Beatgridding your music has been a necessary evil for digital DJs who want to use features like sync, loop, beat-tied effects, accurate hotcues, and so on, for many years. However, while beatgridding 2.0 improved on beatgridding 1.0 by handling songs with slightly varying BPMs a little bit better, not much has changed over the years – until now, that is – because new software is now able to use AI to basically kill manual beatgridding entirely. People, beatgridding 3.0 is here – and we talked about it in this pod, and what it might mean for DJs.

We moved on to talk about audio engineering for DJs and why it’s important for DJs to have at least a basic grasp of what audio engineering is, and how they can use it in their hobby. Whether it’s simply tidying up individual songs or making DJ mixes sound better, or going further and extracting audio from bigger pieces of work for use as a DJ, knowing your way around audio editors, audio repair software, and even audio routing software is a surefire way to improve what you’re capable of doing… way before you get to your decks.

And finally, this month we looked at motorised platters, spinning jogwheels, and asked the question: Why? They haven’t gone away, which you might expect to have happened since turntables stopped appearing in DJ booths, and – lo and behold – now even turntables are on the way back. What is the enduring appeal of having something spinning on your DJ gear? We came up with some answers.

As ever, this pod is supported 100% by the students of Digital DJ Tips and it was recorded in a live webinar with lots of student feedback. If you enjoy it, and you can, please do give us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts. It really does make a difference.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro

0:15 Episode overview

1:43 The death of beatgridding

16:05 Audio engineering for DJs

28:24 Motorised jogwheels

Want to get your question answered on an episode of this podcast? Digital DJ Tips course owners get to ask questions in their student-only group. Your first step to getting involved is to buy a DJ course, so come and join our community at https://www.digitaldjtips.com.

A really busy Your Questions show this month with hundreds of questions from our students, the best of which feature here.

We talk in some depth about quick mixing, what it is, when to do it, and - more importantly - how to do it. We talk to a head teacher who's started to get the DJ bug and land himself some gigs, but now wants to know how to get more and more. And a student wants to know why older songs sound so bad when played directly against modern music, and what can be done about it when you're a DJ wanting to play both types.

There are many more questions featured in this packed edition of the show, so we'd like to extend a huge thank you to all of our students for asking them.

As ever, this pod is supported 100% by the students of Digital DJ Tips, and it was recorded in a live webinar with lots of student feedback. If you enjoy it and you can, please do give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts - it really does make a difference.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro

0:15 Episode overview

1:25 Tips for "quick mixing" on the fly?

9:52 How to branch out from single-genre mixing?

13:19 Advice for building confidence as a DJ?

20:48 Tips for improving the sound of older tracks?

27:58 Best way to approach a DJ set playing background music?

32:19 How do DJs pick which transition techniques they use during a set?

39:17 Any DJ apps that help with preparing mixes?

42:16 Ways to get DJ gigs in a small town?

45:13 How to book more DJ gigs?

47:14 What's the best way to EQ tracks in a DJ mix?

Want to get your question answered on an episode of this podcast? Digital DJ Tips course owners get to ask questions in their student-only group. Your first step to getting involved is to buy a DJ course, so come and join our community at https://www.digitaldjtips.com.

Following the epic DJ fail at Coachella by Grimes, rather than piling in and criticising her, we thought we would use that as a springboard to talk about ways that DJs can avoid the inevitable errors that happen in any DJ set. The conversation on this podcast quickly underlined the fact that these things do happen, but that there are things that you can do to make it less likely, and to recover quicker should it happen. I also shared a classic story from my own past that still has me cringing now.

We moved on to talk about the best place to livestream your DJ sets in 2024, which is a discussion that came out of Twitch saying this week that they are planning to fully legalise DJing with other people's music on their platform, which will be the final feather in the cap of a platform that is overwhelmingly the place DJs choose to do this stuff. We looked at what you need to DJ livestream, why you might want to, and all the other platforms you could use as well as the obvious here.

And finally, following Record Store Day 2024, I presented an unashamedly one-sided argument as to why every DJ should own some kind of turntable, which developed with the help of our wonderful student community into a bit of a trip through old music formats and also a bit of a love letter to the turntable.

As ever, this pod is supported 100% by the students of Digital DJ Tips, and it was recorded in a live webinar with lots of student feedback. If you enjoy it and you can, please do give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. It really does make a difference.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro

0:14 Episode overview

3:32 How to recover from DJ set errors

18:28 The best place to livestream DJ sets

41:36 Why all DJs should own a turntable

Want to get your question answered on an episode of this podcast? Digital DJ Tips course owners get to ask questions in their student-only group. Your first step to getting involved is to buy a DJ course, so come and join our community at https://www.digitaldjtips.com.