Drum and bass DJ Mixing Lesson Using Tracks from Hospital Records

0:00 A couple of pointers and a couple of demonstrations

All right ladies and gentlemen, in this video I'm going to be giving you a demonstration on mixing drum and bass. A couple of pointers and a couple of demonstrations. First of all the demonstrations and then of course the explanation. Alright so these two tunes are from Hospital Records. There'll be a link in the description. Check it out! Okay that's mix number one. Let's do mix number two and then also there'll be like a third one that will be slightly strange but very interesting. So okay what I'm going to do now is show you how you can still mix drum and bass even if you can't beatmatch. For example if you cannot for the life of you get those kicks in the right place while the transition is taking place, I'll show you how you can still mix pretty much drum and bass.

We'll go back to the first transition and I'm just going to now move this track on a little bit. So this one here by the way is Mermaid Scar. It's the Ulterior Motive remix. It's by High Contrast. On the left hand side we have Your Time by Logistics. So let's have a look at what we're going to do. Okay so there I set my cue point back over there. We'll go to the cue point where I set on Your Time. There you go. All right now I'm going to prove a point here. They're both pretty much in the same BPM. They're both hopefully should be having, they should, I'll start again. They should have the same BPM which means you know they should mix perfectly. I'm going to prove a point here now. We're going to speed that one up. We're going to speed Your Time up and slow down now Mermaid Scar. So I'm going to do the first mix now. Let them both play at the same time and we'll see how off these are.

3:32 Using the technique I did just earlier

Using the technique I did just earlier. So here we go. All right that's enough of that. That's absolutely terrible. You can hear that's out of time. Same transition as last one. Time of the transition. There you go. Okay we'll go back to the first transition. This time what I'm going to do is I'm going to slowly blend in Mermaid Scar to Your Time. So first thing, first of course I need to get them back in beat so I'll just do that really quickly. Okay so... Here we go. Okay there you go. Now very important I am by far the best drum and bass mixing DJ in the world. Drum and bass is a lot like the culture you would expect to have with reggae. It's, it's a big culture. It's, it's a purest kind of music. A purest way of mixing so all I am doing before we have big drum and bass DJs out there going he doesn't know what he's on about.

Perhaps I don't but I am here to help and educate you. And hopefully inspire new DJs to get into the genre, the style and the music because it is just big and jump up. Of course that is another style in itself. Alright so what are we doing here? Well drum and bass is very much formatted into sections, into groups. If you imagine big pieces of Lego. If you imagine these two CD players here either side they're both exactly the same size. So a lot of drum and bass tracks are like that inside the entire track. Now what does that mean? Well you have phrasing, really good phrasing in drum and bass which enables you to mix in perfectly drop, double drop. So for example you could have a phrasing of on your time.

You could have eights and sixteens, eights and sixteens. Now when I say eights and sixteens... The count of a bar is one, two, three, four. So you have eight of the count of four. Eight of the count of sixteen that could potentially give you a phrase. So let's have a listen to for example from this point here in Mermaid Scar to the break. Let's count how many bars we've got. Now it's two way counting bars. One is very slowly, the other one is fast. I'm going to count fast. Let's have a listen. This will slowly, very quickly give you a demonstration here. One, one, two... That's slowly this is fast.

7:13 Hospital records, part time, able hear

Also a good way of counting so you know how many bars you are getting to or how many bars you have counted is to count like this...

1, 2, 3, 6, 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 1, 2, 3, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3, 13, 1, 2, 3, 14, 1, 2, 3, 15, 1, 2, 3, 16, 1, 2, 3. Bang! OK, so then the other mix I did, I got towards the latter part of your time and I made sure that I set a cue point 16 bars, of course if you wanted to count slower, 8 bars prior to the end. So let's have a listen. 1, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15. Finished. Alright, let's try and experiment here. Now we know from C here to the end of that phrase we've got a break. Let's try mixing in the beginning of that break into the end part of here, in the end part of your time. So instead of having a break at the end of your time we're going straight into the drop on Mermaid Scar. So I'll just

Set up now, let's go back a little bit. OK, for my timing purposes I'm going to set a hot cue there. OK, so all I'm going to do now is press A and 8 which are my two cue points. You will be able to hear your time, you won't be able to hear Mermaid Scar until the drop. Here we go, I'll just set that up. All I'm going to do is crossfade straight over. Nothing else, just make sure my headphones are in time. OK so there you go, this is my first video for 2016 on mixing drum and bass. Tracks you were listening to of course will buy from Hospital Records. There will be a link in the description to the Hospital Records website where you can get these two tracks and of course all other new tracks. Also check

Out their back catalogue as well. I'll finish off with a big shout out to Hospital Records, all the crew. Practice and enjoy, thank you very much indeed. Take it easy.

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