People don't understand that the sync button is just a tool. If you rely on the tool too much, it becomes a handicap rather than a tool. I still advocate manual beatmatching as it is a way of being 'in-tune' with the music because you are basically 'touching' the music using manual.

However, for someone without hardware (turntables/jogwheels) to manually beatmatch, then just use sync! Don't listen to the haters who think DJing is an elitist job with no room for beginners, who think that technology has ruined DJing.

Technology in DJing - like technology anywhere else - has just made DJing many times more accessible to newbies like you and me. This is the same hate that came out when CDJs first came out. "Oh digital is bullshit" "digital will kill DJing" "vinyl is the only way to go". Look at where that has progressed now: Every single club in the world has a pair of CDJs sitting in the booth, and the famous Technic 1200s is now a discontinued line.

Stick to the basics when you're starting to learn. For cueing, just cue songs on the 1 and try it out yourself. If it sounds bad, try something else. Old school DJs learned that way from vinyl, you can too. Scratching, beat juggling, and effects are all intermediate to advanced skills that DJs use to spice up their sets. As a beginner with no hardware, these skills are not really learnable (aside from effects) because a mouse is just no match for two jogwheels/turntables.

And don't worry about people who stress about manual vs. sync beatmatching. When you play out it only becomes an issue if you screw it up many times. Otherwise if your music is good, people don't care and will dance the night away. 95% of the people you play to won't even notice if your beats aren't matched 100% (or even 80%) because they are there to *party*. The other 5% will be DJs who will analyze your every move. The smart ones will keep the hate to themselves as motivation to work harder. Elitists will bring you down and make you hate what you should love.

It honestly doesn't take much to learn the many basic principles of DJing. Harmonic mixing is just another tool that can be taught in 10 minutes when you have Traktor. All you need is an open mind and a hardworking attitude. If you mess up, go home, practice like crazy, then try again. In the end it's all about the music and the parties you create with it.

Get your gear soon darthbii!

Exactly. Anything in excess is usually not good.

Older versions of Traktor don't come with key analysis. I think 2.6 onwards is when key analysis was implemented. If you're running the 'free' version then I can't help you there; don't worry about it, it's not essential.

Syncing is also great because it saves you time from adjusting the pitch faders, which is probably really useful for dubsteppers like you. Be sure to set the Sync mode to 'Tempo Match' rather than 'Beat' (it's in the settings somewhere). This way you still have to sync your beats manually, but the tempo is automatically set for you.

No, you don't have to cue up EVERY song it's a very exhausting process! If you play out, you will eventually want to because once you cue a song, you never have to cue it again. Just cue up maybe your top 30 favorite songs for practice, and try mixing with cue points. You will learn alot and hopefully come up with a cue point system you can use in the future.

I've spent many hours cueing up songs... have only done a few hundred so far. At least House is easy, usually same structure. Cueing up alt rock and hip hop is a bit of a nightmare.

When you right click and click Analyze, the auto-setting should already be setting keys for you. You may need to right click your column headers (title, artist, bpm, etc) and select Key to open up the Key column of your track browser. The keys are all there.

Aligning kicks and snares is called beatmatching. Adjusting the pitch faders is actually adjusting the BPM. They are called pitch faders because adjusting the BPM will up or down a song's pitch due to changing song speeds (make a song faster, sounds like chipmunk; slower = troll)

Dropping on the drops at the same time? Meaning you want the songs to 'drop' at the same time? This is called Phrase Matching. Every song consists of Phrases put together to form the whole song. Phrases can be 8, 16, 32, or even more Bars. Bars is how many beats in a bar (4/4 for house). Using technology, it's much much easier to set visual cues as to where a phrase starts or ends.

To answer your question specifically, if you want both songs to drop at the same time, you need to know your music by counting how many bars is it to Song A and Song B's drop, then mix them together. For example, if Song A has 32 bars to the drop, then you just need to find the point where Song B has 32 bars to the drop.

Very easy to do this in Traktor. Go to the drop of the song, then mouseover the track stripe (the full song waveform). You will have a little popup that actually tells you how many bars to wherever you point the mouse (ex. 24 bar).

Again, you should try doing this with simpler music first before going into dubstep. Dubstep's high BPM and complex combinations make it harder to learn the basics; walk before running!

The items you listed are easily found in Digital Malls like in PJ, Lowyat, Subang Avenue. Can even buy online @ lelong.com.my.

This just in! Traktor Pro 2 is 50% off on Native Instruments website till Dec 9. Buy it!

Yes it does. But there's Thanksgiving sales on S2 and S4s, checlk out DJtechtools.com. It's thanksgiving so there's alot of sales inthe US. Remember to find out about voltages thougn, Asia vs US voltage is different.

Not sure why you would want to convert Traktor keys into Camelot ones, they're the same thing?

@nightzstar I wouldn't know about behringer but the reviews I searched for aren't very good. If you're just learning, you could try going to DJ shops to test hardware or go for a class first before deciding what to buy. RnB you'd probably need bigger jogwheels to scratch with if you wanted to, but the Mixtrack Pro is a cheap step to learn with.

Yes, the behringer had some unhappy reviews about it. I would recommend googling the crap out of anything you are interested in, including how to mix and all that. I actually had a post in this thread some time before detailing alot of things you may be interested in. Go back in history and find it

You guys should look into Singapore, they have a lot of selection there and last time I bought I haggled my gear to a good price (about international standard price). Maybe you guys can get together and do a group buy, make it very much worth it for the store to sell to you. This way, you'll get gear that has Asian voltages and if want to warranty can go near (nearer than US!) to fix it.

Club DJs will use anything they want. Software is a very subjective choice. The scratch versions of any software is typically just for DVS though, so make sure you know what you will be using in the future before buying. I'm learning how to scratch with Traktor and my controller at the moment and it works fine.

I'm using a Denon MC3000. Valentines, yes! Try haggling with them. I knocked my price down almost 1k because I was buying 2 units and they conveniently had a salesman coming to KL. Again, try ganging up with others who want to buy, confirm can get cheaper if you make it worth it for them

Mix harmonically and in phrase. You can use Traktor's keys or MIK's keys for harmony, but mixing in phrase so quickly means knowing all your music inside and out.

You would definitely need a lot of preparation and practice to get this right live.
Preparation meaning:
1. Cue-pointing all the songs you want to use in a proper manner (when does the drop hit? when should you mix in? this is called phrase matching)
2. learning how each song mixes with each other (harmonic mixing, do the keys clash?)

And all this preparation is useless if you don't practice to keep it tight.

You'll need to become much more familiar with your music and then your software, achievable through experimentation, online tutorials, and most of all practice.

It's definitely a planned thing. In a live setting with hundreds of people looking at you it's very hard to perform this kind of routine completely on the fly (unless you're a genius). Most of the time when DJs go into such complicated routines, they either prepared their songs extremely well that they can make it flow however they want, or they have practiced the routine countless times as their ultimate combo kinda thing.

Those are pre-mixed edits and mashups that artists use for their own shows. Trying to live-mix a lot of songs quickly can become a nightmare when you consider a horde of 10000 fans screaming at you for all the mistakes you made and the money they spent on the show.

This is actually one of the reasons behind the 'press play' argument that went on in the past couple of years. However, consider the fact that the professionally produced and mastered mashups/edits sound much better than a on-the-fly attempt, and you can see where the line between producer/DJ blurs considerably. Readying a mashup specially for a show is taking adequate preparation five steps further by making sure things sound great and the party continues.

That youtube video is just a showcase of ability; I don't think anyone would play that on the dance floor

I think it would be an awesome idea if you (being Malaysian!) came up with tutorial videos on the subject perhaps a video with the basics of using FL (like creating a bassline) would be good to start with.

That sounds great. You should certainly do it! I'd be interested fo shizz.

Hi Ayer,

I would recommend trying out pirated software to test out the feel of DJing, while also looking up videos and tutorials about the techniques used for DJing. The #1 thing you must have to really be a DJ is a passion for music though! Everything else falls into place if you have that passion.

I wouldn't run buying equipment aside from a good pair of headphones (which everyone should have really). You can actually find decent apps to cut your teeth in DJing like Traktor DJ, djay 2, and a couple of others that are available for iOS and Android. They're a lot cheaper than the full programs and are useful to just play around with DJing.

In terms of production, I would really recommend at least giving DJing a try before getting into the nitty gritty of production. It may sound easy but most DAWs are very complex; going in without an ounce of knowledge or 'feel' of what songs should sound like may discourage you early on.

Finally got around to creating a mix! Check it out Best time to play it would be while driving during sundown.

https://soundcloud.com/playmochi/playmochis-playtime-001

Comments welcome!

@slimyboy With this business it's more on who you know than what you can do, unfortunately. Having skill is not as important as networking as there are acts out there who pull in the money because they are popular (rather than good sometimes).

I'd recommend attending nights in a bar/club of your choice and becoming a regular till you can confidently talk to the manager about DJing there. Keep in mind some places aren't allowed to have DJs, and there are dozens of other DJs out there who are looking for the same thing.

@JasonKam I don't think you're going to get any offers close to your stated price for the mixer as searching online you can find much cheaper offers. At your price level I could get a NI S2 o.o #justsayin

@Takalimc

I think it would be super helpful if you could list the small organizers you speak of (I'd certainly like to know! )