Well, I’m a fairly new DJ myself but have been playing and recording music for years. Based on research I’ve done, a lot of successful DJs also produce their own music so I think it definitely can help. I’d also recommend some of the online courses that Digital DJ Tips offers as they do talk about some production techniques which are relevant to DJing. If you were to take an overall music production class, while I think can still be helpful, might not be so relevant to the performing DJ.
Good luck and hopefully others will provide more feedback
@ Harry – Hey! Great mix! Just curious, how did you record it? I just took the MixTape course and it had a lot of good info on it. Did you use the internal recorder on whatever DJ software you’re using? Did you use Audacity or Ableton, or something else?
@Terry 42 – Thanks for mentioning my question in your recent post. Very cool moment as I read your articles regularly so when I saw my name, my mind went “whoa??” haha. Yeah, I’m easy to impress.
Well, very cool that you and Phil also play guitar. Since both of you have tons of experience Dj’ing live, is it feasible to somehow incorporate live guitar into a DJ set? I’ve taken almost all of your courses (which has helped me streamline a lot of what was in my head), experimented with different combinations of live setups, different styles of remixes but still don’t have a set system for making music danceable while also incorporating guitar into the set? I don’t want it to just sound like some guy playing live guitar over a compressed, mastered song that everybody knows nor do I want it to sound like a live rock band that just happens to have a sample of a song like this experiment we did in NY Times Square:
so I’ve ditched the idea of using live drums completely but maybe have my friend do finger drumming to keep all the sounds compressed and nicely EQ’d and record any guitar ideas with any song samples/remixes so I could focus on DJ’ing AND THEN MAYBE AT CERTAIN KEY POINTS IN THE SONG/SET, bust out the guitar to compliment the songs and/or add flavor. An example might be if I mixed in Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, maybe either the solo or the chorus, actually play live guitar but going through a compressor to make it all cohesive? But I also don’t want to just play songs that happen to have guitar in them and then merely play the guitar parts as that would be lame, but actually add new guitar parts to make it a live remix.
Anyways, thanks for any feedback. It’s daunting at times but I think I’m closer to the solution now than ever before. Biggest problem I think, is showing up to a venue where they might only have CDJ’s or only have Serato, so was thinking of just relying on iphone/ipad as easy to transport and I would just load up my remixed songs with the recorded guitar parts.
@DJ Vintage – Haha, yeah, I couldn’t come up with any other name so figured fuck it, and then aha! Lightbulb went off and it clicked!
@DJ Vintage – Have you guys cancelled the MixTape course? I was also considering taking it but when i click on the link, it only show a video, no link on where to purchase the course.
