DJ-ing challenge

Last January I found out that mixing Dutch Rap music with Club music is really hard. The rhythm, the beats per minute, the track build-up, the key, are all different! But I still took on the challenge to perform a one-of DJ act at an important family party.

The reason why I'm putting this online, is to share some of the advice that has helped me and to show off with the end result. You can play the recording of my 30 minutes of fame in the mp3 player at the bottom of this article.

Of course I practiced a lot with the tracks and looked for help on how to best perform transition, where bpm of the track were not matching. I really like the easy explanations of Phil Harris, so I turned to one of his videos to help me get it right.

Without any live practice I thought it was good to look for advice on doing a first live performance. I found this very clear video, again by Phil Harris, explaining that there are only three basic things you should keep in mind.

Somewhere half-way in my preparation I found out that the try-out mix I recorded had some serious distortion in it. So I looked it up and found out in the Traktor manual that the volume had reached the max and this resulted in “clipping” of the audio in the output file. This was the first time I looked into getting the right volume out of the DJ-set actually hooked on to serious speakers. I had to read this article a couple of times, before I sort of understood what was happening and how I could prevent it. So it turned out that the output volume is determined by: volume of the base material, the track fader, the cross fader, the channel gain, the auto gain, the headroom, the limiter and the main output level. Hold on, that is eight levers or switches to setup properly! As you can imagine, it took me a while to get it right. At the time of the party I was really happy to be knowledgable about this and to be able to get the perfect sound and volume out of the speakers and not to have volume spikes mess up my transitions.

Enjoy the result, with special attention for what I think is my best transition ever, at 12:30 ;-)

Track List: Dutch Rap Club Party Mix