This page should actuallu have been known as "The Irony" as I set it to answer one question that I get asked over and over, yet actually didn't put it in this page - till now. So here goes.

Question - "Once I've beat matched a tune, and succesfully mixed it in, do I then reset the pitch to 0? (Sometimes this is followed by a suggestion that playing at the same BPM all night may get a bit tiresome...)

Answer - No.

Next....

OK, Ok.

Of course, this isn't to say that there aren't BPM changes throughout a night. For a start, the warm up tunes I'd play were floating around the 126 bpm area when I'd first lay vinyl to turntable - for a nice gentle start before people arrive - pretty soon you're up at 135 - and by the end of the night 140+. And there's also fluctuations in BPM. Ok, so I said that slowing it down can put people off, but that's if it always happens. If you're banging away at 145bpm and there's still 2 hours to go - you're going to wear people out, mentally and physically, by playing at that kinda pace. So, slow it down a little - this is where I chuck in a more break-beaty tune, to bring things down a bit. The varation of BPM should be used as a bridge or transition of the night, not just because the artist wrote the tune at 124bpm!!

Anyway, what else do I get asked a lot.....

From time to time, I get emails from people saying things like "I just went out and bought some decks, now what's the point of Dj'ing, what am I suposed to do?"

Now, apart from worry a bit about why they just went out to buy decks, I then launch into a kinda half arsed attempt to describe the basics of what the intentions of mixing are. Bear in mind that this (and everything esle in the site) is really based only on mixing house/trance kinda things, I don't go into the D+B, jungle thing coz I don't do it - and aren't really interested in it.

So, the Dummies guide to mixing starts here.

The point of it all is aimed towards playing music live in a club. The big basis behind the house/trance genre is the rhythmic booming bass which drives the people on the dance floor to dance. Part of this bass drum thing is a huge part of the Trance scene, the constant bass beats leading to a kind of trance like state - or something.

Again, like in other pages though, I'm getting way ahead of myself. The real basic point of Dj'ing is to play music. You spend the whole time going from one deck to the next deck, playing a different tune on each deck as the night progresses (although, sometimes, when the big tunes are out, you'll hear them played several times throughout the night).

This, however, isn't the same as "Two decks Dan" who plays the local disco, where one tune will come to an end, and he'll just fade up the next one. The point of Dj'ing in the dance side of life is to mix these tunes together in a way that keeps people dancing, and in a lot of cases, don't even notice that the tune has changed to another one (which is commonly known as seamless mixing). There's many ways to make the transitions from tune to tune seamless - the most simple part of this is to make sure that the bass drum beats occur at the same time:-

So, the important thing is to keep the bass beats flowing through the sets, not that means there's always bass drums banging away, just that the beat is constant between tunes, so the people on the floor don't have to do a quick 2 step shuffle to get back in time with the beats. In other words:-

Beat - -beat - - beat - - beat - - beat - - beat - - beat - - beat - - beat :-
is the kinda thing you're aiming for

beat - beat beat - be-beat- beatbe- beat - bebeat - - beat - beat - - beat
isn't really going to flow.

I know, that's a really hard thing to read and understand, thing is, I can't think of anyother way to do it. Ok, I'll try again.

Tune 1 - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - -
Tune 2 - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - -

Is the preferred method of mixing, where the beats of tune 1 and tune 2 occur together. What you don't want is:-

Tune 1 - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - -
Tune 2 - Beat - Beat - Beat - Beat - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - - Beat - -

Where the beats of the two tunes are out of sync, and the people on the floor aren't too sure as to what beat they're supposed to be following when the dance. Get me?

So - that's the basics, when you have two tunes with bass drums, and you want to mix them together, you need to make sure the beats of the tunes are happening at the same time, it sounds a lot better than when they're out of sync.

The other important thing to explain is where you start the records. Further on in this site, I'll talk about exact places to start a record, and mix it with the other one - but for the purposes of this basic guide, all I need to say is that in the most cases, you start the beginning of the next tune you want to play near the end of the tune that is already playing - kinda like this (A is the tune playing, B is the one about to play.)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
------------------------------------------------------------- BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB

So there is an overlap at the end of A where the two tunes are playing (which is the part where it is important that you keep the beats matched).

So, through the course of the night, you'll have something like this:-

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
------------------------------- BBBBBBBBBBBBB
---------------------------------------------------- CCCCCCCCCCCCCC

Where each letter is a differnt tune. How, where and for how long these overlaps go on for is something I go into through the course of the rest of this site. Next....