The Point of DJing

Clearing things up

Everything here is also in the book, but since this site exists for anyone with zero DJing knowledge, it stays here too, tidied up over time.

Question

"Once I've beatmatched a tune and mixed it in, do I reset the pitch to 0?" (Often followed by: won't playing at the same BPM all night get boring?)

Answer

No.

The underlying point of DJing — in the club style I play, at least — isn't just to keep a constant, pounding bass drum going, but to roughly match the BPM to the energy of the room. When that lines up, the rhythm does something to how people move (makes me sweat a bit too, but that might just be me).

Beyond body mechanics, you're aiming for a BPM people are comfortable dancing to, with a real sense of energy through the night. Bounce the BPM up and down constantly and people can't find their rhythm, and the night doesn't flow.

That's not to say BPM never changes through a night. My own warm-up tunes sit around 126bpm early on, rising to about 135, and by the end of the night, 140+. There's room for planned fluctuation too — if you've been at 145bpm for two hours, dropping to something more breakbeat-driven for a bit gives people (and you) a breather. Use BPM changes as a deliberate transition, not just because that's the tempo the artist happened to record the tune at.

Question

"I've just bought my first set of decks — now what's the point of DJing, what am I supposed to do?"

(Everything below is really about mixing house and trance — I don't go deep into drum & bass or jungle, since it's not a genre I play, and I'd rather not guess at it.)

The point of it all is playing music live in a club. House and trance both lean heavily on a driving, rhythmic bassline that keeps people dancing — part of the same heart-rate-matching idea mentioned above, and a big part of what gives trance its almost hypnotic pull.

The basic mechanics: you move from deck to deck, playing a different tune on each as the night progresses (though the big tunes of the night might get played more than once). This is different to a wedding DJ letting one tune finish before fading up the next — the goal here is seamless mixing, blending tunes together so the transition often goes unnoticed. The simplest version of this is making sure the bass drum beats of both tunes land at the same time.

So the important thing is keeping the beat constant through the transition — not that there's always a beat playing (breakdowns and drops without beats matter just as much) but that when there is one, it lines up between tunes, so nobody on the floor has to do a little shuffle to find the rhythm again.

The next page, Basic Mixing, walks through how to actually do this. As always, DJing for Dummies covers it in full depth in Chapter 12.

Placement

Starting the beat

The other key thing is where you start each record. Better Mixing covers exact placement in more detail, but for now: in most cases, you bring in the next tune's beginning near the end of the tune currently playing, so there's an overlap where both play together and need to stay matched.

Through a night, that overlap repeats from tune to tune — how long each overlap runs, and exactly where it sits, is something the rest of this site (and the book) goes into further.

So that's the bare bones of mixing: play music people want to hear and dance to, and keep it flowing all night with the beats matched, so nobody has to break stride.

Choosing music

Question

"I've just got my first set of DJ equipment — what music should I play?"

The answer is simple: whatever you love. Want to be a trance DJ? Play trance. Into R&B? Play R&B.

There's room for cross-genre dipping — a trance DJ might reach for progressive house, breakbeat, electro or straight house to open a set, and some drum & bass or jungle DJs start with house tunes to build core beatmatching skills before tackling the far more complex drum patterns of D&B or jungle.

But it comes down to playing what you love. Don't play something you're not into for its own sake (there are occasional compromises, covered in the book) — stick to music that makes you smile, gives you chills, and that you'll still be happy hearing over and over while you're perfecting your skills.