Hot Cues Echo Loops and an Acapella DJ Mixing Demonstration

0:01 It's good to turn up at the nightclub or your venue

Right, so it's good to turn up at the nightclub or your venue. You've got a preset, you've got a list, you know what you're playing, you know you're going to play track two after one, you know what the third track is, fourth and so on. But very often it's great to just be spontaneous. It's a little bit like telling an artist, right, this is what I want you to paint. A professional artist, more often than not, wants to play through expression, through feeling, not by someone saying do that. So what I'm about to show you now is kind of like rough ready. It's the sort of thing I do, say, if I was doing a live stream or in the mix. It's just something spontaneous.

Let's just, the track here on the right hand side is What You Do To Me, DJ Nav Smoot, I think it is.

There, so I've just formed a really quick loop. Left hand side is, in my mind, please tell me if I'm right or wrong. It's got to be one of the best acapellas for sampling of all time. Love sensation.

1:46 Side one and we're on echo

Okay, so I'm going to go to side one and we're on echo. So let's just have a listen.

3:32 I'm bringing the volume up sometimes at the beginning of the cue point

Okay, something quite important here is it's about the timing. You must understand the timing of your acapellas. Otherwise, it's still gonna sound okay. But it's not. It's not going to sound in time. So, all right. So very quickly, what was happening there is I'm hitting the hot cues in the correct time signature of the original acapella itself. And what you may have noticed is I'm bringing the volume up and bringing it down. So I'm bringing the volume up sometimes at the beginning of the cue point. And sometimes I'm bringing it up after I've hit the hot cue. That's because in my mind, I'm listening. Listen, if we listen to this one, it's such a good vibration. So instead of bringing the volume up on the its, I'm starting it off and then I'm bringing the volume up on G in good vibrations.

So listen, such a you see, that's where you can really chop it up now using the echo as well. Just enhances the flavor of the acapella. It gives it more depth. And when you overlap that with another track as well, you know what you're doing here is you're making a remix. You're remixing the track. Now, this may be the XDJ-XZ, but I'm quite sure what I've demonstrated here, you can do with practically any half decent controller out there. So if you've got. A controller that's worth more than a couple of hundred dollars, euros, pounds, I would hazard a guess to say you can do this. What do you need? You need hot cues. You need to be able to form a loop and the rest is entirely up to you. Hope that's been a help.

Thanks practice and enjoy.

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