Can someone explain DJing to me? And "remixes," too

Cafe Society
1

It’s almost embarrassing to ask this question because it seems like it’s something that everybody just knows, but here goes:

What’s with DJing? What exactly are they doing? I have friends who do this, but have never been brave enough to ask lest they think I’m even more of an unhip dork than I already am. So…they play music. They seem to have a lot of CDs, or else they have it on an iPod. They fiddle around with some big electronic boards with lots of knobs and sliders. Some of them (not my friends–they’re industrial) make things scratch like old LPs. There are actually machines that are designed to make CDs scratch like old LPs. I do not get this.

So, Doper DJs–please help me out. What exactly are they doing? What makes a good DJ? How is it different than simply choosing a bunch of CDs and playing them? What do all those little knobs and sliders do, anyway?

Oh, and while we’re at it, on a related note, what exactly is involved in making a remix? Several of my industrial CDs have three or four tracks each that are “remixes” of some of the songs, by other people. “Song Name,” <Mumblefoo> Remix. Clearly these are different takes on the same song, but does the remixer start with the recording of the original song and…change it? I know this should be obvious and to some extent it is, but I just don’t get the nuances. If I wanted to make a remix of a song, what would I do? (Not that I do, mind you–lamentably, my musical talent is more toward listening than creation, but I’m curious in a hypothetical sense.)

2

At its most basic, here’s what’s going on:

Two turntables, routed through a mixer. The mixer has a volume slider for each turntable, as well as a master slider that lets you blend/switch between the two audio sources.

Now you get two records. You put one on each turntable, and try to play them both at the same time.

Out of the gate, this is an unmitigated disaster. The two songs you’re playing will doubtless have different bpms (beats per minute … remember those metronomes from music class that count out the time?). So you need to synchronize the beats. That is accomplished with speed dials on each turntable–you can slow down, or speed up, the records as needed until the beats match.

So now, you have two songs that are playing on-beat, but otherwise make no sense together. So you figure out which parts of each song you like. Maybe there’s a great drum break or vocal line in one song. Maybe there’s a great basic beat in the other song. So you play the parts you like from each song, deciding to either mix them together, or switch between them as necessary (remember that master slider?). Now comes the tricky part–to do that, you need to physically “rewind” the record to the correct spot under the needle. (DJ turntables have special needles that won’t carve up your records when you do this.) So you synchronize the records, let them both play, and, when you reach the end of the part you want to feature, you spin that record back to the starting section so you can play that part again. It gets quite mindbending.

Meanwhile, you need to figure out what record you’re going to throw into the mix next to keep things going in an uninterrupted stream.

You can also, nowadays, use special CD players and MP3 players/software that allow you to do the same thing.

3

Wow, no kidding?

I had no *idea *they were doing all that! And on the fly, too! That’s pretty amazing, actually. :slight_smile: I never realized that they were actually playing more than one thing at once…

Thanks!

4

DJing is actually a pretty difficult skill. I’ve been a DJ for years and I must confess I am terrible at Beatmatching. I compensated for this by matching phrasing and blending intros and outros of things that had different kinds of beats so that the beat would change suddenly, but on cue.

You have to match up both the kick drum and the snares. You also have to come in at the right time. Most electronica is based on a very standard template, specifically so it can be beatmatched by DJs. A lot of the reason most electronic music is nearly unlistenable at home is because it isn’t meant to be played at home. It’s meant to be layered. A track that is too complex is that much harder to beatmatch, whereas a good DJ can mix three or four tracks together and make them sound like one.

On your mixer you also have frequency ranges. Usually Lows, Mids and Highs. You can tweak the frequency ranges to make that frequency range more dramatic. Like if you want to build something up you can turn the highs really low then slow build to a crescendo that almost hurts someone’s ears. If you want the crowd to go apeshit you want to get just a hair under ear splitting.

There are certain frequencies that at certain decibel ranges affect the nervous system in different ways. I forget what they are, but I think it’s like 90 db where it starts hitting you in the pit of your stomach, and that’s kind of the lowest you can have it for a real dance party.

Some modern DJs are messing with surround sound, so they are not just mixing temporally, but also spacially, making different sounds come out of different areas of the speakers. You can also project sound so it seems like you hear it at a specific spot.

Mixing multiple genres can be very tough. Even though Techno, Psy-Trance or Tech-House might seem remarkably similar to the unitiated they sound wildly disparate to the afficianado. A good DJ rocks both the man off the street and the snob alike.

Then there are turntablists. A turntablist is like a percussionist who’s medium is his turntables. This is what you see with scratching. These guys are amazing. Check out Q-Bert vids if you want to really see a master at it.

Also, DJ turntables are direct drive not belt drive, you’ll snap the belt in a regular turntable if you try to scratch on it.

5

Remixes are like the DJ form of a cover song. A Mashup is when you mix two different songs, usually two different types of songs. Like the Grey Album which is a mash-up of Jay Z’s Black album and The Beatles White Album.

6

DJing is definitely a skill, and good DJs need talent; timing and a good ear for music are a must if you want to do really make your mixes sing. Matching beat is necessary, of course – you really need good timing for that, as even if the beat is a hair off it creates one of two effects: The bass drums cancel each other out due to being slightly out of phase (if a very similar bass drum is used) or you get a noticeable and disconcerting echo. Then there’s knowing your library. You have to be intimately familiar with every song and know which song outro can blend well with which intro, and at what points in each, such that the mood and energy of the mix is not lost. These two alone are essentials of good psy/goa/prog trance, prog house, techno and various other electro DJs. There are a ton of popular and well-established DJs who have released all sorts of mix albums. Have a listen to Armin van Buuren (particularly his yearly “State of Trance” releases), Paul Oakenfold (a.k.a. Perfecto – some might know him for doing the soundtrack to the movie “Swordfish”), Tiësto, and others. Many trance DJs also become accomplished original artists in their own right.

If it’s a rap DJ you want to be, your mad scratching skills will come into play. Watching a good scratch artist will knock your socks off. Timing is even more important here, as well as knowing your decks and the records on them like extensions of your own hands. Scratching requires mastery and control of your hands, much like a singer must master and control their voice.

Remixes are another beast altogether. Once upon a time (mostly back in the 80s) a remix was simply an extended version of the original song. These days, remixes are all about other artists reinterpreting the material and presenting their own version of it, usually with their own instrumentation and often with their own arrangement. Remixes are primarily made for club play, but they usually find their way on to an artist’s CD single or as bonus tracks on an album. I’m not a DJ (I have zero skill with turntables), but I have done some remixing. I have a lot of fun with it, too – I love taking someone else’s work and putting my own spin on it.

Note that a “remix” and a “mix” are two different things. A remix refers to what I just mentioned in my last paragraph. A mix, as pertaining to DJs, generally refers to the musical set as a whole.

7

Orbital Mindfield Meat Beat Manifesto Remix is one of my favorite tracks :wink:

8

You know how dumb I am? My cousin is a techno DJ in Atlanta, evidently pretty successful, and when he comes down here, you know, his car goes thump thump thump beep beep thump thump thump. He’s always, “Do you know the ___?” and “I have got to burn you this CD!” so once I said, “I don’t know, they all sound the same at the beginning.”

Long pause.

“They’re supposed to, you know. So you can mix them together.”

D’oh!

9

We’re not talking about the guys you hire for a wedding reception here, are we? That’s what I usually think of as a “DJ”, but this art form you’re talking about doesn’t seem to have more than a vague superficial resemblance to that.

10

Chronos Actually that’s a great job for the DJs we’re talking about. They can mindless play Frank Sinatra the Chicken Dance and Britney Spears together without doing anything and walk away with 1500 dollars for transporting a fraction of their equipment and some CDs they burned off of Limewire.

11

I’ve done some remixes and here is basically what I did: the band asked me to make a remix of their song, then provided me with a finished version of the song, the vocals completely isolated, and some of the random other noises in the song. I took the isolated vocals and basically wrote a brand new song around them, taking the song in a completely different direction. Not to whore out my stuff or anything, but as an example: this page has my most recent remix (Energy - interface2x automated remix) and this page contains the finished version (which is slightly different from the version they had provided me). That one was particularly hard for me because I vocoded the vocals to change their melody, as well. It took forever and turned out reasonably well, as far as I’m concerned.

12

In addition to the above, most mid to higher end mixers now have effects and loop banks built in, so with just 2 inputs(whether they be turntables, CD turntables, hard drives, etc), you can record a loop out of the input, then assign it to another input on the fly. I just upgraded to a Denon X1500 mixer, which has 4 channels. With it, I could put my turntable 1 on channel 1, and my turntable 2 on channel 4. Now, I can sample up to 8 seconds of audio out of turntable 1, assign it to channel 2, then put another record on turntable 1, and now I have a record on channels 1 and 4, and a sample looping that I can fade in or out on channel 2.

It also has 9 different effects(echo, parametric filters, flange, reverb, etc), that I can apply to a single channel input, or the whole output. I can even flip a switch, and assign my turntable 2 to both channels 3 and 4. Combined with the above, I have a record on channel 1, a sample looping in channel 2, then I can take the record on turntable 2 and apply a low pass filter and assign that to channel 3, then apply another filter to the record on channel 4. I now have a record playing as recorded(unless I use the filter knobs on it), a sample looping from a previous record, and another record playing in two different versions that I can cut back and forth between.

And that is a simple, mid level mixer…the higher level mixers have 3 sample banks and more effects.

You can also get sample/effect machines that you can send the audio out to, and return to the mixer, and apply an almost infinite number of changes to, like the Pioneer DJX1000 or the Korg Kaosspad KP3, and basically make the song unrecognizeable.

I’m somewhat unimpressed technically with the guys who are strictly doing digital work, and can’t sling vinyl (the newest DJ CD turntables are pretty much idiot proof, and combined with a higher end digital mixer, most of the work is done for you), but this is the direction the whole industry is going.

I just play for fun at afterparties at my house, I have a pair of Technics 1200M3s with a Denon X1500 mixer. I play electrobass and dark breaks, which is more problematic to beatmatch because there is no 1-2-3-4 regular bass drum, but the crazy effects and vocoder raps I think allow you to create a much more interesting mix moving from record to record.

I think it’s kind of sad that you can rip your entire vinyl collection to MP3, burn it on 2 cds, and load a cd into each turntable and never have change a record all night, and by simply hitting a button, you can have a mixer that starts the crossfade at a programmed speed that you pick, but I guess this allows you to have much more time in the mix to do effects and loops. If I’m mixing records that I don’t know really, realll well, often I take so much time setting the mix up that I don’t have time to play with even the simple effects onboard my mixer.

13

Here is a good video showing first, a simple beat match of house music to transfer from one song to the next, and then, an elaborate way to transfer, making a much more creative sound to the experience:

and this is my next purchase(one day)-Korg KP3. It has a memory card slot, so you can store hundreds of samples, then load 4 at a time, or switch and run your live mix through it, and apply hundreds of effects to the samples or the audio inputs:

14

[hijack]
Nice mix. Trancey, with a bit of Front 242 flavour. Softsynths or real gear?
[/hijack]

15

Thanks, all soft-synth. Beats were made with HammerHead (freeware), vocoding was done with Zerius Vocoder (freeware), and the sequencing/synths were all done in FL Studio 6.

16

Awesome, another Fruity nut. :slight_smile: Any reason for using HammerHead instead of FL’s own sequencer? (I’ve never used the former so I’m curious what it offers over Fruity + BeatSlicer) I’ll have to check out Zerius though; I don’t have a good vocoder and could definitely use one.

17

If you did that at my wedding you wouldn’t be looking at $1500, you’d be lucky to get paid at all. What are you gonna do, spit on my record collection?

18

I pretty much used Hammerhead just because I liked the kick of the bass drum and harsh sound of the snare that I found on there and couldn’t find an equivalent in FL off-hand at the time. My original plan was to use the beat from Hammerhead as a place-holder until I made something better or more complicated and … well … I got lazy so I just left it as is. That remix was particularly frustrating because I absolutely could NOT get the vocals to match a beat, no matter how hard I tried. So I had to cut each phrase, sometimes each word, and manually place it on the beat. Drove me crazy.

I really wouldn’t recommend the Zerius vocoder unless you like really manual, low-tech work. What I did was created the vocal melodies in FL, export them as a wav, and use that program to merge them with the vocal track. It only accepts mono wav sounds, as well. It was the first free one I found in my search, so I stuck with it. There is a vocoder function in my version of FL that I haven’t been smart enough to figure out yet. Seriously, there are a MILLION things in FL that I haven’t figured out how to use yet. Those demos have effects that absolutely embarrass my stuff and make it look like a four year old programmed it.

19

Yeah, I know what you mean. I’m still figuring out the slicer. Fruity does try and automatically apply a time stretch/shrink to your current tempo, but only it if can find the tempo in the WAV you’re loading. Vocals often don’t sync up properly, but you can play with the time dilation manually to get proper sync. It’s very touchy using dials to do so, but it does work. I didn’t realize Fruity had a vocoder – but then I haven’t had a use for it yet in any of my projects so I probably wasn’t looking. :slight_smile: Incidentally, if you end up having to do as you did in that latest remix by vocoding vocals, you can achieve a more true-to-life vocal sound and still maintain pitch control as you did by vocoding the vocals using the vocals themselves as the carrier. Then you get what sound like the original vocals, but you can play with them on the keyboard. :slight_smile: (Think Cher’s “Believe” if you’re having trouble picturing it.) The effect is kinda played out these days though, but I still hear it from time to time.

Now, I’m certainly no expert at Fruity but I’ve been using it since v3, so if you’re looking for some help I might be able to offer some assistance.

I wanna buy v7 this summer. The Sytrus plugin kicks some serious, serious ass.

20

Yeah. But I think “Boundaries of Imagination” is still his bes mix CD. Maybe my all time favorite by any DJ.

Ferry Corsten
Sasha’s “Involver”
Sasha & Digweed: “Northern Exposure”
Paul van Dyk
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