticipantYeah, good point… if you want to hear a huge chunk of my history, you can go find the thread called “Friday Flavourites.”
ParticipantFor what it’s worth, at this point in time, you can still use non-Native Instruments hardware with Traktor. I own a Reloop Terminal Mix 8, which comes with Serato, but I also use it with Traktor (as well as my own DJ software), and I’m quite happy with it.
That said, Native Instruments in more interested in selling you hardware to go with their software, so expect support from NI for non-NI gear to continue to flag as time goes on.
ParticipantThe start is a little rough around the edges, but it settles into a real sweet groove pretty quickly, definitely enjoyin’ and bobbin’ my head… the transitions are a lot more transparent after the opening too, nicely done.
ParticipantHow do you buy Serato? I thought it was only available with licensed hardware. Do you maybe mean the upgrade from Intro was on sale and you bought that?
ParticipantOK, yeah… mapping it yourself, that’s a fair point that almost always escapes me if I don’t think about it.
Yeah, Serato is always the special consideration since they don’t support unlicensed hardware at all… not too surprised Rekordbox isn’t MIDI friendly, at least yet – I suspect that that will change as Pioneer tries to apply the screws to keep their dominance.
The best reason I would say in favor of it is, if you are leaning toward Traktor as one of your primary options, but also want to use something else, if that other thing supports user MIDI mapping, then the Traktor license being part of your ticket price is pretty darned appealing… but only if you have the technical chops to do your own mapping.
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