How to Add an a Capella to Your Track While Deep in the DJ Mix

0:01 Yes, you can see me in the background

All right, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, you can see me in the background. Hi, how are you doing? I'll try not to knock the camera. Okay, so something that I believe every single DJ should do out there 100%. It doesn't matter who, where, what you are. It also doesn't matter what genre you're playing. You should beginner, intermediate and or advanced, you should be able to add an acapella to your track. Now we're going to do it the right way. And we're also going to do it the right way. The wrong way. But we're also going to do it the wrong way, the right way. I will explain. Okay, so first of all, let's just get a beat there. All right. So I've done an easy loop. So first of all, the wrong way. I'm just, I'm going to change the pitches.

All right, so let's be honest. If you were listening to that and you were trying to dance, you'd probably be looking at the DJ thinking he or she would just... Like, I don't know, not really concentrating. So that's the wrong way of doing it. Of course, the right way of doing it is to make sure they're in beat. Now, most controllers that you're using will, of course, have some kind of BPM readout. And if you're not very good at finding the actual beat in an acapella, then, of course, by all means, use the readout. This one's relatively easy because...

1:47 It is literally just the vocals of the track

We have a beat in the background, but a lot of true acapellas don't have anything. It is literally just the vocals of the track. So let's have a look. So we've got 129. Excuse me. I'll put that to 129. I'm going to speed this up to 129. Give or take. Let's have a look. Put that to 129 as well. And now I'm going to play them in beat. Here we go.

OK, pretty good. Now what I'm going to do is play it out of time. So I'm going to play it in the incorrect time signature, but hopefully it'll sound all right. Let's get rid of the mid or the high. Here we go. Let's try this. So what I'm doing there is I'm adding it in the incorrect time signature. Now, it probably sounded slightly better the second time when I just played it there. It's because we didn't have... We didn't have that timing of the overall beat, but it sounds a little bit drab and dry. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a bit of an echo to it. So let's just tap along with this wrong one. Sorry. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. OK, so we actually had some on and off time signature there. And also, if you noticed a couple of...

That's my son in the background playing. He's playing some games with his mates online. I mean, come on. Let's be honest. When I was a kid, you'd play... If you actually said to your mum and dad, I'm going to play with my mates now online, they'd think, yeah, but there's washing on there. It's such a shame. But at least he's having a bit of fun anyway. So what I was doing then is I had the volume up on the sample of the acapella and I was bringing quickly the volume down. Of the beat. So more highlighting the acapella over the beat, I played that a few times in a few bars and then rounded it off by letting the aca play in its correct time signature over the beat. Now, maybe this is sort of slightly more intermediate to advanced. I don't really know. It depends on your skill level and mine, which is pretty crap sometimes, to be quite honest.

6:01 Is it the acapella or is it the track?

But what I'm trying to get over here is it's good to use acapellas. Because it adds an extra dimension, again, an extra little bit to the track you're playing. Now, again, with acapellas, you've always got to be careful of the track or the acapella itself. If there is an underlying beat inside that acapella, then you've got to be wary because if you play it out of time too much, of course, it's going to definitely sound out of time because you've got the time signature of the acapella on the track that's playing and you don't want people to get confused. As in, well, which time signature am I listening to? Is it the acapella or is it the track? Alternatively, if you do have an acapella that is truly an acapella with no beat, then, you know, you can be more artistic with it.

So I hope this is a help very quickly as well. A lot of people always asking actually not a lot, only about seven, I'd say in the past two years. But if I can help seven people, all the better. What do I use for thumb drives? Well, I... I've been using sort of your regular thumb drives, but recently I've got this. I'm not being sponsored or anything like that. I've got this SanDisk. It's a one terabyte SSD, so solid state drive. And that so far has been absolutely amazing. Again, solid state. It's... I can't recommend these enough. It's brilliant. The only downside to it is one terabyte is already full. So if I can afford it, I will. If I can afford it, the next one I'm going to get is probably a four terabyte.

All right. So hope that's been a help. And of course you should know the jack sample is loads of them about different sort of varieties on it and whatnot. But hope that's a help. And again, you know, you can always practice doing this by doing exactly what I've done and just use a loop on one side and have fun with it. I mean, you know, there all I did is I used the echo, but you could use the ping pong and ping pong. I mean, you know, you could use a loop on one side and have fun with it. But if you don't have a loop on the other side, you can use a loop on the other side and have fun with it. So that's all I've got for today. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you liked it, please subscribe to my channel.

And I'll see you in the next one. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

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