DJ Tutorial, Riding the pitch!

0:00 In this video we're going to call this riding the pitch

Alright folks, in this video we're going to call this riding the pitch. The reason I'm calling it that is simply because of this, and that is that I like to, when I'm mixing, keep my fingers on the pitch control. A lot of DJs, what they will do, once they think they've got it in beat, they will now concentrate mainly on messing around with the bass mid and treble, which is fine, it sounds good. But, at the end of the day, that's fine. If you've got it perfectly synced. If you haven't got it perfectly synced, then occasionally what will happen, the beats will start to go off. You'll have a boom, boom, boom to begin with, but then eventually you'll have a ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, and then it's all over the place. And before you know it, you've spent too much time here, not enough time here, so what happens is that you just, you lose it. The easiest thing to do then is woof, volume down, start again.

1:57 The beats are more defined so it's a lot easier, right?

But if you ride the pitch and if you concentrate more on the actual mix and concentrate less on messing around here, to begin with, then when you get familiarized with keeping the beats in sync, then you spend more time here messing around. What I'm going to do now, I'm going to get the camera to zoom up here and you'll see exactly what I mean. I'm going to ride this pitch. What you will see... Initially, maybe you'll see sharp movements, but slowly the movements will get smaller and smaller and smaller till eventually they're so fine, the movements, but I'm listening, I'm thinking, right, it needs to go a little bit slower. So I take it down a tiny bit, but then... Thank you for watching. That kind of minimalistic music because there's not much going on and you can hear the beats. The beats are more defined so it's a lot easier, right? So what we'll do, we'll zoom this up and we'll see what happens. It's a bit posh here, look. I've got one of these buttons. Okay, basically then what I was doing is simply this. Let me just get it a bit further out.

3:40 I was listening to the beat, okay?

Okay, what I was doing is simply this ladies and gentlemen. I was listening to the beat, okay? Again, I was bringing it in on the one and that is the one is basically the first part of a bar. 1-1-2-3, 2-1-2-3, 3-1-2-3, 4-1-2-3. I was bringing it in one. That's what I class as bringing it in on the one. I brought it in, wham, straight in. Now then, theoretically I know roughly they're the same speed because I would have, I haven't, but I should have theoretically checked the beats per minute. So if this one is at 133 beats per minute, the other one is 135 beats per minute, I will know I have to increase the speed on this one even before I've started mixing this one in. So what I was doing, okay, I was listening. Now then, when I felt that the sound, the beat, sorry, was going too fast, much too fast, I perhaps slowed it down. But as soon as they caught up, I would have had to bring it back up again. The reason being, if I'd have kept the pitch slow, kept the pitch at this position, what would have happened, it would have just carried on going slower and slower and slower. It's all about that cars, remember?

I have done a video on that. If you notice, I'm not sure what video it's called at the moment, but it's the one where I've got the two vehicles, okay? So I suggest you go and watch that. So I was slowing the pitch down. As the beat was catching up, then I started to increase it again. And then I was slowing it down again. But the movements were getting finer and finer until eventually... It was almost tiny fraction, fraction, very very small movements. I could have maybe just left it there and it may have stayed in perfect beat for maybe 30 or 40 seconds but eventually it would have gone off very slightly. This is my interpretation of riding the pitch. I hope I've been a help. Practice and please enjoy. Take it easy.

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