DJ LESSON on MIXING DRUM and BASS for the DJ who can't beat match

0:00 Short demonstration on mixing drum and bass

Right, ladies and gentlemen, short demonstration on mixing drum and bass. Now first of all, drum and bass is quite technical how it's put together. There's a lot that's going on. So if your timing is out of sync, it can sound completely terrible. It's almost like a train wreck. There's too much going on. So you do have to make sure everything is perfectly synced. If you try and mix the likes of house music, if you're just mixing the beats, you've pretty much got a couple of beats to keep in time. One, two, three, four. Drum and bass is there's a lot going on. So if you are out of time, it can sound terrible. Let's imagine though that you can't mix drum and bass, but you do love drum and bass. How do you mix it? Well, you can still do it. What you have to do though is find the right tracks. You have to find tracks that finish off with a nice little bit of a melody.

And some tracks that start off with a bit of melody. So in this demonstration, it's very simple. We have two tracks here. One on the left is Alex with a double X, A-L-E-X-X, Rave. It's a track entitled About Sex. On the right hand side, it's ATP for the soul. So first of all, let's play the Alex Rave track.

Imagine this was hip hop.

Okay, so that is the Alex Rave track. This one here is ATP. Now then, this is the beauty about it. Have a listen to the beginning.

2:03 We've got a melody, but there's no beat there

Now, we've got a melody, but there's no beat there. There's absolutely no drums whatsoever. But there is timing. Now, if we have a listen again. Now, let's imagine I had beat matched this track while there was a beat into that track and then got back to the beginning. I could mix that in with a beat because there's still timing. Have a listen.

Takes a bit of time, but you can get it. Alright, so how do we mix without mixing? Now, let me show you. What I'm going to do, I'm going to wait for the latter part of the Alex Rave track. And then I'm going to bring in the album. Now, the crucial bit about mixing like this, they have to be in key or they have to be keys that match. If they're not, it will sound atrocious, even atrocious. Right, so first of all, I'll give you an idea of the Alex Rave, what it sounds like, beginning, middle and end. But the end is what we're going to concentrate on the Alex Rave. The beginning is what we're going to concentrate on, on the ATP. We're not going to mess around with bass, mid, treble, nothing. We're just going to do a smooth transition.

From one to the other, the end of Alex Rave, the beginning of ATP. So, this is the beginning of Alex Rave.

This is around about the middle. Now we're going to go to the end.

Now if we have a listen to the end, we've still got timing. Listen to the beat.

Right from the... Bang! Finish.

This is where the genius comes in. This is where you can get over... Not being able to beatmix. Here we go.

4:47 Where the pitch is set

Now you'll notice that that still was sort of in time. But let's imagine it's not in time. If we have a look at where the pitch is set there, you can see... What I'm going to do now is... Again, I'm just thinking out loud here. I'm going to move the pitch down so that is now slower and this one's even faster. So if I did try and beatmatch these, it would be completely offbeat. We'll do exactly the same thing and you'll notice, you'll hear, that we do have a transition. But the transition... The transition isn't about the beat, the transition is about the music. Right, so here we go again.

Down to the last set of 21 seconds. Same thing. Here to this tutorial is the key. Practice and enjoy. Thank you.

I'll let you have a listen to this one as well. This is ATP. It's going out to Fugitive and Stoker. Nice one. Eternal Crew. Practice and enjoy.

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