Rodders
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Rodders
MemberOn a MacBook Pro, I use Carbon Copy Cloner once a week to do a full bootable system back up to FW drive, plus a weekly backup of my iTunes folder on a separate external hard drive.
MemberI’ve been using Twitch with Traktor 2.5 for a couple of weeks now. The Novation mapping works very well, there’s a Traktor overlay included in the box and it’s all fairly intuitive so a quick flick through the getting started guide and you’re away. I haven’t actually used it with Serato (apart to check out the slicer function you mentioned!) but here’s what I can tell you – the “Performance Modes” are now Hot Cues, FX (to assign a deck to one of the 4 FX slots), Loop (similar to the Serato Auto Loop) and Beat Grid (adjust & fine tune grid markers / BPM). The FX section is a little different to match how Traktor handles FX, you can either use the encoders to control the wet/dry of all 4 FX, or bring up one FX deck parameters, and you can’t ‘flip’ one of the FX to the faders like you can with Serato. Like I said I had a quick look at the slicer in Serato and can’t yet see a way to accomplish this in Traktor although I have only been using it a few weeks so there’s lots I don’t yet know.
A couple of cool things I like about Twitch with Traktor – you can have control of 4 decks at once, all the faders/encoders work in pickup mode so there’s no big jumps when swapping decks. Also the touchstrip is a breeze to use when mixing so have found no need for the sync button. One tiny bugbear is that the shift value of the controls isn’t displayed on the overlay although there’s only a few controls this applies to. The only other thing I’d like to do is map the Remix Decks to be controlled by Decks C-D.
Let me know if there’s anything in particular you wish to know. I haven’t yet checked out any other homemade mappings but might take a look into this over the weekend.
June 18, 2012 at 3:01 pm in reply to: What one lesson has playing in front of a real audience taught you about programming / song choice? #1006380MemberThis might sound obvious but be prepared to change direction of your mix if the audience seem so inclined, regardless of what genre was expected beforehand.
actionPak, post: 22081, member: 2399 wrote: Always intersperse your set with some songs the crowd knows (i.e., radio friendly, commercial remix) or else they will all leave the dancefloor…. 🙁
This is where clever use of samples, loops and acapellas come in.. Find a few choice snippets to drop over whatever you happen to be playing and the crowd simply think they’re listening to a new bootleg and you don’t lose any credibility by ‘selling out’ your mix 🙂
June 18, 2012 at 3:00 pm in reply to: What one lesson has playing in front of a real audience taught you about programming / song choice? #1006379MemberThis might sound obvious but be prepared to change direction of your mix if the audience seem so inclined, regardless of what genre was expected beforehand.
actionPak, post: 22081, member: 2399 wrote: Always intersperse your set with some songs the crowd knows (i.e., radio friendly, commercial remix) or else they will all leave the dancefloor…. 🙁
This is where clever use of samples, loops and acapellas come in.. Find a few choice snippets to drop over whatever you happen to be playing and the crowd simply think they’re listening to a new bootleg and you don’t lose any credibility by ‘selling out’ your mix 🙂
MemberIt’s a good point Chris, especially considering the influx and availability of digital tunes versus buying a few 12″s every week. I think what Terry 42 said above about looking at the waveform and cue points is a great idea. If you can understand what you’re looking at in the waveform, you can look at an entire track and know ‘ok so this is the intro, then a beat kicks in here, then it all comes in, then there’s the breakdown, then it’s all full-on’ etc. And also most (not all!) dance music follows a fairly straight formula, you know, 16/32 bar sections. So technically speaking you can probably mix most tracks of a similar genre together and (this for me is a crucial point) providing they’re in key, you could make it work, without knowing the tracks inside out. At a most basic (or lazy!) level you just know that the last section of one track (16 / 32 bars) is probably a good time to start the beginning of another, and work your magic with EQs.
The trick then when you’re practising is to find those tracks or those sections of a track that really complement each other. You might flick through a track and be immediately taken by the breakdown, or the chorus, or an acapella part. You then don’t need to know the whole track, just single that bit out, loop it, sample deck, whatever.
Finally, think about how you structure your crate and how you label your tracks. Personally I structure my crates according to genre and wherever possible rename my tracks to include the key, that way I know immediately if the tracks have a good chance of working together, regardless of how well I know them. Of course, it helps if you understand a little about keys / harmony to make this work.
MemberI use the sync button (or pre-warp my tracks) but having DJ’d for over 20 years I feel like I’ve earned that right 🙂
Echoing the comments above, I’d advise learning the fundamentals so you know what to do when things go wrong. If a mix is done well then it makes no difference whether it’s manual or sync’d, but if it’s a trainwreck due to poor beat gridding / warping / whatever, you’re going to make yourself look stupid if you don’t know how to immediately rectify it.
MemberIt’s very easy to get laid as a wedding DJ. Just thought I’d throw this out there..
MemberMy DJ software is currently Ableton, reason being is I’ve been using it since 2004, initially as a production tool but it seemed an obvious cross-over to start DJ-ing with it (was a vinyl and CD man before that). Coming from a production background (as opposed to purely DJ) I love the workflow and flexibility in terms of FX, signal routing, use of dummy clips etc. and it got me out of the mindset of DJ-ing just being about 2 or 3 channels.
Having said that, I recently used Traktor at a gig, and am considering getting under the hood of it a bit more. Interestingly all the other DJ’s I spoke with at the gig who were using laptops (about 10 in total) were all on some flavour of Traktor. I’ll still use Ableton for doing re-edits beforehand and stuff.
MemberUp until the end of last year I was an Events Manager for a big audio/video hardware & software company. Now I’m still figuring out what to do.. tempted to change career entirely because whilst working for that company my creativity dropped to almost zero (only so long you can stare at a DAW screen), since leaving I’ve done a DJ mix and got a regular gig, as well as working on a couple of remixes and 3 of my own productions!
MemberI remember in the 90s seeing Boy George and him not being able to mix for toffee but still having a fantastic night. A few years ago I saw Arthur Baker in London and same thing, he didn’t even attempt to beat match but his track selection was superb and his lack of mixing didn’t make one bit of difference to my enjoyment of the night.
As said in previous posts, the programming (the tunes themselves and the order they’re played in) is way more important to me than simply being able to beat match. Don’t get me wrong, as an artform I totally appreciate a DJ who can beat match perfectly using vinyl. And if a DJ does not mix at all but just plays tracks back to back, so be it, if they’re good tracks I will still dance and enjoy it. But if they do try to mix, I’m more interested in how they blend / mix the tracks together, with creative use of EQ, FX, levels, loops, whatever.. I don’t care if it’s a computer doing the actual beat matching / sync, because I think the only reason DJs had to learn to beat match in the first place was because they had no choice – the technology didn’t exist to do otherwise.
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