19:37
Mixing on a controller with laptop software
On YouTube this video is called DJ Lesson How to Mix Using the Pioneer WEGO2 and Virtual DJ
What this lesson teaches
The longest software lesson on the channel, filmed twice from two angles, and it walks through a full mix with nothing left out. Worth reading as a summary of everything in stages 2 to 5 as it looks on a screen.
Loading
Find the folder, drag it into the software's browser, use the browse dial on the controller to scroll, and load to the left or right deck.
All of it done from the hardware, which is the point of a controller: once the folder is in the browser, your hands do not need the laptop.
Setting the cue point by ear
The first real technique, and his process is exactly right.
He plays the start of a track, moves the platter, presses cue where he wants it - then listens and says it is slightly too far into that beat. Moves it back a tiny amount. Tries again. Happier.
Then the same on the other deck, and his observation is the useful one: virtually no movement on the platter, but quite a bit of difference in where the beat starts. Instead of starting halfway through the beat, it starts at the beginning.
That is the whole skill of setting a cue point. A few milliseconds, found by ear, repeated until it is right - and then it is right forever, because it is saved.
The tempos
127.48 on one track, 127 on the other.
Two options, and he states both: speed the slower one up, or slow the faster one down. Either works; what matters is that you choose rather than guess.
He slows the faster one with the pitch fader - away from him slows down, towards him speeds up - overshoots to 127.18, comes back, and settles at 127.01.
Worth noting that he is reading the software's number while moving a physical fader. That combination is the actual advantage of a controller over either alone.
Cueing in the headphones
He demonstrates this carefully because it confuses people.
The cue buttons above each fader send that channel to the headphones. With the crossfader on the other side, pressing cue lets you hear a track the room cannot hear - the software shows it playing, the speakers stay silent.
And then the combinations: fader down and cue on, headphones only. Fader up and cue on, both. Headphone volume separate from master.
If you have never had this explained, it is the thing that makes monitoring make sense: the headphones and the speakers are two independent outputs, and the cue buttons decide what goes to the first one.
Key
The software has worked them out: 3A and 4A.
His reading of that is the Camelot logic from stage 5 - one number higher, so mixed in the right place it may lift the vibe very slightly, where the same key on both would give more of a constant.
And the caveat, which is the honest part: software does not always get the key right, so there may be a slight clash. Always listen first.
Where to bring it in
The best stretch in the lesson, and it is pure phrasing.
First the rule: you never mix a track in anywhere or any time. Not vocals over vocals. Not a busy track over a busy track. The incoming record has to land where the two will gel, which means somewhere one of them has room.
Then the method: read the waveform. Where there is a lot going on, there is a lot of music. Where there is very little, there are breaks. The display is a map of where the space is.
Then he plays it and counts - and stops, because something happened: there was a definite change in the music there. A melody stopped, and another part began, with no gap between them.
That is a phrase boundary, found by listening rather than counting, and it is the point to mix at. His analysis is exactly the stage 3 lesson, arrived at live.
Levels
Small thing, good habit. He brings one fader slightly higher than the other and explains why: the quieter track's file is quieter, possibly from how it was made, so he compensates at the fader.
Two tracks at the same fader position are not necessarily at the same volume. Match what you hear, not what you see.
Beatmatching by the lines
The software draws two coloured lines - red and blue - marking the beats of the two tracks. The job is to get them on top of each other.
He moves the jog wheel and you watch the red line move. Clockwise brings them together; anti-clockwise pulls them apart. And the rule that follows: if moving one way makes them further apart, move the other way.
One mechanical note worth having: he uses the side of the jog wheel, not the top - because on this controller the top would have stopped the track.
And the warning about sync
His closing argument, and it is the most important paragraph in the lesson.
The software will beatmatch for you. In a way, that is cheating - and he immediately qualifies it: it is not cheating if you are new and you need it right straight away.
But do not rely on it. Because you will get a booking where there is no software like this, and you will have to use your ears, and if you never learned how you will fall flat on your face with nothing to help you.
His advice: learn to beatmatch first, and use software like this as the way to learn it - matching the lines manually, with the jog wheel, so you are training your ears against a visual answer key.
That is the right use of the display. Not a substitute for the skill, but a teacher for it - and the only honest way to use sync is to be able to do without it.
Contents of the video
0:01 Track entitled, once found, moving crossfade
Alright guys, I'm going to do this video twice. The reason being is one video you're going to get a close-up of the program, the other one is wide angle. If you're watching this on wide angle, you want to get a close-up of the program, then check out the link in this video and vice versa if you're watching this close-up with the software which is known as VirtualDJ, this is the VirtualDJ Pro, then follow the link for the wide angle version. I'm doing this because quite a few people have been asking me to do a very basic mix Using the Pioneer DJ WeGo 2 and VirtualDJ. The two tracks I'm using is Danny J Lewis, a track entitled This House. That's the one on the left hand side. The one on the right is Lenny Fontana and Marcus Knight, a track entitled I'm So High. What I'm going to do is put two links in the description as well of both of these videos to the two artists. Now first of all, using the WeGo 2 once you have found
Specific folders. And then you've dragged over and you've opened those folders, you've got to the files. What you can do then is you can use the browse dial. You can also use this to find the folders as well. Once you've pulled a folder over to this area here in the VirtualDJ program, then it's just a question of moving this up and down and finding your specific file you need. Once you've found the file... Then you can load to the left hand side or to the right. So again, I'll just show you load there and you can see that now loading up. So I'm now going to find the Danny J, sorry, the Lenny Fontana track which is the next one down and I'm going to load that to the other side so you can see that reloading. Pretty much it was exactly the same earlier on. I've just copied what I've done.
Now, the first thing we need to do is just to make sure that we're going to get some sort of sound. And you can see while I'm moving the crossfade on the hardware, I'm moving the crossfade on the software. The up-fader on the Danny J Lewis and the up-fader on Lenny Fontana. So let's just press play Danny J Lewis. We can see that track moving quite nicely as well. And we can hear it. I'm just going to turn it up a little bit. Right, what I'm going to do is, again, you may need to do this to try and find the first beat. You can move the platter and you can press Q at the point where you would like the track to start. So, I don't know if you can hear that, it's just slightly too far into that beat. So I'm going to move it back a very, very tiny amount. We'll try about sort of there, there. I'm a lot happier with that. I'm going to move the crossfader over and we'll do the same thing now with Lenny Fontana. I want it there.
3:03 Beats minute
Just a bit too far into that beat, a tiny fraction so I'm going to move the platter a tiny bit back to about there. A bit more. Very little difference or there's virtually no movement at all on the platter but there is quite a bit of a difference where the beat starts. Instead of starting halfway through it started at the beginning so have a listen to Lenny Fontana and Danny J Lewis. Okay, the next thing you'll need to look at is your BPM, that's beats per minute. And if we look at the program, we can see that the Danny J Lewis is 127.48 BPM. That means that in every single minute you will get 127.4 beats in that minute. So you're pretty much halfway in between 127 and 128. Lenny Fontana is 127.
4:58 Let's start the Lenny Fontana track
So a couple of things we can do here. One is if we want to, we could increase the BPM of the Lane Fontana to 127.48. Alternatively, we could decrease Danny J Lewis 127.48 to 127 and we can do that by using the pitch on the controller. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to now Move the pitch on the Wego on the left hand side which is corresponding with Danny J Lewis down that direction. I'm going to move it away from me, by moving it away will slow the track down, by bringing it towards me will speed it up. So if we watch the software now, we can see those numbers 127.18123, oh we've gone too far. So if I move that towards me, 127.01 pretty much, that will do for now. Okay so let's start the Lenny Fontana track. So again I've moved the crossfader over. Bearing in mind I'm doing this now without any headphones. If I wanted to what I could do on the WeGo2 we have two buttons above each of the up-faders and when
The one is highlighted. The corresponding fader will tell me, or underneath the highlighted LED, we can see that it's almost got like, it looks like headphones on it. That's telling me that I can now listen to that side if I want to. But I don't want to because I'm going to start that off. Now I want to actually listen to the other side. Now I'm not going to use my headphones. But if I wanted to cue up that particular track now, the other side, I'm just going to move this down a tiny bit. I'm just moving the wide angle lens, wide angle camera down slightly so we just can get the crossfade in. So what I could do now if I wanted to with my headphones in, if I pressed cue now on the Danny J Lewis, we can see...
The corresponding software, which is highlighted in blue, is now moving, but we can't hear anything. That's because the crossfade is over on the Lenny Fontana track. If, let's say, I move the crossfade over, we can't hear the Lenny Fontana, but by pressing Q, we can hear Danny J Lewis. Now, if I brought my up-fader down and pressed Q, The Danny J Lewis. And if I can quickly grab, I should have done this earlier, I do apologise, if I quickly grab a set of headphones, I'm going to plug them in there. What I'm going to do now, I'm just going to leave the headphones there and I'm going to turn the headphones up like so. Hold on. There you go. What you're listening to now is the actual audio from the headphones, not from the speakers.
7:26 Just put the headphone volume down
But if we have a listen, while I bring the up-fader up, now you're hearing the audio from the speaker as well as the headphones. Just put the headphone volume down. That is just the audio now from the speaker, so I'm going to turn that up as well. Okay, so what I could do if I wanted to, while Lenny Fontana is playing, I could cue the Danny J Lewis up using the headphones so I can move the volume. Headphone volume up, play the Danny J Lewis and I can hear the Danny J Lewis over the Lenny Fontana track but only on the headphones, not through the speaker because the volume is down, not up. If I bring the volume up and press Q, I'll be able to hear the Danny J Lewis through the speaker as well as the headphones. I'm going to bring that down. Alright, so that's a tiny bit of it.
Another major factor about mixing tracks is make sure they're in keys that work and for some people it's relatively simple to do, for others it's slightly more difficult. There are programs out there that will help you but also the VirtualDJ program will help you as well because it can go through the tracks and work out keys for you. For this demonstration we have the Lenny Fontana in 3A and we have the Danny J Lewis in 4A. So the Danny J. Lewis being a number higher, what that'll probably mean is if we mix it in the right place at the right time, it may lift the vibe very slightly. If it was the same key, 3A and 3A, you'd have almost like a bit of a constant but it's always a good idea to listen to tracks first. Sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes certain softwares don't work out the exact keys so there may be a slight clash. It's always a good idea
10:01 Waveform up here, we can see
So, we're listening to Lenny Fontana. Now, you never mix a track in anywhere or anytime, anyplace. You have to mix tracks in at certain points during the other track. For example, it's not a good idea to mix vocals over vocals. It's not a good idea to mix a track over another track if there's a lot going on in it. You need to make sure that the track you're going to mix in with the track that's playing is at a good point where it will be a nice gel of music. You don't want too much happening at the same time. So if we have a look at the waveform up here, we can see almost a lot going on and very little. Where there's a lot going on, we have a lot of music. Where there's very little, we've got breaks.
So what I'm going to do now is, I'm just going to get my mouse and I'm just going to press, if I can, on that point there. Now if we listen then, and by the way you need to probably look at the close-up now, I'm just going to go to there. You can hear there's less going on. A bit more going on, a bit more going on, and more. And around about here we come to the end of the track. Now for a lot of DJs, They like to mix the beginning of tracks with the end of tracks, and I think for this demonstration that's what we're going to do. So I'm just going to move the jog wheel back. You can see how I'm moving it using the hardware. And I'm just going to press play pause. Now what that's done, that has now paused the track at that point. And again, this is a demonstration so some of these parts or a few things I'm doing here you wouldn't normally do
12:01 Bring it back slightly
Let's say if you're playing in public, you wouldn't for example stop the track. You would of course let it play but what you would do now is you would do what I'm doing if you were say listening through the headphones for getting the track that you want to mix in to the Lenny Fontana which is of course Danny J Lewis. You'd be using your headphones and listening to this track to get it ready. So let's just have a listen to Danny J Lewis again. Cue it up again. Get it ready and cue it. Bring it back slightly. Okay, now then, what I'm going to do now, I'm going to start the Lenny Fontana track. What I'm going to do is I'm going to try and find a point where I feel it's a good point to bring in Danny J Lewis. And I'm going to start to try and count bars and phrases. So let's press play. Lenny Fontana. Three, four, two, one.
Did you hear? There was a definite change in the music there. All of a sudden it seemed to just, there was something about it that was a definite change. Things happened. Let's have a listen again. OK, so what did happen? Well we had a sort of a melody going on and all of a sudden the melody stopped. So what that tells me... And the DJ is that we have a part in the track where we have the end of a certain phrase, a certain part of the music, a certain part of the track, and we have the beginning of another part of the track. We don't have a gap in between. It's almost as soon as one part finishes, the other part will start at exactly the same point. So if we go back again, have a listen. Three, four. Three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.
And so on. Right, so what I'm going to do, I'm going to start the Danny J Lewis track at that point. So again, what I'm going to do, I'm going to have the up-fader and I'm going to have the crossfade in the middle. I'm going to have the up-faders at the same positions. I may bring Danny J Lewis slightly higher. That could be down to the way the file was made. Audio on the Danny J-Los could be slightly lower, so I'm compensating for that by bringing the fader slightly up higher. So we're going to play the Lenny Fontana again. To get them in beat slightly, because they were a little bit off, I used the jog wheel. I didn't touch the top, I used the side. If I touched the top, I would have actually stopped the track. But I moved the jog wheel slightly to the side to get it in beat.
15:07 We're going to slowly bring Lenny Fontana down, Danny J Lewis
We're going to slowly bring Lenny Fontana down, Danny J Lewis. I'm going to bring Danny J Lewis down a little bit. In fact what we'll do is if I just go over to Danny J Lewis and I'm just going to click on a bit of the track about there so you get an idea of the rest of the tune. Okay so what was actually going on? Well if you looked at the software at one point we had The two lines, you can see two lines, you can see red and blue. Now those two lines signify the actual beats. And the idea was for me to match those lines together. So if we can see, as I move the jog wheel now, we can see the red line moving slightly. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to cue that up again. There. Danny J Lewis up. Bring Danny J Lewis back to about there.
16:24 The idea is for me to match those lines up
Now the idea is for me to match those lines up. Now you can see they're sort of pretty much matched up, but they're not quite, there isn't a difference. We can hear almost like as though two beats aren't working together, they're off. Now if I move the jog wheel on the Lenny Fontana clockwise, can you see now those two lines are together? Anti-clockwise and they're moving apart. So, this is sort of a demonstration. It's a bit of a tutorial but it's showing you some aspects of beatmatching. Now, a good way of using software like VirtualDJ is to make note of the lines. The idea is to match those lines perfectly together. We'll do it for you. It can do it for you. But it is, in a way, it's cheating. It isn't cheating if you're a new DJ and you need to get it perfect straight away. But don't rely on it because if you do let the software beatmatch for you then you may find you could be asked to do a gig etc and they may not have software like this. You may have to use your ears
Beatmatching, then you could fall flat on your face because you'll get to a situation maybe where they haven't got the likes of this software and you won't know how to beatmatch and there'll be nothing to help you. So my advice is learn how to beatmatch first and a good way is using software like this and matching the beats manually. By moving the jog wheels. So you can see by moving the jog wheels, you've got the two lines eventually matched up. And also bearing in mind as well, if you move the jog wheel one way and the lines go further apart, that means that you need to move the jog wheel the other way in that. So what will happen then? The lines will go closer together. So if you move the jog wheel one way, they go further apart. Of course, move them the other way, they get closer together. All right.
I hope this particular video has been a help. Don't forget, check out the other video to get a close-up of the software or if you're watching the software video, watch the other video to get a closer or a bigger view of the WeGo and the software as well. Thank you very much. Practice and enjoy.
This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.
