4:25
Selecting across genres for a mobile crowd
On YouTube this video is called Mixing different genres of music for the mobile DJ
What this lesson teaches
The practical answer to a question people keep asking, and it starts by conceding the difficulty.
Why beatmixing is not the answer
Reggae, techno, trance, hip-hop, drum and bass, R&B, soul. The BPMs range from 80 to 180.
Try to beatmix across that and, in his words, you are basically stuffed. There is no pitch fader in the world that covers it and nothing would survive the attempt.
What you do instead
Listen to the key, the tone, the feel. Those are the properties that transfer across genres, because they have nothing to do with tempo.
Two records can be eighty BPM apart and still belong next to each other if they share a mood, a key relationship, or a sonic character. That is the thing you are selecting on.
And then chop or fade
He does not touch the pitch controls at all. The transitions are chops - one record stopping and the next starting - or fades, one sound dissolving into the other.
Neither requires matched tempos, because nothing overlaps for long enough to matter.
Timing still applies
The part people drop when they hear that beatmatching is off the table.
You still have to find an appropriate time to bring the next one in. The cut lands on a phrase boundary, at the end of a section, where the outgoing record has finished saying something. Everything from the counting stage still holds.
What you have given up is tempo matching. You have not given up timing, and a chop in the wrong place is as obviously wrong in a mobile set as anywhere else.
The three tracks
His demonstration uses two dance records and an eighties pop song in the middle, which is exactly the shape of a real mobile set - and the point of choosing that combination is that it looks impossible on paper and works in practice, because he selected on feel rather than on numbers.
Contents of the video
0:00 Another video for you on mixing different genres
Alright folks, another video for you on mixing different genres. Loads of people have been asking for this because they can't understand what the heck's going on. Now, in a sense, mixing different genres could be quite difficult if you want to beatmix them. Simply because reggae, techno, trance, hip-hop, drum and bass... R&B, soul, sound soul. If you try and mix all of those in time, you're going to have an absolute frigging nightmare because the beats or the BPM, the beats per minute could range anything from 80 to 180. So you're basically stuffed. So how do you do it? Pray. No, what you do is you listen to the key. Shut up! You listen to the key, the tone, the sound, alright? So I've got three tunes here. I'm not going to touch the pitch controls. Follow that direction to that little box which is over there and you'll have all the relevant information of the tracks. Have a listen to this first of all. Right, here we go. And then have a listen to this. And then have a listen to this.
1:18 Are dance-y-ish
Okay, so we'll go back to track 11 on that one and we'll stick to track 4 there. Alright, so in a sense we've almost got three completely different tracks. We've sort of got two of the same tracks because the first and the last one are dance-y-ish. The middle one is from the 80s, it's by Eurasia, entitled, I think it's Respect, Give a Little Respect to Me. So it's like completely different, but how do we mix these three tracks? Well we listen to the tone, the key, the feel. Also, to a certain degree, we've got to take into consideration the timing. In other words, we've got to find an appropriate time to bring the next one in. We're not going to beatmix them, we're almost going to chop them in or fade the sound of one track into the other. So, here we go. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to wang this one forward a little bit. Bang, straight in. Alright, now we've got some erasure, so what I'm going to do now is go to the next track over here.
2:50 Let's wang this one forward again
Let's wang this one forward again. You know, we're sort of like, all the punters are happy and punters by the way, the UK terminology for punters is the people out there getting pissed and dancing enjoying themselves. Well, theoretically. Alright, imagine this is halfway through. In fact I'll wang it forward anyway. You know, timing. Okay, so we've got another track. I just sort of tried to listen to the tone and thought, yeah. He worked there, brought another track in, totally offbeat, there was no beatmatching at all, but somehow it worked because it's all about the sound. So I hope this is a help and as usual, practice and enjoy. Stay.
This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.
