DJ Music

One of the most fundamental and important parts of DJing is beatmatching, beatmatching forms the foundation of modern DJing and to DJ music well in most types of DJ music, some form of beatmatching occurs. Beatmatching is simply matching the beats of the incoming track with the beat of the playing track in order to create a smooth and seamless fade across the track allowing the DJ to play music without interruption, for most DJ music styles beatmatching is very important, but as a general rule of thumb, if your DJing any style of music you’ll want to make sure the beats match up.

A basic DJ setup for DJing any kind of music consists of a mixer, two turntables, a sound system of some sort and in some cases an amp. Whilst this DJ setup applies to vinyl DJs, the approach for CD DJs and laptops/digital djs is very similar and the basic DJing skills are still the same. The cross fader allows one table to be played out loud whilst the other table can be setup for DJing, by crossing the cross fader over, the second deck is played through the output.

To get started DJing and more importantly beatmatching you need a strong understanding of the music you’re playing particularly the beat and rhythm of the music. get use to listening to the music playing out of the speakers, and try to make note of the beat of the music. You’re going to listen to the music on the first deck playing out on the speakers, then try and use the pitch fader to align the beat of the music playing on the second deck which should be playing out of the headphones, hence why you see DJs often hunched over with one side of their headphones on when they DJ music.

when you’ve matched up the beats of the music, move the cross fader from the first deck to the second deck.

l Play out the first deck.

2 listen to the second deck via the headphones
3 match up the beats of the music from each deck

4 move over the cross fader

This is really an outline of the beatmatching process, and as this is an important DJing skill we will be going through each element in detail.

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