Making tempo changing

1. Use the 50% rule… – This one is pretty simple, and it states that if you’re beatmixing, say, a 120BPM tune into a 126BPM tune, the best place to do that mix is at 123BPM – 50% of the way between the two. That way, the first tune is only speeded up a small amount, and likewise the second is only slowed down a small amount. Fewer people are likely to notice when a tune is “off” its original BPM when you try to stay close to the original BPMs in this way
2. …and the 5% rule – This one states that you should only deviate by 5% up or down, maximum, when beatmixing (I usually prefer 4% personally). So if you’re mixing a 100BPM tune, 5% down is 95BPM and 5% up is 105BPM – so you’re looking for your next tune to be within that range. If all this talk of percentages muddles your head, just choosing 5BPM up or down (or a 10BPM range) is a simpler, if slightly less accurate, way of remembering this rule
3. Use key lock… but beware – Keylock, or master tempo, is the control on CDJs and DJ controllers/software that stops the pitch of a tune altering when you change the tempo. It can be highly useful when executing BPM changes in a beatmix, because it stops tunes sounding ridiculously low or high when you slow them down or speed them up outside of a subtle change. However, deviate too far from true tempo (or sometimes, any distance at all) and the sound can reduce in quality with keylock on, so trust your ears. A good rule too is to try to return to the true tempo for the incoming tune once you’ve finished your mix, and then turn key lock off once you have (say, within the first minute of the tune playing), by making slow BPM adjustments that hopefully your audience won’t notice
4. Make those BPM adjustments randomly/off the beat – It’s fine to adjust the BPM of the tune that’s playing as I just described – indeed, it’s the only way you’re going to move between the BPMs if you also want to carry on beatmatching. But doing this in slow increments over a couple of minutes is the best way, as hopefully your audience won’t notice. Another tip is to make these small adjustments randomly or off the beat. The reason is that because most adjustments we make in DJing are on obvious “1” beats; so if you do this in totally random places in the song, there’s nothing musical about it (ie the audience isn’t expecting anything to change) thus you’ll get away with it better
5. Try the double/half trick – If your set speeds up to a high BPM (say 155+), you can mix in a tune that’s exactly half the BPM of the playing tune and the beats will line up (so from 156, you could mix into a 78BPM tune) – great for hopping from dubstep to hip hop or vice versa
6. Ditch beatmixing totally – It ain’t all about beatmixing, folks. A couple of the best tricks up any DJ’s sleeve are surprise and silence. Surprise the audience by radically changing genre and BPM at just the right time by just throwing a new tune on right at its biggest hook or drop. Or, kill the music totally before dropping in to, say, an acapella at a different BPM, then a beat finally to bring the music back, again at the new BPM. Or you could cut from the beat of one track at one BPM to a beatless break of another at a different BPM. Sure, you’ve got to practise such techniques (and sometimes, you’ve got to have the balls to practise them in front of a real audience) – but these are all bonafide tricks for moving between the BPMs without needing to religiously rely on beatmatching
7. Trust your ears! – we have three full sections of videos on mixing, we have an example mix where I demonstrate going from a full-on house tune to a laconic lazy reggae song in one mix – while still beatmatching! This particular mix breaks pretty much all the rules above, but it still works… so the important takeaway here is to trust your ears and if you experiment and something sounds good that shouldn’t (or if try as you might, a mix that ought to work really just doesn’t) – believe what you’re hearing. There’s art as well as science in mixing, and never more so than when boldly chopping around genre and tempo ranges

Playing warm up set

1. Leave your ego at the door – This is a job, and the job is to set the mood, create the vibe, and prepare the club and the dancefloor for the main DJ. It isn’t about showing off, making a name for yourself, or grabbing the limelight. If you want to get booked again, don’t try and do any of these things. Your time will come…
2. The big tunes are off-bounds – Filling a dancefloor is easy. Just play all the big tunes of the moment. Thing is, that is absolutely not an avenue open to you as a warm-up DJ. Your job, instead, is to get the dancefloor full by the time the main DJ comes on, without playing any of the big tunes. Suddenly sounds a bit harder, right? So let’s look at some ways of making it easier…
3. Focus on the person or people most likely to start the dancing – It may be just one girl. A group of two girls and two lads. It won’t be a whole bunch of people at first, for sure. But somewhere in that slowly filling-up club will be someone who can’t wait to get going. They’ll be on the edge of the floor, probably. Watch them. Play to them. The dancefloor is like a seesaw: Once you get few people on it, it “tips”… and the night has started. So concentrate on your first people – hard
4. Don’t be scared to change genres – DJing more about programming and music than mixing, and never more so than when you’re warming up. You’re setting a mood, and trying different things (within the realms of what’s expected in the venue you’re playing in, of course) is part of the job – indeed, it’s essential. This is no time to stick to a pre-planned, perfect mix that just isn’t getting the right results – and as no two warm-ups are the same, you must be prepared to switch things up
5. Be friendly, especially to the staff – Dan says this is actually the best piece of advice he has for DJs! DJing is all about atmosphere, and the right atmosphere spreads from you, and from the people who are there from the off… that means the staff! So if you’re humble and friendly with everyone – doormen, bar staff, manager, promoter, other DJs, early attendees – you’re starting to set the fun and happy vibe right from the off. How simple that you can begin to get your work done before you play the first tune! But so many warm-up DJs are moody, insolent or unfriendly, “heads down”-type characters, who then wonder why the club has a bad vibe for their whole set. Always remember, the party starts with you

Good DJ Organization

1. Separate your DJ music from your non-DJ music – You do not – I repeat, DO NOT – want to be spending even nanoseconds quickly scrolling past that Phil Collins album that you’ve got in iTunes, ahem, for your mum, in the heat of a DJ gig. OK, so you may have a bit, some or a damned lot of non-DJ music on your iTunes or whatever – and that’s cool, families share computers, some of us do have a musical life outside of DJing, you know (although I draw the line at Phil Collins – then again, “Coming In The Air Tonight” is pretty cool…) – but seriously, just tag all the dancey stuff “DJ” and only work from that lot. Or just keep it somewhere separate
2. Use genres that make sense to you – People get awfully respectful around genres. Let me tell you something: Half the people making, selling and distributing the music you buy digitally – the very same people adding the “genre” tags to the music – don’t have a damned clue about genre either. From the laughably vague (Dance/RnB) to the ridiculously specialist (“Nintendocore”? “Nerd Core Hip Hop”?), genres mean nothing unless they mean something to YOU. So use house, disco, pop, hip hop etc (pick a few and stick to ‘em) and retag everything that comes into your library with just a few genres that make sense to you. This will help you immensely when DJing to lump together everything that sounds roughly the same in YOUR eyes (or ears)
3. Make playlists – Make playlists for individual gigs. Make playlists for mixtapes. Make monthly playlists. Make sad ones. Happy ones. Just make ‘em. And tuck them into a folder called “playlists” if having them there, in full view, offends you. You’ll come back to them, I promise you. Playlists are our way of doing what we want to do by nature – slice, dice, organise. They help us to look forward creatively. They may be only 2 or 3 songs or they may be 100s, but they don’t have to be perfect, they don’t even have to mean much – they could just be a few tunes that mix well together. But make ‘em and keep ‘em. One of the great things about digital is that the same song can appear in all different places in your library – so take advantage of that
4. Keep your set history – All DJ software will allow you to save the history – what you’ve played. As with playlists, just do it! It’ll help you out in all types of ways, from remembering what you played last New Year’s Eve (trust me, it never changes that much year-on-year – you’d be surprised) to remembering what you played for the last two hours last night because, ahem, you were “in the spirit of things”. It costs nothing to do it, so just do it
5. Back the hell up! – A reader and a friend, Jake, told me the other day that he was really, really happy, because his hard drives with all of his music on were NOT destroyed in the fire that destroyed pretty much everything else he owned, and which nearly killed him, a couple of months back. It happens, folks. Back up your music and keep a copy somewhere else. The same house even isn’t good enough (ask Jake). Obviously life/death/fires is serious stuff, but while this ain’t gonna happen to most of us, losing music happens to far too many people. And when you follow a backup regime, something else curious happens – you value your music more. Because you know you can be bothered to look after it, you somehow feel it’s worth more to you. And feeling your music is worth a lot is pretty essential for any self-respecting DJ.