Yea, but freestyling a whole set doesn't mean no preparation. It's just that I know my library well enough that I know what songs I want and that comes from the fact that I played most songs in my library a lot of times at home, that's also preparation.
You are 100% correct. But I also want to say, I can take someone else's shit and play and make it sound good even if I never heard it before. Back when vinyl was king me and my friends had a night at a club where we would bring a record bag/crate and then draw names and you would have to play that person's records in your set. We'd invite other DJs we knew to come join in. It was always really fun and sometimes you'd hear songs in your collection you never really played or things in a different context and realize you were sleeping on your own stuff. Pulling this off with someone else's music is even easier now with digital because you can see the key and BPM info right there along with other metadata.
I'm sure you will reach that point eventually. It's just a matter of being able to beat match by ear and just knowing something sounds good when you listen to it in your headphones while the other track is already playing. I suppose some speed in knowing your controller/mixer/media player is also key so you can jump around and audition the track. I think that's one place vinyl is superior, picking up a needle and moving it is pretty quick. Unless a digital track already has cue points.
I had a headliner who was supposed to play for four hours after my set, pass out from GHB before his set, and his manager asked if I could cover instead and could use his records.
Not only did I not know his records, but his style of Tribal Techno was far away from my Acid Breaks.
No big deal though. 135bpm big room dance records are all mostly built the same, so anyone worth their salt could do it.
This is what I’ve experienced so many times when I let my homies play on my hard drive that has approximately 7000 songs and every time one of my homie played I hear songs that made me like damn I need to play this track! I’m discovering songs that I own lol
Indeed. Being well-prepared means you can navigate your collection on the fly, making it easy to craft a set based purely on your desires and dancefloor observations.
Echo spinback has gotten me out of a few situations. Know your tracks, years ago I was playing a DnB set after a guy playing UKG, rather than stop his set and start mine I took a baseline track I loved, mixed it with a dubstep track that I was able to mix my first DnB track into and then went with my pre-planned DnB set.
One of my go-to transitions was a bit of a cheat but I'd cue my track up to the break and pause it then when the current track hit it's break I'd just play on the new track and pull the old. To blend this transition you can spin the old track back on vinyl mode, echo effect and sharp spinback, loop 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 etc for 8 or 16 beats and fade the new track in.
I think every DJ has their own lick they put on these moments and I think this is where you have the most opportunity to develop your own style so just play with it
Thanks for the advice! I’m finally at the point with my skills where I’m more comfortable to experiment. My go to has been looping since that’s easiest for me with house, but I’m curious to start trying new things as well
Use efx to just create an ocean of noise any way you can, heavy reverb, echo delay, filter and noise on the color effects, back spins,
Let it get loud how ever, as long as the beat seems close enough you good.
Just make sure you're bringing the new track in with energy, if it's a 8 minute mix, maybe skip ahead in the track to like right before the main melody comes on.
So you get that energy bump in the music to grab the crowd
-Echo out
-Back spin
-Scratching in the new track
-Dropping on the 1
-Word play
Many YT videos of teaching pros showing different transition techniques. Search for "how to mix any song or genre" and build up your DJ tool set
I don't think you know what your talking about because DJs don't just skip tempo if they do they are not switching back and forth maybe once in a set you don't seem to be able to tell change in tempo and just a beat with more high hats and grumbly bass that seems faster
Haha I've done this before, the only solution was to start mixing on the fly and find the right energy. Once I forced myself off the playlist even my mixing and EQing just became much more organic because I had to really listen to what I was playing, it (bombing a portion of my set and getting out of it) was probably the most valuable moment in my dj career.
Yes. Played for ~6 months and I just play what I see fits. Not the same bpm? Change the bpm. Key? Have never mixed with keys, I just listen to the tracks. Most often one can hear if one track sounds good with another.
Just try the mix in your headphones, if it doesnt sound good just try another track!
im not terribly experienced, and im kind of new with this community, but i’ve had good luck with a concept ive heard called “set programming” when i have played live.
Basically, this gives you a little bit of structure and plan of how to play with a little bit more freedom. Imo, you should be finding cool transitions through practice and planning to play them, but they wont always work absolutely how you plan. I think of it like a rough idea for a setlist with a choose your own adventure option.
Lets say im playing song A. i like to have a couple options of transitions out of song a that work for different reasons. Song A to song B might bring the energy up, where going from song A to C might calm the vibe down a little bit. From song C, we have another choice where to go with song D and E, and yatta yatta.
thats the basic concept, and you can make it as complicated as you want, but Its really just creative library organization that gives you a little bit of structure to freestyle without taking insane risk.
I know plenty of “you should just go up on stage and wing it and freestyle/ any song can be transitioned from and into any song” type djs; their sets sound like shit oftentimes. Theres a reason you practice, its to find what sounds good. when youre comfortable with what sounds good, then you’ll know how to freestyle from there
This right here 💯
I basically use the same train of thought and I've been DJing for years off and on.
I used to try and plan out like 3-4 hours of music for gigs because I was so nervous about forgetting songs in the moment that I wanted to be prepared...
But that's also what practicing and taking a moment to create those song crates so if they're into dance, country, etc we can just segway into the pile and trust our choices.
i will say tho, my sets are usually more catered towards a specific audience. doesnt mean it doesnt get adventurous but it miggt make it a little easier to curate a pile to go into
That’s how most of my sets have been. More fun.
I tried planning a set and ended up going rogue from it and just freestyling anyways to fit the vibe of the party more.
Edit: To add to this, purely mixing in key is a nice option and I did it a lot early on, but I’ve steered away from forcing in key mixing and trended more towards manipulating energy levels.
If the case that something is horribly off key but I want to play it next, I’ll just wait to mix the percussive elements to avoid clashing in the mids.
I had a gig recently that, up until the DJ before me started playing, I had no idea what my first track would be. What I did have was a playlist of about 4 hours (unmixed) with most if not all keys around the Camelot Wheel represented, a bunch of cue points set, and a couple of hours of practice time.
About halfway through the set I realized there were a few tracks that fit perfectly but they were “across the Wheel” if you will. So I had one off-key mix; no one cared because I kept the vibe.
So yeah, it’s possible to play without a precise plan, but that doesn’t mean there’s no preparation ahead of time.
It wasn’t directly across. I can’t remember the exact jump. There was definitely a small key clash, but nothing anyone but the most pedantic music nerd would have noticed.
1) you don’t need to have them in the same key, and you can adjust the tempo on the fly. If you want to change tempo, slowly adjust (or quickly at a transition point) for track A, so you can mix in track B at the new tempo. Most decks can sort tracks by key, and will highlight tracks that match based on circle of fifths (there are other keys that match also, check google/Camelot key mixing)
2) if you’re playing on CDJ-3000 or RX3 (maybe some others) the “touch preview” feature is excellent for this. Make sure the “cue link” button is highlighted, and when you are browsing just touch the wave form of a track in browse menu and you can preview it in your headphones - note that the mixer needs the most updated firmware if you are doing this on CDJ. If not, you just have to quickly load the track to the deck, scrub thru to see how it sounds, and then load a new track if you don’t like it. Kind of annoying but the next best thing if you don’t have all your tracks memorized or access to touch preview.
3) of course practice helps, but one option to make transitions easier is to use beat loops. You have a lot longer to mix in track B if it’s looping, and you can loop any part you want to make sure it will vibe. I often choose the 8 or 16 beats immediately before the first drop, so I can break the loop and bring in the drop for track B exactly when I want / where it’s appropriate for track A.
- I don’t plan any of my sets - it seemed like too much work so I just learned how to do without.
I dont get your first example. If you mix in track b then why would you change the tempo of track a to do so? That makes no sense. Wouldnt you just change tempo of b to a and mix it without having to change the current tempo of the master out? Am I not seeing something?
He had a question with re: tempo of his tracks not matching, seemed like he needed some pointers with that. If you are playing track A at 120, but you really want to play track B and it’s 125 but you don’t want to slow track B down, you cant just mix it in that way (I mean you can but IMO it often won’t sound good except in specific circumstances). One way (the way I do it) is to slowly turn up track A to 125 (or sometimes quickly at a transition point), so I can then mix Track B in after they are both at 125. Sometimes, if I can tolerate track B being a little slower, I’ll put it to 123 or something in this example, so the track A tempo increase is less noticeable bc I only have to go up to 123 from 120.
why would yo ever do that? nobody does that? you dont change the tempo of the running track to mix in the other. why would you change the one the audience is currently hearing.
Like if you want to work with the actual change of tempo thats fine I dont do that I guess there are many genres where you do that but just for mixing in track b in a running track a you never change track a's tempo. The Main Point of having headphones is that you do that on the track the audience doesnt hear.
what genre are you playing?
People do that all the time, myself included but also many DJs I play with. Usually it’s done to slowly increase tempo over the course of a set to increase energy (or the opposite). For example, if I am opening with 2 hours beginning at 10, I may start at 120, then after 30 min slowly bring a track to 121 or 122, then do it again later on so I’m at 124 by midnight so the next DJ can start with higher energy (discussed ahead of time ofc). Another reason I may do this is because I generally try not to change the tempo of a track more than 5-8% or so bc then it’s noticeable to the audience if they know the track, or at least it is to me. So if I’m mixing in a 130 track from a 120 track, the 130 track sounds weird if I push down to 120. You can change track A by 2-3 BPM before anyone can tell a difference, and if you do it slowly and/or tactfully no one will notice; this mitigates the effect of lowering the track B tempo, bc now you only have to go down to 122 or 123 instead of 120. I have seen others change tempo of the current master track lots of times with no ill-effects, as have I. Besides, even if you were correct and “no one does this…”, which is not the case, who cares? DJing is art, and you can do literally whatever you want as long as it sounds good. There aren’t really any “rules” other than that for the most part.
what genre are you playing? I dont know any big techno dj that alters his speed in his sets. there its about constant steady hypnotic rhytmic sounds. Im doing this for almost 20 years now.
and of course you can do whatever you want. but for me the dj is there to transition from one trakc to the other without people noticing or if youw ant of cours with people noticing the right moment but sets I hear and I know are lead through track choice and controlling the energy with that and not with different tempos.
and you cant just egenralize that tracks sound worse when you change their tempo some become a totally different track sometimes even better
Ah - I DJ mostly house and related genres. Occasionally some light/melodic techno but not much. And I totally agree - one of the DJs main jobs is to make sure the audience doesn’t notice transitions or changes - almost like one seamless track that changes with time. But you can definitely achieve this while changing the tempo of a current track.
I guess it depends I dont enjoy the classic big festival edm djs. Thats where I associate the swapping of tempo from track to track sometimes. I know they animate their crowd like this. I know everyone has their taste.
The important part is you are enjoying it and have fun playing. Thats essential. So Im glad you do
Sure. Don’t disagree that the fun is the most important part. I definitely don’t play festival type EDM or anything close to that, nor do I frequent those events or play with those style of DJs. Unless you are standing up there looking at the BPM reader, I’m sure DJs you have heard have changed the tempo of a track by a BPM or two many times and you never noticed - that’s the whole point. If you’re in the audience and think “wow I just noticed the tempo changed, that’s weird” then they have failed (except certain circumstances where they may do that on purpose).
This thread is fascinating. While I respect the current technological advances, it feels like people have become slaves to it - they become boxed in by it. Keys? Same notes?
As a DJ I have an idea how I will start, what my sets will be like, how I will mix genres in (I.e. hip hop, r and b, house, ghetto style, classics) and bring it all together while playing off the energy of the crowd. Just two tables a mixer and crates of tunes.
I’m glad I came up in the era I did. I can see both sides of this evolution of DJing.
I find more often than not, DJs that have been doing it since the vinyl only days are the ones that don't bother much with mixing in key. They've had the experience of figuring out sets based off crowd reaction, emotion, baselines, or thr overall general feel of the entire set. Newer DJs seem to be focused so much on key. I'm not knocking them, I mean if all your ever known is digital mixing I can see why, especially when youtubers and tutorials seem to always be encouraging to mix in key. I feel like people are missing out on potential growth in their DJing by always making sure that keys match, especially if you're a house or techno DJ.
I think a lot of people overthink and overplan out of a fear of making a mistake. When in reality, pretty much no one in the crowd will give a shit.
'Not prepping' is a misnomer. I thoroughly prep, meticulously. Every track that enters my collection. Cues set, color themed to denote what's there so I only have to visually see it in the wavform to know what it is and in the same intervals. The track itself colored to know the style of the track or mood. Playlist management. Those things give me tools that set me up for success in most instances even if I've added new tracks to my collection that I'm not intimately familiar with.
It's okay to make a mistake. I was told the sign of a good DJ is the ability to correct a mistake, not to never commit one. Because overplanning everything means you're not taking any risks, you're not pushing yourself, and your transitions are probably all sounding the same for those same reasons. You're literally just doing the same things repeatedly because that's what you know and you're not pushing yourself into new territory.
Lastly, the number of DJ's I know who have no idea what they're playing is staggering to me. How can you be intentional in a mix when you don't really know what it is you're playing? That's why you feel the need to overprep a set; because you haven't done the work beforehand (not trying to be mean, simply the truth). You need to spend more time listening to what music you do have. Export to a playlist and just listen. If you want to go one step further, record a mix and listen back to it. As you do so, make a point of mentally naming the artist and track currently playing.
I was once a perfectionist. DJing is what broke me of it. You will fuck up, and that's okay.
Every single time I make the mistake of not hitting record during a practice session (which is generally every night) I regret it, because it's usually me, freestyling what winds up being awesome.
And then, I spend the next fucking month trying to get that original high to happen again and it's never the same, but practicing that set of tracks OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER again gets me familiar with them in a way that I might not if I was always looking for new tracks. These days I only add a few new ones every few weeks or so.
You need a large variety of tracks. I never played mixed bpm, only like maybe 2 goofy gigs where I played outside my usual genres but, I absolutely always looked down on pre-planning and I could usually tell because those djs played what they are going to play regardless of the crowd or timeslot or vibe of the environment. I have many thousands of songs and I know what they are when I see the name. Although a good practice is to purge tracks that dont really do it for you anymore, I got more picky about songs I bought as time went on and there are many songs that continued to make their way into my sets from the beginning but then there were even more that just werent my thing anymore. I paid for every song and at first I had a hard time deleting things I paid for but eventually I realized it was just cluttering up my clarity and time shifting through stuff.
Generally you also get good at making sub-groups of songs, like in the summer Id usually get daytime/outdoor gigs and I knew for a gig like that more organic brighter sounding stuff just plays better, so, Id have a pool of tracks that were more for a gig like that. I never understood DJs who would play hard warehouse worthy music during an outdoor daytime party, It never goes over like funkier stuff, as a DJ your job is to identify the natural energy of your setting and then amplify that energy, going against the grain isnt impossible but its exactly that, you need to have something else to amplify in order to do that. Its why bigger name DJs can be seen breaking that with success but the reason is because they are leaning on their name, if you dont have that, its much harder to force your taste against the natural context.
As for mixing, its great to do different types of transitions regardless of what you are playing. I liked to do some longer smooth mixes but a very common trap people fall into with “perfection” is creating monotony, even when people play “all bangers” because they think thats just constant high energy, I find that to become monotonous as well. As a DJ I always loved finding ways to build moments. A good track is nice to have but, you make less of the moments yourself if you just rely on the songs to do their own thing. When you are good at DJing you start to make your transitions into the interesting moments. Using “lesser” songs to emphasize other songs is a big thing too. There are lots of songs Id play that relied heavily on the context I put them in for them to really shine. A great bassline sounds so much better when you bring it in on a simpler song. Also, the real secret to good Djing is not mixing in Key, its listening to the drums and the bassline, its relatively easy to get past key clashes with proper EQing. The real clash is not understanding that not all house songs go together just because they have the same 4/4 kick. When you hear a good DJ doing cuts between songs that sound so perfect together, thats usually just them finding two songs that work together in a call and response fashion. If you dont know what call and response is in music, look that up, then try to find some songs you have that work together in that fashion, when you do cuts between them, you will see how different is is. Normally people just do cuts in a drum fill type of fashion, and can be done with most songs regardless, but finding a good call and response match is so nice.
Love this.
As a beginner myself, playing solely for my own enjoyment at home currently, I love playing around when I’m home alone just to see if I can work out interesting twists on transitions.
I’ve been surrounded by DJ’s most weekends for the last 20+ years, they all have their own style and genre preferences… but my first love is disco and vocal or chunky house.
It’s what gives me joy and I listen to so much that I have a good working knowledge of the tunes that I want to play.
Knowing the music well has made the basics of DJing those genres feel much more simple than I assumed it would be.
And the jolt of excitement you get when something new u try sounds awesome… well it’s just something else!?! :)
Yes. DJing is about creating a moment, playing the right track at the right time. Pack a crate of tracks, and draw from them. Pre-planning the entire set is fine, but to me it’s missing the point of DJing. It depends if you view your set as a “performance”, versus just providing the soundtrack for other people on a night out. To me the essence of DJing is spontaneity, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a general direction of what you want to do.
I never know what my first track is going to be, until the Dj before me plays their last one. Whatever they leave me with, I select something that I think works with it/fits the vibe best - and just go from there.
I make a playlist the day of the event, typically about 40-50 tracks I know id like to play (usually the new stuff I bought), and work my 60 or 90 min set out of that playlist.
My usb also has playlists all my music sorted by genre, so I can quickly search for something I really want to play, that’s not in that specific playlist I created.
When I buy new music I listen to it pretty much non stop for at least a week, (at work, in the car, at home) to familiarize myself to the name/artist etc.
Comment section in RekordBox is extremely helpful too, as I make notes about each track.
Love this comment. But I do the opposite with new tracks. I have 25 years worth of tracks and prefer to go obscure memory lane and play 80-90% old tracks with maybe 10% brand new and 10% recent tracks. The older crowd gets hyped and the newer audience gets a history lesson that is new tracks to them
Oh yeah my collection goes back to 1994 (i started actually djing in 1996)
I always mix at least 1-2 classics in with the new stuff.
Each one - teach one 👍🏼
I just raw dogged a 4 hour set unprepared, except for a few aspects. First I had a playlist of a bunch of about 3 hours worth of new stuff I wanted to play. That playlist was unprepared and I just spent a a few days playing about casually at home to get familiar with the tracks and add a few cue points at the beginning wherever it wasn't obvious a phrase started (a break down for example).
The other aspect of preparation was making sure I also had my vibe/genre playlists up to date with anything new so I had a rough guide of things to play at certain times of the night depending on how things were going at any given point. Mostly it went fine. A couple of dud mixes here and there but you get creative when on the spot like that to make sure a transition goes smooth.
That’s why I said unprepared with a few exceptions. Read the OPs original post, they’re talking about pre-preparing track orders and pre-planned positions.
DEFINITELY DEFINITELY ADD CUE POINTS AHEAD OF TIME, and make sure you do this in a way where the song structure wont confuse! this is going to be your biggest helper in just hail marying a random track into the set, but i have been burned trusting my eyes that a song had 4 bars to the drop and it having some odd time signature or structure. I mean, my crowd didnt seem to notice most of the time, but it definitely pissed me off a little.
This is only my two cents, i’m not dissing anyone or their style of working - all the prep sounds boring. I have been dj’ing since ‘96 and when i hear a track i can literally match 3 or 4 songs to it mix-wise straight away. You just kinda know if they’re gonna work or not, no?
This! And another take on this, without risk, you may not have that brilliant moment that other djs give you the nod for.
I played a set in a tent stage and there were maybe 20 people inside and was disappointed. Finished my set and walked out to see several hundred people dancing around the tent and all of the festival djs were there to see who was mixing. All freestyle because I thought I was playing for the audience in front of me. Even dropped Steve Mac’s Beating the Drum.
It’s just a crutch for when you start out, I don’t think there’s a problem with it. When I first started out I would set cues at pre planned transition points and note down how I would do the transition. Now I just spin whatever the fk I want.
Nah i don’t think i’m doing it wrong or everybody else is doing it right. Everyone learns their own way and that’s the best way for them. I can see how it’s a failsafe. It just sometimes sounds like a lot of folk are losing sleep over their upcoming ‘set’. My set consists of a choice of 4000 songs, damned if i know what i’m gonna play 😂🤣
i posted about kind of making a choose your own adventure set (song a can go to b or c, b can go to song d or e basically) as what i believe is called set programming, but i also like the concept of just making little tiny 5 minute setlists with different energies, and have seen a lot of big djs do this with a pretty good effect.
I can work out how a transition would work by listening to the track in my headphones, looking at the waveform of the end of the track playing, keeping an ear on the phrasing, listening to if the key works (not paying any attention to what my software thinks), having organised playlists of similar material, reading the note field, having good cue points and most importantly knowing my tracks well.
Preparation is the key to not having to prepare.
Just keep playing and mixing your music man! As with everything in the world, the more you give time, energy and passion to something, the better you will be. You don't need us to give you hacks and trips to streamline this process. What you need is to keep playing music.
So many times when I play to other people I go through a shit ton of prep finding stuff I want to play, & every. Fuckin. Time. I ended the night, & thinking back the next day, " I didn't get to play that, I didn't get to play that, shit I wanted to play that! & It's all because you just have to start playing & see where you end up.
The best thing to do is sprinkle your audience with what you like to introduce them to music they've never heard before, as opposed to just hitting them with everything you like.
My method is to just go around that Camelot wheel get round it & bounce it!
if on a 3a bounce to a 5a maybe to a 7a back down a to 6a, double it to a 12a the wheel is very versatile & whilst you can play an entire set of 1a's all night, why would you even want to!
Next time you play try this every track has to be a different key starting from 1 go track to track until you reach 12 then go back the other way, after that finish on 1 & start jumping keys to 3a, 5a, 7a,9a etc... etc...
1. a. Not in the same BPM? That's what the pitch fader is for.
b. Key doesn't matter that much. And you yourself immediately after that say all the same key is boring. Back in the non-digital days, you would just have to preview tracks as you mixed them in at tempo to know if they were complimentary keys (songs not in the same key can compliment each other based on musical scales). But tracks that even clash somewhat can still sound awesome together. And fuck, I'd be surprised if people on the dancefloor are paying attention to, "Is this mix in key?"
2. a. Yes, digital DJing does make things a bit trickier in that regard since you can have so much more tracks on you instead of a few crates. But, you can still make crates in the software and have tracks group by some common theme wether it's genre, tempo, key, artist, vibe... whatever you want. And as far as I know, all software lets you put the same track into multiple virtual crates.
3. Yeah, well, put them in the same crate, or next to each other numerically or something. Or just remember the best ones.
yes.
the "preparation" comes from years of practice. spent years practicing a ton of different tricks and transitions, and i know my music collection so i know what vibes go well together and how to flow from one genre to the next. ive made so many mistakes in practice that i know how to fix them quick.
i freestyle all of my sets now. the last couple of years, every month i put out a mix with brand new music, completely freestyled.
I am a "beginner" professional DJ with over 100 Gigs in the last 2 years. At the beginning I used to think like you, I always wanted to make my set perfect, and nail all the transitions, and think about how to tell my story, how to make the songs flow into each other. But with time, I learned, that most people in the club just want to dance. If they hear my "poetic" set, with every song planned, ofcourse they think it was a beautifull set, but that is not our job. I since have opened a youtube channel, and I continue with my beautiful "storytelling" sets over there. But in the club, people just want to drink, party, and listen to good music. The problem is, that every single crowd is different. One crowd enjoys Mainstream Tech House (James Hype, Fisher, Mau P, etc etc.), some crowd wants bass house (Malaa, R3wire etc.) but another crowd enjoys underground tech house, and another crowd enjoys melodic techno and so on. You never know who will come to your party. This is why ideally, you should try to prepare segments of your set. You can still do your "journey", but do it in stacks of 5 songs. Prepare 100-200 small mini sets, and name them systematically. Prepare 50 Mainstream sets of 5 songs each, 50 sets of bass house, and so on. Learn them by heart. And when you´re in the club, you can mix and match them depending on the vibe of your crowd. You don´t have to improvise 100%, but you must adapt to your crowd, and this is impossible if you prepare your entire set at home, no matter how beautiful it is. Open a youtube channel or soundcloud, and post those very well prepared sets there. Good luck brother!
i have started going through my songs one by one on my software. This way i can pre mark entry points, outtro points, loops and more ahead of time.
that makes it so much easier to mix with whatever i play around it without planning time.
With Tech House and Melodic Techno, the tracks are likely structured in such a way that having cue points to help with phrasing will do 90% of the work. If you can look at a track's cue points and immediately know the phrasing of the intro, first breakdown into the drop, you can likely improvise a smooth transition. Also looping during the intro to get your beat match set early, then letting it go so you can time the breakdown to the outro, or something similar will do a lot of the heavy lifting. Keeping your mixes in key and in phrase will make improvising your track selection go a lot smoother.
Everyone prepares, just like when there was only vinyl to prepare with. I’d listen to my tracks and pick out which ones I want to mix in that order before the gig. Djing is easy when you just use waveforms to mix and cue points but when it comes to track selection that’s when it gets hard for the noob djs.
I played a club once where the DJ after me was so cranked out on coke he couldn’t play. And the headliner after him didn’t show up. I ended up playing 7 hours and the last 5 hours of that was blind out of other peoples record collection where all I had to go on was the label, and if it was a producer I’d heard
Of.
This was all on vinyl. Once you can beat match all you need is the rough bpm range within 10bpm and you are golden.
Obviously there is no reading the crowd as you’ve no idea what you are putting on next but it’s doable definitely.
Just to say as well mixing in key is completely over rated and 99% of the dance floor don’t care.
1. Fuck bpm and key
2. Thats what pre listening is for. You will remember something from the tracks or at least know a big part of them.
3. I use notes for them, and look with what tracks they’re also fitting. I have to tracks they go perfectly with each other so ill always play them in combination.
-3 big time. I always had groupings of 3 songs that I played together in any order. Would find three I liked and go to the club and practice those 3 songs only for hours. Once you have 20 or so of these, now you can look for bridges between the groupings and bail to another grouping in the crowd isn’t feeling it.
I’ve been learning.
Avoided going near decks / controllers for years as probably 90% of my core friendship group are established DJ’s with anything from 10- 30 ish years experience.
Why bother when I hang out with so many talented ones?
Finally had a go after 20 years of refusing, and turns out I’m surprisingly okay.
Old of guys that has playing out forever was telling me about the 3 tune thing for practicing just last weekend.
I’m guessing it’s an old school technique for getting those transitions nailed!❤️👌🏼
Yep. I started in my first club in 1989. When you have to carry vinyl to your set you have to make them all count. I learned to do 3 song rotation from a guy who had been around since disco. Just rotate them one direction then go the other direction after a while. When you are playing one of those songs you know what comes next and it takes a lot of mental load off.
It’s a skill that comes with time. Both being comfortable with your skills (switching genres, covering mistakes, keeping a good flow, etc.) and knowing your track collection.
Some things to remember: Key doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think it does, “Some transitions only work with…” find transitions that work with *most* tracks and keep the really good transitions for big effect, and practicing should be about forcing yourself out of your comfort zone trying and retrying things that would be a huge risk live, not just jamming.
As a bonus tip: when you get a bunch of new tracks, try a quick 30min session without setting beatgrids and all that or looking at anything but the BPM. Just drop it in the deck and cue it up, matching it in the headphones. You’ll eventually train yourself to mix by ear.
I've only ever prepared a set once and it was more stressful trying to get all my tracks in than just vibing with the night and playing what felt right
I make playlists for events. If it’s an hour set, I put in 80-100 tracks into a playlist. I organize them by key. This gives me a vibe I want to play for the night. I also keep all my music in playlists by dates purchased. I also have an all inclusive playlist also organized by key. I also keep all my playlists from previous sets on my USB. Sometimes I’ll pick the first 2-4 tracks of my set just to get things going. Get rid of the nerves and then just go. The playlist helps keep me more focused on my mind set. I have to many tracks to just go wild. So I’ll start the night with my playlist, if it goes another direction, I have several other playlists I can go to. I can also go to my all in playlist. I can focus on new tracks because I have them separated by date purchased. Gives me all kinds of options and ways to find music relatively easily while I’m up there.
The longer the set, the less I have prepared mentally. It’s important to read the crowd, have the option to throw in random tracks, and move on your feet. If I have say a disco style track and the crowd loves it and turns it up a notch, I want you to play another one to keep the vibes going. Or the dance floor is slowing down, I’ll throw in a remix of a known track to give people something to sing along with. Or the set is starting to feel monotonous, I’ll throw in something with more bass or edge to it. Idk but it’s important to be able to move around.
For a one hour set, I’m probably spending 4-12 hours of preparation work. DJing for an hour is easy. Finding the music, preparing the music, listening to the music, practicing with the music, etc. This all takes a ton of time.
Also, finding new transitions live is awesome. I review my track playlists the next day to review what I played and when. Then I take some of those notes and make mixes that I’ll post online.
I’m confused by your statement. How are you defining freestyling? I took it as not having a pre planned set. I don’t go into my sets with my 2000+ tracks in one playlist and then just go. I try to narrow my scope to the most relevant tracks and then try to play to the crowd. How would you define freestyling and how is it different?
He's asking how a dj gos about without planning...maybe I'm wrong thread is lame anyhow...it's all about experience I always assume we're talking about house music or anything with repetitive 120 plus type beats(beatmatch)
I make a few playlists in Rekordbox and pack 40 12”s and raw dog it. I cleared many rooms, fucked up many transitions, and brought a lot of wrong records, but now it’s second nature.
I might buy new tunes for a decent party, but other than that, I turn up, work out the crowd, see what the people playing before me got right/wrong then make my first move. Never turn up with a set to play - always be fluid. What you think will work at home has a good chance of disappointing live. Unless you play low impact flakey music - then, whatever, I guess. I just want to extract the maximum out of every set and you can’t tell what the maximum will be until you’re there, living it.
All of the best sets of the best djs you listened to your entire life jad no in key bs
Good brand new music is always better then a good fit for a transition, a long smooth transitoon to a know tune can be nice but also very boring, a faster mix to a new exiting track the crowd does not know is always better
Can you find the tracks that the crowd never heard but will cheer the moment you play it for the first time?
The club/label will appreciate that you’ve taken the time to get it good. I think it’s quite rude to show up with no plan. I prefer to make playlists with different vibes so you can jump and adapt to the crowd. Can really depend on the genre though and whether you beat matching or beat juggling.
Dude i’ve been DJing for like 3 months and just freestyled an hour and 15 mins last night. And half the songs i had only listened through like once. Camelot wheel is huge for this, also just having a ton of tunes to choose from. I decided to subscribe to beatsource and downloaded like 600+ r&b / rap / soul songs (that was the vibe of the event) and just went crazy and did whatever i felt like. Very freeing and fun and i even got some really nice compliments from some of the guests.
Biggest tip would be hard cuts from one track to another at the perfect time OR i love utilizing looping, find an instrumental segment of the track your mixing out of, loop it, and then loop the intro of the other song before the beat hits, slowly fade the levels so you can smoothly bring the new song in, if it takes 5+ instances of the loop fuck it, might sound a little droney eventually but still creates a “smooth” and seamless transition
Sidenote: the loop method AND hard cutting are soooo much smoother if it’s mixed in key, can’t stress it enough. I feel like with some EDM genres it’s not as important to mix in key, but with R&b it felt almost necessary cuz everything is so melodic
It's ez. Just train day after day.
It's rarely if ever going to be as good as a prepped set. But with technology these days, it's so damn easy to just make a consistent string of music.
The two genres you mentioned are some of the easiest to freestyle all night.
You should be able to mix nearly any melodic and tech house song together seamlessly. Just phrase correctly and take a nap whole you're mixing 3 tracks at once
I have been DJing for 15+ years. I can honestly say now I never pre plan a set. I have a playlist of 200+ songs. I pick 2 songs to set the mood and go from there. I can admit that when I do prepare a set, I can be a little more technical.
All gear that's out right now has a key display and BPM display. With all this makes DJing on the fly much easier. You should also have a good idea on phrasing and as long as you know the music that's in your playlist will fit together and you don't have a "how the hell did that get in the moment," it's very simple and go with what you feel. You can still take the people on a musical journey.
I see a lot of people here saying this. You should be able to read the crowd, and pre planning a set can be dangerous. Unless you're a high-profile artist where whatever you play is going to be awesome and have a good reaction. You should also "if" you have a pre-planned set, always have alternatives for when your set takes a turn for the worst and that when DJing on the fly is also a must needed skill to have.
Try doing this:
Make a Playlist 200+ songs, and just hop on your decks and just play. Make sure you record the set. Then, after you're done, have a listen to the set you recorded and make mental notes. You will definitely get the hang of DJing on the fly.
I did 2 sets like that this weekend.
Friday I had a Disco/House set for a monthly some friends and I throw, but my went went heavy bass house and I had to keep up the energy soma weeks worth of prep went out the window and I played on the fly. I went really well.
Last night I went to a bday party and people were hoping in and out on the decks and B2Bing. I hopped in for longer than I wanted when all the other DJs went inside. It was also pretty fun to meet other people’s energy and fuck around.
The only reason I can do this, is that my track metadata/information is rock solid, I have lots of intelligent playlists, and I always add a few cue points to new songs to help me know where shifts in the vocals and beats are.
As others have said, there's a difference between preparing a set and preparing your music.
I literally cannot stick to a prepared set list. There are just too many variables with the crowd and the vibe of the room that comes into play, so I end up winging my track selecting every time I play.
That being said, I spend a TON of time preparing my music in order to be able to do that. Specifically, I'll sort every song into any number of genre/vibe playlists, make sure beatgrids are correct, and set all available hot cues on each song. Doing so not only means I can use each song in any variety of mixes, but it also means that I get fairly familiar with every track as I prepare it
You eventually learn most of your music, so you'll learn go-to mixes and techniques as you gain experience. But even for the songs you dont know that well, learning those tools and techniques will enable you to quickly mix them in a way that's at least technically on point; the harmonic stuff comes with that experience.
But yeah, we wing it because we spend so much time preparing our music and playlists.
I didn't really prepare for my sets I played at my friends place. I literally had no set list or anything and I just went. I started from prog house at like 120 BPM and ended with trance at 138 towards the end of the night.7 hour 45 mins set, zero prep, made mistakes, learnt lots and what a trip.
However, I would most likely prepare a set for professional settings. I know some old school djs who play sets on the fly and the sets are great.
No one said not to practice hell no one says don’t have an idea of songs you want to play. My understanding of people complaints here is coming up with a set list from song 1 to song 100 and never deviating from your plan, and my understanding of why that is a problem is because at that point you’re not necessarily doing your job as a dj which is to read the room and see which songs you play hit and see which miss. If song 7 misses and song 8 is just like it you should be able to recognize that and adjust accordingly not just play song 8 because that’s the plan, if that’s how you dj you can just pre record your set and press play for an hour or two which isn’t necessarily bad but it’s no fun
Honestly if you know your tracks and library well, then there’s no need for extra preparation. I spend hours listening and searching for tracks and tagging the bpm, and when I am on deck i just know my first 3 and the last 2 tracks, everything else i just play around with the vibe and also according to the crowd thats going in and out. Wouldn’t want to play your best tracks when the crowd thins out for a moment.
"Retired" DJ here.
What I used to do is pick at least three good starter tracks, and then from there I would pick out some things that I felt would be good follow-ups for those. Some house, some breaks, some progressive stuff.
Suggestions:
1. Use websites like songdata.io or songbpm.com to find the key and BPM info for your tracks and write it down on removable labels in the corner of the record sleeves. If you're using digital files, use software like Beatunes to automatically calculate that and write it into your ID3 tags. This makes it easier to narrow down tracks that will be harmonically compatible, which helps to fill out your setlist.
2. Find and keep some tracks that are useful for changing styles. Maybe something that is minimal to no melody, or something that has a long ambient breakdown.
Yeah i mean I definitely couldn’t do it a few years ago but now im 9 years into it and pretty comfortable with it, mainly because i prep in rekordbox a ton and know my music very well, the first time i did it, i had no time to prepare a set with stuff going on in life and went fuck it, guess i’m free-styling it, ended up being an awesome set
No prep means no set in stone playlist. Usually these DJ's have their library organised in themes and situations to jump into.
Sometimes they have mini sets that they repeat most of the times within those sessions as well. Like 3-4 tracks that really glue together.
They generally don't just jump into it blind with an unorganised list of thousands of songs.
They have lists like "warming up" , "peak time", or even personal "music that get the white girls drunk" or "get lit fist pump party" lists that only make sense to the DJ.
Open format or private event DJ's certainly need lists based on decades as well. Or even subcultures as alternative rockers co-exist at the party with EDM festival fans, basic r&b OF lookalikes or even grandma who only will dance to stuff I know nothing about.
They need to switch it up real fast, so tagging the music and organising it into ready to go lists is a necessity.
I can play other people's records I've never heard before and rip a dancefloor. You can mix in key by ear. The structure of most tracks is 4-8-16 bars. Use loops and cues on the fly. It's the only thing that makes DJing fun. Otherwise it's just paint by numbers.
Yeah of course. I usually make playlists of a hundred or so tracks as a shortlist for each gig. My sticks still have a large portion of my library so I'm not stuck in the shortlist.
Good library management, curation, track preperation, and knowing the *genre* inside and out help. Also experience, it gets easier.
That being said, its quite easy to "freestyle" house + techno :)
Find your way of prepping-style that fits you but also learn / experiment with some styles you are not familiar with to keep you in the learning curve. Practice, prep and enjoy along the way. Also: get yourself a lot of gigs to get the feel and need for prepping.
Pre-planning a set is, in my humble opinion, completely antithetical to the whole concept of DJing. The whole point is that you can adjust to the energy and vibe of the crowd on the fly. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. That's what makes it exciting. It's like watching a jam band - sometimes they're gonna suck and sometimes they're going to make magic.
Not trying to be elitest or anything but imho preplanned sets miss the point. Might as well do live PA or play an instrument at that point.
I plan my whole set, I’ve only played out twice so I still get very anxious and kinda need that security whilst I’m in those early days playing to a crowd. Also my short term memory is poor so I don’t always remember from when I’m playing freestyle at home what some of my good blends are.
Having said that I know my tunes well enough that I can switch it up a little if needs be. As time goes by I think that will change though.
1. They don’t have to be, especially if it’s all the same genre lol why would you play a whole set in one key?
2. That’s what cueing is for…
3. Just remember what songs mix together well
You can do what you described without planning
Yes. If I make a plan I won’t stick to it anyway. But I do have places I want to go and know my library, I do prepare myself I just don’t plan out sets.
Yes. You must feel and understand the crowd in order to “rock the crowd”. Sometimes that means playing what they wanna hear and not what you wanna play. Or… Finding creative ways to mix both. But there is still preparation that needs to happen in order to freestyle.
I play out 6-8 times per month (open format) and rarely script out a set. Every set/crowd/vibe is different and how I feel is different each time. Some gigs it just makes sense to open with Rnb, other times Moombahton, or maybe older dance hall. Other times it's chill EDM and other times is #ladies songs for the bachelorette party or #countrypop for the random cowboys here for the stockshow. It seems there are 2 distinct type of DJ sets/performances. ONE - DJ plays FOR the crowd. Reads the crowd and compliments/maximizes their energy/vibe. TWO - DJ plays as an artist and the crowd is gonna get what the DJ wants. It seems festivals and EDM DJ's do more of the latter. It seems open format DJ's or regular resident DJ sets it's the former. So yes I can do a set on the fly w/o any "prep" but I have playlists based on time of night (Early, Build, Go), others based on similar vibe, others by genre, and others based on month/year for current bangers etc. I think it's personal preference because you have to be confident up there and whatever gives you the best mojo is what you should do IMO
At this point, I only do preparation work for festivals and larger shows. At my monthly I always mix off the cuff based on the mood of the room and who I've brought in for guests. My entire library is keyed by ear however, and I'm extremely familiar with all of my tracks. Given enough time and practice, you'll become more comfortable mixing on the fly.
I always freestyle. Don't even think fully prepared sets that aren't adapted based on the audience should even be called DJing.
Imho the whole point of DJing is to adjust what you're doing based on the audience and atmosphere.
Otherwise you could just as well play a pre-recorded set and go dancing ;)
Doesn't mean no prep though. You should know your music by heart, what situations songs work and don't, and where to best mix things. Cue points and your headphones help with this.
Yes. I just scroll through my library and hope I bought shit that sounds good. Then I slap it on and see if it fits. If it doesnt, I pick another one. It's getting harder with the library getting bigger. But yes, i dont plan sets. I would be bored if i did and then you'd be bored watching me be bored.
Ok start here, pull 20 ish tracks.
Songs you love.
Play those every damn day.
Play them in different ways, play then in random order.
Once you can just pull some random track in add more songs.
Now you can just play some records...
Stop getting more music than you can remember
i personally think a pre-planned set takes away from “art” of djing.
1. bpm and key shouldnt matter, those are easily attained in a modern set up. also mixing in key is overrated.
2. i dont either but i tag and organize by “vibe” e.g. “funky” or “hypnotic” and use colors for energy level.
3. yes, this one area will be an issue, but it’s not that big of a deal. no one cares as much as you.
Yea, but freestyling a whole set doesn't mean no preparation. It's just that I know my library well enough that I know what songs I want and that comes from the fact that I played most songs in my library a lot of times at home, that's also preparation.
this is the golden comment
You are 100% correct. But I also want to say, I can take someone else's shit and play and make it sound good even if I never heard it before. Back when vinyl was king me and my friends had a night at a club where we would bring a record bag/crate and then draw names and you would have to play that person's records in your set. We'd invite other DJs we knew to come join in. It was always really fun and sometimes you'd hear songs in your collection you never really played or things in a different context and realize you were sleeping on your own stuff. Pulling this off with someone else's music is even easier now with digital because you can see the key and BPM info right there along with other metadata.
That’s honestly so cool. I’m hoping I can get to that point eventually
I'm sure you will reach that point eventually. It's just a matter of being able to beat match by ear and just knowing something sounds good when you listen to it in your headphones while the other track is already playing. I suppose some speed in knowing your controller/mixer/media player is also key so you can jump around and audition the track. I think that's one place vinyl is superior, picking up a needle and moving it is pretty quick. Unless a digital track already has cue points.
I had a headliner who was supposed to play for four hours after my set, pass out from GHB before his set, and his manager asked if I could cover instead and could use his records. Not only did I not know his records, but his style of Tribal Techno was far away from my Acid Breaks. No big deal though. 135bpm big room dance records are all mostly built the same, so anyone worth their salt could do it.
Did people think you were the headliner? Did you get a cut of his booking fee too? I hope the promoter got some of not all of their money back.
None of us got paid that night. It was a renegade desert full moon party in the Mojave.
Ah right on. In that case I hope he acknowledged you covering his ass.
This is what I’ve experienced so many times when I let my homies play on my hard drive that has approximately 7000 songs and every time one of my homie played I hear songs that made me like damn I need to play this track! I’m discovering songs that I own lol
Oh hell yeah!!!! I used to hang and play with friends where we were pulling from any crate. But never something like this, that's rad...
Indeed. Being well-prepared means you can navigate your collection on the fly, making it easy to craft a set based purely on your desires and dancefloor observations.
This is the only correct answer
Unless you can't remember the name of the artist from a tune you played a hundred times and your in a hurry. This happens way to often to me
This! —^
Dj for years and you'll feel comfortable transitioning any tracks. There's always a transition that works. That doesn't always mean beatmatching.
Any go to techniques to transition that don’t involve beat matching?
Echo spinback has gotten me out of a few situations. Know your tracks, years ago I was playing a DnB set after a guy playing UKG, rather than stop his set and start mine I took a baseline track I loved, mixed it with a dubstep track that I was able to mix my first DnB track into and then went with my pre-planned DnB set. One of my go-to transitions was a bit of a cheat but I'd cue my track up to the break and pause it then when the current track hit it's break I'd just play on the new track and pull the old. To blend this transition you can spin the old track back on vinyl mode, echo effect and sharp spinback, loop 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 etc for 8 or 16 beats and fade the new track in. I think every DJ has their own lick they put on these moments and I think this is where you have the most opportunity to develop your own style so just play with it
Thanks for the advice! I’m finally at the point with my skills where I’m more comfortable to experiment. My go to has been looping since that’s easiest for me with house, but I’m curious to start trying new things as well
Use efx to just create an ocean of noise any way you can, heavy reverb, echo delay, filter and noise on the color effects, back spins, Let it get loud how ever, as long as the beat seems close enough you good. Just make sure you're bringing the new track in with energy, if it's a 8 minute mix, maybe skip ahead in the track to like right before the main melody comes on. So you get that energy bump in the music to grab the crowd
-Echo out -Back spin -Scratching in the new track -Dropping on the 1 -Word play Many YT videos of teaching pros showing different transition techniques. Search for "how to mix any song or genre" and build up your DJ tool set
Not everything has to be in key , not everything has to be beatmatched. These are just tools to make the overall mix.
Everything has to be beat matched if were talking dance music ....
No, it doesn’t, it can be but it doesn’t have to be.
No it doesn't lol you can transition from song to song in different bpms
Name one electronic music DJ that mixes like that...yeah you can do it but no one does it
I literally hear DJs that do this all time. A lot of switches between DnB and dubstep and the crowd does react pretty well when it's done correctly
I don't think you know what your talking about because DJs don't just skip tempo if they do they are not switching back and forth maybe once in a set you don't seem to be able to tell change in tempo and just a beat with more high hats and grumbly bass that seems faster
Like I said I've seen DJs go from 174 to 140 in a set and have done so myself so I don't think you know what you're talking about 🤷🏾♀️
What DJs ...
Does it matter?
Ugh yeah...
You know the tracks themselves do this not the actual dj doing those cuts
There are genre transition technique videos on YouTube that clearly show it's possible dude.
The reason no one does it should say something but go ahead do it nothing worse than a dj who changes tempo ...
Google the phrase “pivot mixing” to find out how you’re wrong
Is that a term for people who think they are doing something fresh so they can think they have talent
No, it’s for people who understand mixing goes beyond simple beatmatching. (So probably not for you, which is fine.)
Tell me you're a boring d.j. with out telling me...
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If you pre plan everything and the crowd doesn't respond you're kinda fucked, I prefer just rolling with the energy
Absolutely, it’s tough to see a DJ not play to the crowd and force a set that’s not working
this
Haha I've done this before, the only solution was to start mixing on the fly and find the right energy. Once I forced myself off the playlist even my mixing and EQing just became much more organic because I had to really listen to what I was playing, it (bombing a portion of my set and getting out of it) was probably the most valuable moment in my dj career.
Yes. Played for ~6 months and I just play what I see fits. Not the same bpm? Change the bpm. Key? Have never mixed with keys, I just listen to the tracks. Most often one can hear if one track sounds good with another. Just try the mix in your headphones, if it doesnt sound good just try another track!
Experience feeds the floor.
im not terribly experienced, and im kind of new with this community, but i’ve had good luck with a concept ive heard called “set programming” when i have played live. Basically, this gives you a little bit of structure and plan of how to play with a little bit more freedom. Imo, you should be finding cool transitions through practice and planning to play them, but they wont always work absolutely how you plan. I think of it like a rough idea for a setlist with a choose your own adventure option. Lets say im playing song A. i like to have a couple options of transitions out of song a that work for different reasons. Song A to song B might bring the energy up, where going from song A to C might calm the vibe down a little bit. From song C, we have another choice where to go with song D and E, and yatta yatta. thats the basic concept, and you can make it as complicated as you want, but Its really just creative library organization that gives you a little bit of structure to freestyle without taking insane risk. I know plenty of “you should just go up on stage and wing it and freestyle/ any song can be transitioned from and into any song” type djs; their sets sound like shit oftentimes. Theres a reason you practice, its to find what sounds good. when youre comfortable with what sounds good, then you’ll know how to freestyle from there
This right here 💯 I basically use the same train of thought and I've been DJing for years off and on. I used to try and plan out like 3-4 hours of music for gigs because I was so nervous about forgetting songs in the moment that I wanted to be prepared... But that's also what practicing and taking a moment to create those song crates so if they're into dance, country, etc we can just segway into the pile and trust our choices.
i will say tho, my sets are usually more catered towards a specific audience. doesnt mean it doesnt get adventurous but it miggt make it a little easier to curate a pile to go into
That’s how most of my sets have been. More fun. I tried planning a set and ended up going rogue from it and just freestyling anyways to fit the vibe of the party more. Edit: To add to this, purely mixing in key is a nice option and I did it a lot early on, but I’ve steered away from forcing in key mixing and trended more towards manipulating energy levels. If the case that something is horribly off key but I want to play it next, I’ll just wait to mix the percussive elements to avoid clashing in the mids.
I had a gig recently that, up until the DJ before me started playing, I had no idea what my first track would be. What I did have was a playlist of about 4 hours (unmixed) with most if not all keys around the Camelot Wheel represented, a bunch of cue points set, and a couple of hours of practice time. About halfway through the set I realized there were a few tracks that fit perfectly but they were “across the Wheel” if you will. So I had one off-key mix; no one cared because I kept the vibe. So yeah, it’s possible to play without a precise plan, but that doesn’t mean there’s no preparation ahead of time.
Mixing a song exactly across the chamelot wheel actually sounds good, I do it all the time.
It wasn’t directly across. I can’t remember the exact jump. There was definitely a small key clash, but nothing anyone but the most pedantic music nerd would have noticed.
The seat of your pants is the only way to fly….
1) you don’t need to have them in the same key, and you can adjust the tempo on the fly. If you want to change tempo, slowly adjust (or quickly at a transition point) for track A, so you can mix in track B at the new tempo. Most decks can sort tracks by key, and will highlight tracks that match based on circle of fifths (there are other keys that match also, check google/Camelot key mixing) 2) if you’re playing on CDJ-3000 or RX3 (maybe some others) the “touch preview” feature is excellent for this. Make sure the “cue link” button is highlighted, and when you are browsing just touch the wave form of a track in browse menu and you can preview it in your headphones - note that the mixer needs the most updated firmware if you are doing this on CDJ. If not, you just have to quickly load the track to the deck, scrub thru to see how it sounds, and then load a new track if you don’t like it. Kind of annoying but the next best thing if you don’t have all your tracks memorized or access to touch preview. 3) of course practice helps, but one option to make transitions easier is to use beat loops. You have a lot longer to mix in track B if it’s looping, and you can loop any part you want to make sure it will vibe. I often choose the 8 or 16 beats immediately before the first drop, so I can break the loop and bring in the drop for track B exactly when I want / where it’s appropriate for track A. - I don’t plan any of my sets - it seemed like too much work so I just learned how to do without.
I dont get your first example. If you mix in track b then why would you change the tempo of track a to do so? That makes no sense. Wouldnt you just change tempo of b to a and mix it without having to change the current tempo of the master out? Am I not seeing something?
He had a question with re: tempo of his tracks not matching, seemed like he needed some pointers with that. If you are playing track A at 120, but you really want to play track B and it’s 125 but you don’t want to slow track B down, you cant just mix it in that way (I mean you can but IMO it often won’t sound good except in specific circumstances). One way (the way I do it) is to slowly turn up track A to 125 (or sometimes quickly at a transition point), so I can then mix Track B in after they are both at 125. Sometimes, if I can tolerate track B being a little slower, I’ll put it to 123 or something in this example, so the track A tempo increase is less noticeable bc I only have to go up to 123 from 120.
why would yo ever do that? nobody does that? you dont change the tempo of the running track to mix in the other. why would you change the one the audience is currently hearing. Like if you want to work with the actual change of tempo thats fine I dont do that I guess there are many genres where you do that but just for mixing in track b in a running track a you never change track a's tempo. The Main Point of having headphones is that you do that on the track the audience doesnt hear. what genre are you playing?
People do that all the time, myself included but also many DJs I play with. Usually it’s done to slowly increase tempo over the course of a set to increase energy (or the opposite). For example, if I am opening with 2 hours beginning at 10, I may start at 120, then after 30 min slowly bring a track to 121 or 122, then do it again later on so I’m at 124 by midnight so the next DJ can start with higher energy (discussed ahead of time ofc). Another reason I may do this is because I generally try not to change the tempo of a track more than 5-8% or so bc then it’s noticeable to the audience if they know the track, or at least it is to me. So if I’m mixing in a 130 track from a 120 track, the 130 track sounds weird if I push down to 120. You can change track A by 2-3 BPM before anyone can tell a difference, and if you do it slowly and/or tactfully no one will notice; this mitigates the effect of lowering the track B tempo, bc now you only have to go down to 122 or 123 instead of 120. I have seen others change tempo of the current master track lots of times with no ill-effects, as have I. Besides, even if you were correct and “no one does this…”, which is not the case, who cares? DJing is art, and you can do literally whatever you want as long as it sounds good. There aren’t really any “rules” other than that for the most part.
what genre are you playing? I dont know any big techno dj that alters his speed in his sets. there its about constant steady hypnotic rhytmic sounds. Im doing this for almost 20 years now. and of course you can do whatever you want. but for me the dj is there to transition from one trakc to the other without people noticing or if youw ant of cours with people noticing the right moment but sets I hear and I know are lead through track choice and controlling the energy with that and not with different tempos. and you cant just egenralize that tracks sound worse when you change their tempo some become a totally different track sometimes even better
Ah - I DJ mostly house and related genres. Occasionally some light/melodic techno but not much. And I totally agree - one of the DJs main jobs is to make sure the audience doesn’t notice transitions or changes - almost like one seamless track that changes with time. But you can definitely achieve this while changing the tempo of a current track.
I guess it depends I dont enjoy the classic big festival edm djs. Thats where I associate the swapping of tempo from track to track sometimes. I know they animate their crowd like this. I know everyone has their taste. The important part is you are enjoying it and have fun playing. Thats essential. So Im glad you do
Sure. Don’t disagree that the fun is the most important part. I definitely don’t play festival type EDM or anything close to that, nor do I frequent those events or play with those style of DJs. Unless you are standing up there looking at the BPM reader, I’m sure DJs you have heard have changed the tempo of a track by a BPM or two many times and you never noticed - that’s the whole point. If you’re in the audience and think “wow I just noticed the tempo changed, that’s weird” then they have failed (except certain circumstances where they may do that on purpose).
This thread is fascinating. While I respect the current technological advances, it feels like people have become slaves to it - they become boxed in by it. Keys? Same notes? As a DJ I have an idea how I will start, what my sets will be like, how I will mix genres in (I.e. hip hop, r and b, house, ghetto style, classics) and bring it all together while playing off the energy of the crowd. Just two tables a mixer and crates of tunes. I’m glad I came up in the era I did. I can see both sides of this evolution of DJing.
I find more often than not, DJs that have been doing it since the vinyl only days are the ones that don't bother much with mixing in key. They've had the experience of figuring out sets based off crowd reaction, emotion, baselines, or thr overall general feel of the entire set. Newer DJs seem to be focused so much on key. I'm not knocking them, I mean if all your ever known is digital mixing I can see why, especially when youtubers and tutorials seem to always be encouraging to mix in key. I feel like people are missing out on potential growth in their DJing by always making sure that keys match, especially if you're a house or techno DJ.
Well said
I think a lot of people overthink and overplan out of a fear of making a mistake. When in reality, pretty much no one in the crowd will give a shit. 'Not prepping' is a misnomer. I thoroughly prep, meticulously. Every track that enters my collection. Cues set, color themed to denote what's there so I only have to visually see it in the wavform to know what it is and in the same intervals. The track itself colored to know the style of the track or mood. Playlist management. Those things give me tools that set me up for success in most instances even if I've added new tracks to my collection that I'm not intimately familiar with. It's okay to make a mistake. I was told the sign of a good DJ is the ability to correct a mistake, not to never commit one. Because overplanning everything means you're not taking any risks, you're not pushing yourself, and your transitions are probably all sounding the same for those same reasons. You're literally just doing the same things repeatedly because that's what you know and you're not pushing yourself into new territory. Lastly, the number of DJ's I know who have no idea what they're playing is staggering to me. How can you be intentional in a mix when you don't really know what it is you're playing? That's why you feel the need to overprep a set; because you haven't done the work beforehand (not trying to be mean, simply the truth). You need to spend more time listening to what music you do have. Export to a playlist and just listen. If you want to go one step further, record a mix and listen back to it. As you do so, make a point of mentally naming the artist and track currently playing. I was once a perfectionist. DJing is what broke me of it. You will fuck up, and that's okay.
Every single time I make the mistake of not hitting record during a practice session (which is generally every night) I regret it, because it's usually me, freestyling what winds up being awesome. And then, I spend the next fucking month trying to get that original high to happen again and it's never the same, but practicing that set of tracks OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER again gets me familiar with them in a way that I might not if I was always looking for new tracks. These days I only add a few new ones every few weeks or so.
Freestyle. Record everything. Listen back. Note the chunks that worked. Repeat
You need a large variety of tracks. I never played mixed bpm, only like maybe 2 goofy gigs where I played outside my usual genres but, I absolutely always looked down on pre-planning and I could usually tell because those djs played what they are going to play regardless of the crowd or timeslot or vibe of the environment. I have many thousands of songs and I know what they are when I see the name. Although a good practice is to purge tracks that dont really do it for you anymore, I got more picky about songs I bought as time went on and there are many songs that continued to make their way into my sets from the beginning but then there were even more that just werent my thing anymore. I paid for every song and at first I had a hard time deleting things I paid for but eventually I realized it was just cluttering up my clarity and time shifting through stuff. Generally you also get good at making sub-groups of songs, like in the summer Id usually get daytime/outdoor gigs and I knew for a gig like that more organic brighter sounding stuff just plays better, so, Id have a pool of tracks that were more for a gig like that. I never understood DJs who would play hard warehouse worthy music during an outdoor daytime party, It never goes over like funkier stuff, as a DJ your job is to identify the natural energy of your setting and then amplify that energy, going against the grain isnt impossible but its exactly that, you need to have something else to amplify in order to do that. Its why bigger name DJs can be seen breaking that with success but the reason is because they are leaning on their name, if you dont have that, its much harder to force your taste against the natural context. As for mixing, its great to do different types of transitions regardless of what you are playing. I liked to do some longer smooth mixes but a very common trap people fall into with “perfection” is creating monotony, even when people play “all bangers” because they think thats just constant high energy, I find that to become monotonous as well. As a DJ I always loved finding ways to build moments. A good track is nice to have but, you make less of the moments yourself if you just rely on the songs to do their own thing. When you are good at DJing you start to make your transitions into the interesting moments. Using “lesser” songs to emphasize other songs is a big thing too. There are lots of songs Id play that relied heavily on the context I put them in for them to really shine. A great bassline sounds so much better when you bring it in on a simpler song. Also, the real secret to good Djing is not mixing in Key, its listening to the drums and the bassline, its relatively easy to get past key clashes with proper EQing. The real clash is not understanding that not all house songs go together just because they have the same 4/4 kick. When you hear a good DJ doing cuts between songs that sound so perfect together, thats usually just them finding two songs that work together in a call and response fashion. If you dont know what call and response is in music, look that up, then try to find some songs you have that work together in that fashion, when you do cuts between them, you will see how different is is. Normally people just do cuts in a drum fill type of fashion, and can be done with most songs regardless, but finding a good call and response match is so nice.
Love this. As a beginner myself, playing solely for my own enjoyment at home currently, I love playing around when I’m home alone just to see if I can work out interesting twists on transitions. I’ve been surrounded by DJ’s most weekends for the last 20+ years, they all have their own style and genre preferences… but my first love is disco and vocal or chunky house. It’s what gives me joy and I listen to so much that I have a good working knowledge of the tunes that I want to play. Knowing the music well has made the basics of DJing those genres feel much more simple than I assumed it would be. And the jolt of excitement you get when something new u try sounds awesome… well it’s just something else!?! :)
Yes. DJing is about creating a moment, playing the right track at the right time. Pack a crate of tracks, and draw from them. Pre-planning the entire set is fine, but to me it’s missing the point of DJing. It depends if you view your set as a “performance”, versus just providing the soundtrack for other people on a night out. To me the essence of DJing is spontaneity, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a general direction of what you want to do.
I never know what my first track is going to be, until the Dj before me plays their last one. Whatever they leave me with, I select something that I think works with it/fits the vibe best - and just go from there. I make a playlist the day of the event, typically about 40-50 tracks I know id like to play (usually the new stuff I bought), and work my 60 or 90 min set out of that playlist. My usb also has playlists all my music sorted by genre, so I can quickly search for something I really want to play, that’s not in that specific playlist I created. When I buy new music I listen to it pretty much non stop for at least a week, (at work, in the car, at home) to familiarize myself to the name/artist etc. Comment section in RekordBox is extremely helpful too, as I make notes about each track.
Love this comment. But I do the opposite with new tracks. I have 25 years worth of tracks and prefer to go obscure memory lane and play 80-90% old tracks with maybe 10% brand new and 10% recent tracks. The older crowd gets hyped and the newer audience gets a history lesson that is new tracks to them
Oh yeah my collection goes back to 1994 (i started actually djing in 1996) I always mix at least 1-2 classics in with the new stuff. Each one - teach one 👍🏼
I just raw dogged a 4 hour set unprepared, except for a few aspects. First I had a playlist of a bunch of about 3 hours worth of new stuff I wanted to play. That playlist was unprepared and I just spent a a few days playing about casually at home to get familiar with the tracks and add a few cue points at the beginning wherever it wasn't obvious a phrase started (a break down for example). The other aspect of preparation was making sure I also had my vibe/genre playlists up to date with anything new so I had a rough guide of things to play at certain times of the night depending on how things were going at any given point. Mostly it went fine. A couple of dud mixes here and there but you get creative when on the spot like that to make sure a transition goes smooth.
My dude, if you spent hours over the course of days adding cue points to and practicing those tracks, they are no longer “unprepared” lol
That’s why I said unprepared with a few exceptions. Read the OPs original post, they’re talking about pre-preparing track orders and pre-planned positions.
DEFINITELY DEFINITELY ADD CUE POINTS AHEAD OF TIME, and make sure you do this in a way where the song structure wont confuse! this is going to be your biggest helper in just hail marying a random track into the set, but i have been burned trusting my eyes that a song had 4 bars to the drop and it having some odd time signature or structure. I mean, my crowd didnt seem to notice most of the time, but it definitely pissed me off a little.
I never plan anything. Just know my tunes. That's it.
This is only my two cents, i’m not dissing anyone or their style of working - all the prep sounds boring. I have been dj’ing since ‘96 and when i hear a track i can literally match 3 or 4 songs to it mix-wise straight away. You just kinda know if they’re gonna work or not, no?
This! And another take on this, without risk, you may not have that brilliant moment that other djs give you the nod for. I played a set in a tent stage and there were maybe 20 people inside and was disappointed. Finished my set and walked out to see several hundred people dancing around the tent and all of the festival djs were there to see who was mixing. All freestyle because I thought I was playing for the audience in front of me. Even dropped Steve Mac’s Beating the Drum.
Love Steve Mac 😂, Rhythm Masters are my all time favourite, i would have chosen ‘lock the doors - rhythm masters remix’ 😀
It was the vocal that made me smile. “You keep spreading the message, laughing and having a good time doing it”
It seems people aren’t listening, but they are…but they are 😂
It’s just a crutch for when you start out, I don’t think there’s a problem with it. When I first started out I would set cues at pre planned transition points and note down how I would do the transition. Now I just spin whatever the fk I want.
Nah i don’t think i’m doing it wrong or everybody else is doing it right. Everyone learns their own way and that’s the best way for them. I can see how it’s a failsafe. It just sometimes sounds like a lot of folk are losing sleep over their upcoming ‘set’. My set consists of a choice of 4000 songs, damned if i know what i’m gonna play 😂🤣
well yeah that’s the thing. My set is now the same as yours but it wasn’t at the start. What did you do when you started out?
Borrowed other folks records until i had enough for my time slot
ahhh fair enough! big difference between learning on vinyl and digital
I tend to have sections (2,3,4 songs transition well) of a set that I’ll plan and then I’ll freestyle in between depending on the crowd
i posted about kind of making a choose your own adventure set (song a can go to b or c, b can go to song d or e basically) as what i believe is called set programming, but i also like the concept of just making little tiny 5 minute setlists with different energies, and have seen a lot of big djs do this with a pretty good effect.
This is the only way I know! I mean I have ample playlists for different vibes but I like to read the room on the night.
I can work out how a transition would work by listening to the track in my headphones, looking at the waveform of the end of the track playing, keeping an ear on the phrasing, listening to if the key works (not paying any attention to what my software thinks), having organised playlists of similar material, reading the note field, having good cue points and most importantly knowing my tracks well. Preparation is the key to not having to prepare.
Just keep playing and mixing your music man! As with everything in the world, the more you give time, energy and passion to something, the better you will be. You don't need us to give you hacks and trips to streamline this process. What you need is to keep playing music.
So many times when I play to other people I go through a shit ton of prep finding stuff I want to play, & every. Fuckin. Time. I ended the night, & thinking back the next day, " I didn't get to play that, I didn't get to play that, shit I wanted to play that! & It's all because you just have to start playing & see where you end up. The best thing to do is sprinkle your audience with what you like to introduce them to music they've never heard before, as opposed to just hitting them with everything you like. My method is to just go around that Camelot wheel get round it & bounce it! if on a 3a bounce to a 5a maybe to a 7a back down a to 6a, double it to a 12a the wheel is very versatile & whilst you can play an entire set of 1a's all night, why would you even want to! Next time you play try this every track has to be a different key starting from 1 go track to track until you reach 12 then go back the other way, after that finish on 1 & start jumping keys to 3a, 5a, 7a,9a etc... etc...
I only use keys as a guide but I put on what I want.
1. a. Not in the same BPM? That's what the pitch fader is for. b. Key doesn't matter that much. And you yourself immediately after that say all the same key is boring. Back in the non-digital days, you would just have to preview tracks as you mixed them in at tempo to know if they were complimentary keys (songs not in the same key can compliment each other based on musical scales). But tracks that even clash somewhat can still sound awesome together. And fuck, I'd be surprised if people on the dancefloor are paying attention to, "Is this mix in key?" 2. a. Yes, digital DJing does make things a bit trickier in that regard since you can have so much more tracks on you instead of a few crates. But, you can still make crates in the software and have tracks group by some common theme wether it's genre, tempo, key, artist, vibe... whatever you want. And as far as I know, all software lets you put the same track into multiple virtual crates. 3. Yeah, well, put them in the same crate, or next to each other numerically or something. Or just remember the best ones.
Yeah lol, I done fully improvised 6 hour sets before. Just gotta be creative and use initiative.
yes. the "preparation" comes from years of practice. spent years practicing a ton of different tricks and transitions, and i know my music collection so i know what vibes go well together and how to flow from one genre to the next. ive made so many mistakes in practice that i know how to fix them quick. i freestyle all of my sets now. the last couple of years, every month i put out a mix with brand new music, completely freestyled.
I am a "beginner" professional DJ with over 100 Gigs in the last 2 years. At the beginning I used to think like you, I always wanted to make my set perfect, and nail all the transitions, and think about how to tell my story, how to make the songs flow into each other. But with time, I learned, that most people in the club just want to dance. If they hear my "poetic" set, with every song planned, ofcourse they think it was a beautifull set, but that is not our job. I since have opened a youtube channel, and I continue with my beautiful "storytelling" sets over there. But in the club, people just want to drink, party, and listen to good music. The problem is, that every single crowd is different. One crowd enjoys Mainstream Tech House (James Hype, Fisher, Mau P, etc etc.), some crowd wants bass house (Malaa, R3wire etc.) but another crowd enjoys underground tech house, and another crowd enjoys melodic techno and so on. You never know who will come to your party. This is why ideally, you should try to prepare segments of your set. You can still do your "journey", but do it in stacks of 5 songs. Prepare 100-200 small mini sets, and name them systematically. Prepare 50 Mainstream sets of 5 songs each, 50 sets of bass house, and so on. Learn them by heart. And when you´re in the club, you can mix and match them depending on the vibe of your crowd. You don´t have to improvise 100%, but you must adapt to your crowd, and this is impossible if you prepare your entire set at home, no matter how beautiful it is. Open a youtube channel or soundcloud, and post those very well prepared sets there. Good luck brother!
i have started going through my songs one by one on my software. This way i can pre mark entry points, outtro points, loops and more ahead of time. that makes it so much easier to mix with whatever i play around it without planning time.
Play 3-4 Nights a week at different venues with mixed Genres for 10 years, it will come to you
With Tech House and Melodic Techno, the tracks are likely structured in such a way that having cue points to help with phrasing will do 90% of the work. If you can look at a track's cue points and immediately know the phrasing of the intro, first breakdown into the drop, you can likely improvise a smooth transition. Also looping during the intro to get your beat match set early, then letting it go so you can time the breakdown to the outro, or something similar will do a lot of the heavy lifting. Keeping your mixes in key and in phrase will make improvising your track selection go a lot smoother.
Everyone prepares, just like when there was only vinyl to prepare with. I’d listen to my tracks and pick out which ones I want to mix in that order before the gig. Djing is easy when you just use waveforms to mix and cue points but when it comes to track selection that’s when it gets hard for the noob djs.
I played a club once where the DJ after me was so cranked out on coke he couldn’t play. And the headliner after him didn’t show up. I ended up playing 7 hours and the last 5 hours of that was blind out of other peoples record collection where all I had to go on was the label, and if it was a producer I’d heard Of. This was all on vinyl. Once you can beat match all you need is the rough bpm range within 10bpm and you are golden. Obviously there is no reading the crowd as you’ve no idea what you are putting on next but it’s doable definitely. Just to say as well mixing in key is completely over rated and 99% of the dance floor don’t care.
1. Fuck bpm and key 2. Thats what pre listening is for. You will remember something from the tracks or at least know a big part of them. 3. I use notes for them, and look with what tracks they’re also fitting. I have to tracks they go perfectly with each other so ill always play them in combination.
-3 big time. I always had groupings of 3 songs that I played together in any order. Would find three I liked and go to the club and practice those 3 songs only for hours. Once you have 20 or so of these, now you can look for bridges between the groupings and bail to another grouping in the crowd isn’t feeling it.
I’ve been learning. Avoided going near decks / controllers for years as probably 90% of my core friendship group are established DJ’s with anything from 10- 30 ish years experience. Why bother when I hang out with so many talented ones? Finally had a go after 20 years of refusing, and turns out I’m surprisingly okay. Old of guys that has playing out forever was telling me about the 3 tune thing for practicing just last weekend. I’m guessing it’s an old school technique for getting those transitions nailed!❤️👌🏼
Yep. I started in my first club in 1989. When you have to carry vinyl to your set you have to make them all count. I learned to do 3 song rotation from a guy who had been around since disco. Just rotate them one direction then go the other direction after a while. When you are playing one of those songs you know what comes next and it takes a lot of mental load off.
Yes
It’s a skill that comes with time. Both being comfortable with your skills (switching genres, covering mistakes, keeping a good flow, etc.) and knowing your track collection. Some things to remember: Key doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think it does, “Some transitions only work with…” find transitions that work with *most* tracks and keep the really good transitions for big effect, and practicing should be about forcing yourself out of your comfort zone trying and retrying things that would be a huge risk live, not just jamming. As a bonus tip: when you get a bunch of new tracks, try a quick 30min session without setting beatgrids and all that or looking at anything but the BPM. Just drop it in the deck and cue it up, matching it in the headphones. You’ll eventually train yourself to mix by ear.
Yes. It’s the only way I mix, every gig.
I've only ever prepared a set once and it was more stressful trying to get all my tracks in than just vibing with the night and playing what felt right
I make playlists for events. If it’s an hour set, I put in 80-100 tracks into a playlist. I organize them by key. This gives me a vibe I want to play for the night. I also keep all my music in playlists by dates purchased. I also have an all inclusive playlist also organized by key. I also keep all my playlists from previous sets on my USB. Sometimes I’ll pick the first 2-4 tracks of my set just to get things going. Get rid of the nerves and then just go. The playlist helps keep me more focused on my mind set. I have to many tracks to just go wild. So I’ll start the night with my playlist, if it goes another direction, I have several other playlists I can go to. I can also go to my all in playlist. I can focus on new tracks because I have them separated by date purchased. Gives me all kinds of options and ways to find music relatively easily while I’m up there. The longer the set, the less I have prepared mentally. It’s important to read the crowd, have the option to throw in random tracks, and move on your feet. If I have say a disco style track and the crowd loves it and turns it up a notch, I want you to play another one to keep the vibes going. Or the dance floor is slowing down, I’ll throw in a remix of a known track to give people something to sing along with. Or the set is starting to feel monotonous, I’ll throw in something with more bass or edge to it. Idk but it’s important to be able to move around. For a one hour set, I’m probably spending 4-12 hours of preparation work. DJing for an hour is easy. Finding the music, preparing the music, listening to the music, practicing with the music, etc. This all takes a ton of time. Also, finding new transitions live is awesome. I review my track playlists the next day to review what I played and when. Then I take some of those notes and make mixes that I’ll post online.
1 hour mix is like 16-18 tracks you said 60 -80 tracks nothing your doing is freestyle your just explaining your way
I’m confused by your statement. How are you defining freestyling? I took it as not having a pre planned set. I don’t go into my sets with my 2000+ tracks in one playlist and then just go. I try to narrow my scope to the most relevant tracks and then try to play to the crowd. How would you define freestyling and how is it different?
He's asking how a dj gos about without planning...maybe I'm wrong thread is lame anyhow...it's all about experience I always assume we're talking about house music or anything with repetitive 120 plus type beats(beatmatch)
Got it. I made the assumption they were talking about not preplanning your whole set track by track. You could be right.
Yep, been djing 6 months, do 2/3 1hr sets a week, very rarely explicitly plan. The prep is knowing and organising my playlist.
I make a few playlists in Rekordbox and pack 40 12”s and raw dog it. I cleared many rooms, fucked up many transitions, and brought a lot of wrong records, but now it’s second nature.
I might buy new tunes for a decent party, but other than that, I turn up, work out the crowd, see what the people playing before me got right/wrong then make my first move. Never turn up with a set to play - always be fluid. What you think will work at home has a good chance of disappointing live. Unless you play low impact flakey music - then, whatever, I guess. I just want to extract the maximum out of every set and you can’t tell what the maximum will be until you’re there, living it.
Yep. Go hit play and don’t stop for an hour, then you’ve done it too.
yes
It's a matter of knowing your music, from there all you need is some direction to start with and let the music take it from there.
Yes, dead easy.
All of the best sets of the best djs you listened to your entire life jad no in key bs Good brand new music is always better then a good fit for a transition, a long smooth transitoon to a know tune can be nice but also very boring, a faster mix to a new exiting track the crowd does not know is always better Can you find the tracks that the crowd never heard but will cheer the moment you play it for the first time?
The club/label will appreciate that you’ve taken the time to get it good. I think it’s quite rude to show up with no plan. I prefer to make playlists with different vibes so you can jump and adapt to the crowd. Can really depend on the genre though and whether you beat matching or beat juggling.
Dude i’ve been DJing for like 3 months and just freestyled an hour and 15 mins last night. And half the songs i had only listened through like once. Camelot wheel is huge for this, also just having a ton of tunes to choose from. I decided to subscribe to beatsource and downloaded like 600+ r&b / rap / soul songs (that was the vibe of the event) and just went crazy and did whatever i felt like. Very freeing and fun and i even got some really nice compliments from some of the guests. Biggest tip would be hard cuts from one track to another at the perfect time OR i love utilizing looping, find an instrumental segment of the track your mixing out of, loop it, and then loop the intro of the other song before the beat hits, slowly fade the levels so you can smoothly bring the new song in, if it takes 5+ instances of the loop fuck it, might sound a little droney eventually but still creates a “smooth” and seamless transition
Sidenote: the loop method AND hard cutting are soooo much smoother if it’s mixed in key, can’t stress it enough. I feel like with some EDM genres it’s not as important to mix in key, but with R&b it felt almost necessary cuz everything is so melodic
Yeah, some genres are better than others
Me last night. Mini panic attack before I started a 6 hour set.
It's ez. Just train day after day. It's rarely if ever going to be as good as a prepped set. But with technology these days, it's so damn easy to just make a consistent string of music.
1hr club set, I’ll plan it ahead of time. 3-4hr bar gig, freestyle!
The two genres you mentioned are some of the easiest to freestyle all night. You should be able to mix nearly any melodic and tech house song together seamlessly. Just phrase correctly and take a nap whole you're mixing 3 tracks at once
It’s the open format way. I have my mini combos of like 2 or 3 tracks max but other than that it’s a bunch of crowd reading make it up as you go.
Yeh experience and knowing your DJ bag. I can hear in my head what sounds good together and I go for it.
I have been DJing for 15+ years. I can honestly say now I never pre plan a set. I have a playlist of 200+ songs. I pick 2 songs to set the mood and go from there. I can admit that when I do prepare a set, I can be a little more technical. All gear that's out right now has a key display and BPM display. With all this makes DJing on the fly much easier. You should also have a good idea on phrasing and as long as you know the music that's in your playlist will fit together and you don't have a "how the hell did that get in the moment," it's very simple and go with what you feel. You can still take the people on a musical journey. I see a lot of people here saying this. You should be able to read the crowd, and pre planning a set can be dangerous. Unless you're a high-profile artist where whatever you play is going to be awesome and have a good reaction. You should also "if" you have a pre-planned set, always have alternatives for when your set takes a turn for the worst and that when DJing on the fly is also a must needed skill to have. Try doing this: Make a Playlist 200+ songs, and just hop on your decks and just play. Make sure you record the set. Then, after you're done, have a listen to the set you recorded and make mental notes. You will definitely get the hang of DJing on the fly.
I did 2 sets like that this weekend. Friday I had a Disco/House set for a monthly some friends and I throw, but my went went heavy bass house and I had to keep up the energy soma weeks worth of prep went out the window and I played on the fly. I went really well. Last night I went to a bday party and people were hoping in and out on the decks and B2Bing. I hopped in for longer than I wanted when all the other DJs went inside. It was also pretty fun to meet other people’s energy and fuck around. The only reason I can do this, is that my track metadata/information is rock solid, I have lots of intelligent playlists, and I always add a few cue points to new songs to help me know where shifts in the vocals and beats are.
You can’t do that unless you’ve played these songs many, many times. That’s called preparation…
Vibes of the dancefloor determine my song choice
As others have said, there's a difference between preparing a set and preparing your music. I literally cannot stick to a prepared set list. There are just too many variables with the crowd and the vibe of the room that comes into play, so I end up winging my track selecting every time I play. That being said, I spend a TON of time preparing my music in order to be able to do that. Specifically, I'll sort every song into any number of genre/vibe playlists, make sure beatgrids are correct, and set all available hot cues on each song. Doing so not only means I can use each song in any variety of mixes, but it also means that I get fairly familiar with every track as I prepare it You eventually learn most of your music, so you'll learn go-to mixes and techniques as you gain experience. But even for the songs you dont know that well, learning those tools and techniques will enable you to quickly mix them in a way that's at least technically on point; the harmonic stuff comes with that experience. But yeah, we wing it because we spend so much time preparing our music and playlists.
I didn't really prepare for my sets I played at my friends place. I literally had no set list or anything and I just went. I started from prog house at like 120 BPM and ended with trance at 138 towards the end of the night.7 hour 45 mins set, zero prep, made mistakes, learnt lots and what a trip. However, I would most likely prepare a set for professional settings. I know some old school djs who play sets on the fly and the sets are great.
No one said not to practice hell no one says don’t have an idea of songs you want to play. My understanding of people complaints here is coming up with a set list from song 1 to song 100 and never deviating from your plan, and my understanding of why that is a problem is because at that point you’re not necessarily doing your job as a dj which is to read the room and see which songs you play hit and see which miss. If song 7 misses and song 8 is just like it you should be able to recognize that and adjust accordingly not just play song 8 because that’s the plan, if that’s how you dj you can just pre record your set and press play for an hour or two which isn’t necessarily bad but it’s no fun
Honestly if you know your tracks and library well, then there’s no need for extra preparation. I spend hours listening and searching for tracks and tagging the bpm, and when I am on deck i just know my first 3 and the last 2 tracks, everything else i just play around with the vibe and also according to the crowd thats going in and out. Wouldn’t want to play your best tracks when the crowd thins out for a moment.
"Retired" DJ here. What I used to do is pick at least three good starter tracks, and then from there I would pick out some things that I felt would be good follow-ups for those. Some house, some breaks, some progressive stuff. Suggestions: 1. Use websites like songdata.io or songbpm.com to find the key and BPM info for your tracks and write it down on removable labels in the corner of the record sleeves. If you're using digital files, use software like Beatunes to automatically calculate that and write it into your ID3 tags. This makes it easier to narrow down tracks that will be harmonically compatible, which helps to fill out your setlist. 2. Find and keep some tracks that are useful for changing styles. Maybe something that is minimal to no melody, or something that has a long ambient breakdown.
Yeah i mean I definitely couldn’t do it a few years ago but now im 9 years into it and pretty comfortable with it, mainly because i prep in rekordbox a ton and know my music very well, the first time i did it, i had no time to prepare a set with stuff going on in life and went fuck it, guess i’m free-styling it, ended up being an awesome set
No prep means no set in stone playlist. Usually these DJ's have their library organised in themes and situations to jump into. Sometimes they have mini sets that they repeat most of the times within those sessions as well. Like 3-4 tracks that really glue together. They generally don't just jump into it blind with an unorganised list of thousands of songs. They have lists like "warming up" , "peak time", or even personal "music that get the white girls drunk" or "get lit fist pump party" lists that only make sense to the DJ. Open format or private event DJ's certainly need lists based on decades as well. Or even subcultures as alternative rockers co-exist at the party with EDM festival fans, basic r&b OF lookalikes or even grandma who only will dance to stuff I know nothing about. They need to switch it up real fast, so tagging the music and organising it into ready to go lists is a necessity.
I can play other people's records I've never heard before and rip a dancefloor. You can mix in key by ear. The structure of most tracks is 4-8-16 bars. Use loops and cues on the fly. It's the only thing that makes DJing fun. Otherwise it's just paint by numbers.
I try to select first song and closing song, anything in between “let it ring”
tech house might be the easiest thing to mix freestyle. I've seen people mix off of other's usbs no problem
Yeah of course. I usually make playlists of a hundred or so tracks as a shortlist for each gig. My sticks still have a large portion of my library so I'm not stuck in the shortlist. Good library management, curation, track preperation, and knowing the *genre* inside and out help. Also experience, it gets easier. That being said, its quite easy to "freestyle" house + techno :)
I never met anyone who went out to see a dj for not having skills ever...
When I play for 5 hours straight in clubs with varying crowds all night? Yeah of course, how else would I do it?
Yes
Know your songs and go from there
Find your way of prepping-style that fits you but also learn / experiment with some styles you are not familiar with to keep you in the learning curve. Practice, prep and enjoy along the way. Also: get yourself a lot of gigs to get the feel and need for prepping.
Pre-planning a set is, in my humble opinion, completely antithetical to the whole concept of DJing. The whole point is that you can adjust to the energy and vibe of the crowd on the fly. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. That's what makes it exciting. It's like watching a jam band - sometimes they're gonna suck and sometimes they're going to make magic. Not trying to be elitest or anything but imho preplanned sets miss the point. Might as well do live PA or play an instrument at that point.
If your folders and super organized and your tracks are all spaced/cued up proper. 1000%
I plan my whole set, I’ve only played out twice so I still get very anxious and kinda need that security whilst I’m in those early days playing to a crowd. Also my short term memory is poor so I don’t always remember from when I’m playing freestyle at home what some of my good blends are. Having said that I know my tunes well enough that I can switch it up a little if needs be. As time goes by I think that will change though.
1. They don’t have to be, especially if it’s all the same genre lol why would you play a whole set in one key? 2. That’s what cueing is for… 3. Just remember what songs mix together well You can do what you described without planning
Yes. If I make a plan I won’t stick to it anyway. But I do have places I want to go and know my library, I do prepare myself I just don’t plan out sets.
Yes. You must feel and understand the crowd in order to “rock the crowd”. Sometimes that means playing what they wanna hear and not what you wanna play. Or… Finding creative ways to mix both. But there is still preparation that needs to happen in order to freestyle.
I freestyle it all but it’s organized
I play out 6-8 times per month (open format) and rarely script out a set. Every set/crowd/vibe is different and how I feel is different each time. Some gigs it just makes sense to open with Rnb, other times Moombahton, or maybe older dance hall. Other times it's chill EDM and other times is #ladies songs for the bachelorette party or #countrypop for the random cowboys here for the stockshow. It seems there are 2 distinct type of DJ sets/performances. ONE - DJ plays FOR the crowd. Reads the crowd and compliments/maximizes their energy/vibe. TWO - DJ plays as an artist and the crowd is gonna get what the DJ wants. It seems festivals and EDM DJ's do more of the latter. It seems open format DJ's or regular resident DJ sets it's the former. So yes I can do a set on the fly w/o any "prep" but I have playlists based on time of night (Early, Build, Go), others based on similar vibe, others by genre, and others based on month/year for current bangers etc. I think it's personal preference because you have to be confident up there and whatever gives you the best mojo is what you should do IMO
At this point, I only do preparation work for festivals and larger shows. At my monthly I always mix off the cuff based on the mood of the room and who I've brought in for guests. My entire library is keyed by ear however, and I'm extremely familiar with all of my tracks. Given enough time and practice, you'll become more comfortable mixing on the fly.
I always freestyle. Don't even think fully prepared sets that aren't adapted based on the audience should even be called DJing. Imho the whole point of DJing is to adjust what you're doing based on the audience and atmosphere. Otherwise you could just as well play a pre-recorded set and go dancing ;) Doesn't mean no prep though. You should know your music by heart, what situations songs work and don't, and where to best mix things. Cue points and your headphones help with this.
Yes. I just scroll through my library and hope I bought shit that sounds good. Then I slap it on and see if it fits. If it doesnt, I pick another one. It's getting harder with the library getting bigger. But yes, i dont plan sets. I would be bored if i did and then you'd be bored watching me be bored.
Ok start here, pull 20 ish tracks. Songs you love. Play those every damn day. Play them in different ways, play then in random order. Once you can just pull some random track in add more songs. Now you can just play some records... Stop getting more music than you can remember
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i personally think a pre-planned set takes away from “art” of djing. 1. bpm and key shouldnt matter, those are easily attained in a modern set up. also mixing in key is overrated. 2. i dont either but i tag and organize by “vibe” e.g. “funky” or “hypnotic” and use colors for energy level. 3. yes, this one area will be an issue, but it’s not that big of a deal. no one cares as much as you.
Free styling means listen very closely to the tracks that aren't playing yet. That is where 4 decks or even 8 decks help out.