Intermediate DJ Mixing Lesson Adding Another Layer to a Track

0:00 Two more tracks here from the legend known as Mr Lenny Fontana

Alright guys, two more tracks here from the legend known as Mr Lenny Fontana. If you are a young DJ and you have not got the foggiest who Mr Lenny Fontana is, then go and check out Karmic Power Records and go and have a little look back in time. That guy was one of the best DJs of his time and at the moment he is a producer and a DJ as well and the guy is coming back full force. Two tracks from Miss Lenny Fontana, a track entitled How We Do This, the original mix which is playing now. On the right hand side, John Hatter, a track entitled Feel Alive. Now the How We Do This track has got one wicked bassline. What I want to do is I want to add another element, a new dimension to the bassline and I'm going to do that by adding some of the vocals of John Hatter over the top.

1:40 The mix itself is too overpowering

We're using the RX. I'm going to use the roll feature. Okay, this is our bassline. Stunning. Absolutely stunning. Okay, let's just go back a bit. All right, let me get rid of that hot cue. Set another hot cue in time. If I'm really critical, that's just a tiny bit too soon. There. Pretty much the same. All right, okay. Yeah, alright, so what do we want to do? Let's have a listen to, let's go out of that, let's listen to John Hattler, sorry, Hatter, beg your pardon. Get some more hot cues going. Okay, this is in its dry format. Lots going on, too much. The mix itself is too overpowering. As you can see with the EQ, bass, mid and treble are all at 12 o'clock, so there's too much going on there. Both tracks are overpowering each other, they're destroying each other instead of one complementing the other track which is what I want to try and get to. So the first thing I'm going to do is take the bass away from John Hatter. Okay so let's have a listen to it now. Now also by taking away the bass you are taking away quite a bit of the overall volume of the track so you may have to...

3:37 Four beats, one bar

Turn up the mid to compensate for that. Now we can still hear the bass in the background very slightly. Maybe we could add some filter. Okay, so we've got that. Let's play how we do this again. Let's go back a little bit. I'm going to set another cue point there. Can you get that, hun? Did you get it, hun? Oh, you got it, right, sorry. Sorry, phone went. Okay. Okay, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay, we're going to form a loop or roll, one roll, quantized it on channel two and what do we want? Four beats, one bar. We're on eight, two bars. To reduce that roll, the left hand button is below beat and out we go. Okay, so what happened here? We did some form of a mix. We weren't mixing the John Hatter track into how we do this. Okay, we did, but what I'm trying to explain here is we didn't play the how we do this and then just play the John Hatter track and then carry on with the John Hatter track. What we did is we used part of the John Hatter track over how we do this. So let's imagine we had a third track. We could use John Hatter over how we do this.

Take John Hatter out, let Howie do this play to pretty much the end and then bring in a third track. So this is another way out of millions and millions of ways of just adding an extra bit of spice to your mix. Big up Lenny Fontana. I was nearly sort of halfway through saying Karmic Power Lenny, so it sounded like Carl Lenny Fontana. Sorry. Karmic Power Records, Lenny Fontana. Check out all the info in the description. Practice and enjoy. Thank you.

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