DJ Lesson on Going from Energy Level 5 to 9 Without a Jump

0:00 You want is dips, peaks, troughs

All right guys, in this demonstration what we're going to do, we're going to be mixing two tracks with completely different energy levels. Now first of all I want to talk you about energy, mixing energy in your set. Now the idea is to get a good set, of course, you need to have an energy flow. It's got to have a nice natural line to it. The last thing you want is dips, peaks, troughs and all you would be doing if you do this sort of transition incorrectly. I'll give you an analogy. People are dancing, the last thing you want to do is walk up to someone and give them a whack with a sledgehammer once or prior to, oh sorry, after you've just given them let's say an ice cream sundae. The ice cream sundae is the mellow tune. All of a sudden whack over their head with a sledgehammer. They're going to think what the hell are you doing? You've just been nice to me and now you're being horrible to me. It's exactly the same if you're playing

1:36 I mean what a cut

With a sledgehammer. You've just been nice to me and now you're being horrible to me. It's exactly the same if you're playing soulful. It's also got that uplifting modern day bass line everyone loves. I mean what a cut. Stonebridge been out for ages and all these guys have been around for a long time. They know how to produce music. Top buzz, top guys. Okay, I'm gonna pause that then we have a listen to WWE and Motti Space Jarrow. It's the original mix this one here is taken from disc number one and it's track 11. okay so straight away you can hear there are definite different energy levels i would class track eight here the stone bridge a sort of around about your six to seven maybe even five to six it's mellow it's soulful it's got a good amount of deep soulful energy whereas

The w and w track is more on an eight to nine you know it's more hands in the air give me you know i can see the people going more and more and more so what i'm going to do now again there's a million one ways of doing this sort of transition what i'm going to do first i'm just going to do two what i would class as the wrong way and then when i was not the runway the wrong way come on and then what i'll class as the right way so first of all let's i need to just um make sure i know how many bars there are at the beginning of track 11 over here the w and w and then i can sort of do some sort of transition now bearing in mind as well this is a demonstration i'm not here to do a perfect mix what i'm here to do is give you my interpretation of what a perfect mix let's

Say should be like or how if you do this correctly you can get it a lot better than me and hopefully uh you'll do a better job yeah i'm sure you get me right okay so first of all i'm going to count my bars before the kick comes in so one one two three two one two bananas and apple balls and okay so we've got eight bars bang straight it comes in so uh let's start listening here to brilliant trap so i'm just gonna go to break here and highly likely maybe eight bars from here maybe 16. let's have a look two one two three three one two seven one okay so okay so i'm pretty sure we've got about 12 bars there i didn't count exactly so on a rough guess i'm going to from that break go in four bars probably you were counting more than i was or paying

4:49 Loop mode, eight bars, gone

More attention should i say all right so from there i'm gonna do my very basic transition start this one what an idiot sorry i didn't even count the four bars did i so just ignore that bit i'm not going to edit this come on this is what practice is all about if you don't do practice like this then how are you going to learn okay so sorry about that okay so you're probably thinking while i was doing that mix what are you doing your idiot i know i know i found out uh okay nope hold on from here that wasn't so bad all right okay so we've yeah admittedly we've gone from the beginning of a track we've gone into from eight bars of the beginning into eight bars of the kick into a break so really we're not going directly into

Full-on we're going into a break okay but i know i can get this mix a lot better so this time what i'm going to do i'm going to go slightly back i am going to form a loop of the beginning of this track so even before the track started i'm going to go into loop mode again everything i do here on these players you can do with a controller so we've gone into loop mode i'm now going to go to eight which is two bars a two bar loop i'm just gonna leave it like that so we're gonna pause that you can hear that on the headphones

There right so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to go back again so let's just move back a little bit now this is where you can if you want to you can be precise on the amount of bars and phrases sorry amount of sorry yeah bars but it's not imperative all right because what i want to try and do i want to try and have a mix we've got two tracks but we're gonna have a third track and the third track is going to be two loops working together together so it's almost as though we're leading out of this soulful track and we've got this middle bit that is it's a bit like the jam in a sandwich you know you've got the bread bread very boring put a bit of jam in the middle you forget about the bread so let's press play and here we go

Now again what i want you to do always with my demos and tutorials is have a look at what i've done and what i've done with my demos so that you can get a bit of an idea of what the song is about so if you want to do this go back to your demo and scratch your head and go hmm but i can maybe do it slightly differently yeah do it don't copy this exactly by all means if you want to but try your own style as well so what was happening the first mix it was just yet one on top of the other away we go but the next one what i did is i added a loop i did two loops so i'm going to do a little bit of time if you if you if you find it difficult to keep loops in time manually then by all means do sync and master and then have a little bit of fun if you've got again

All right i've got two players imagine if you've got a controller and four channels the fun you could have so for example think outside the box not here think over there there there and down there don't go down there um so you've got four channels so you've got your loops going together quite nicely you've got them in sync mode because you will need to be able to get them in sync mode to do this if you're not good at beat matching then you've got two other channels guess what add an acapella over one of them maybe add another loop from another track over over the the mix then you could slowly bring that track out you've got your loop from the other track you've got the loop from the track that you're eventually going to bring in to the mix you've got your

Acapella then you can slowly bring your acapella out yeah disengage the loop on this channel bang away you go but you've still got the loop on that channel the potential is just entirely up to you you're in control just go for it and while you're in your bedroom having a bit of fun if you do make mistakes what the hell you're in your bedroom when you're out there in front of people and you make a tiny mistake don't worry about it because 99 the people out there won't even know you've made a mistake and the one percent who do know you've made a mistake some of those will and others will go well do you know what that's pretty good because at least it proves you were trying you were thinking outside of the box not just playing it safe hope that's

Been a help check a link the link in the description to cdpool.com and i'll finish off with practice and enjoy and there will be more on the club releases very shortly thank you

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.