Let’s continue from where we left off in How to Beatmatch (part 1).
You are now familiar with the basic concept of how to beatmatch and what beatmatching is. But in How to Beatmatch (Part 1) I only talked about beatmatching 2 copies of the same song, and the result didn’t sound that good anyway. Let’s get a little more advanced in Part 2 of How to Beatmatch.
Just like in Part 1, take a duplicate track and put it on both of your decks. On Deck A, cue up the track right before the beat hits. What I mean by this is as follows:
On your CD player there is a Cue button. It lets you pause the track wherever you want and resume it later with the play button. When you are playing a track and you hit the play button to pause it, you hear a stuttering sound. This moment in the track is called a frame and it is a fraction of a second of sound. You can turn the jog wheel to advance or reverse frame by frame. Play around with this so that you get familiar with how to identify what you’re actually hearing by listening to these frames. You should be able to notice the way a drum beat sounds when you hear it in frames. Once you get the hang of it, what you need to do is position the track at the frame right before a drum beat starts to hit. Then press the Cue button and the track will be paused there.
If you are using records, the process is similar. Just stop the record with your hand and move it back and forth to identify the sound of a drum beat hitting. You won’t be able to pause the record there, but keep your hand on it at the point right before the beat hits.
Make sure that your crossfader is in the middle position.
Now, with your other hand, press play on the other deck. Get a feel for the timing of the beat. Tap your free hand to the beat if you want, many DJs find that helpful. When you’re ready, press the play button (or release the track that you had paused with your hand) at the exact moment that a beat is about to hit on the track that is currently playing.
If you did this perfectly, the beats on both tracks should be synchronized and you have pulled off a successful beatmatch. But that’s what happens in a perfect world. In reality you were actually a little off and you’re hearing the galloping I had mentioned in Part 1. No problem, just use the jog wheel (or touch the record) to speed it up a bit and get the beats to match up. Wasn’t that easy?
There you go, you have just learned one of the techniques of how to beatmatch. But you will not often be trying to beatmatch two tracks that are exactly the same speed. In Part 3 of How to Beatmatch I’ll talk about how to beatmatch when your tracks are different speeds, or have different BPMs.
-Mixing DJ
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once again, great article…. extremely articulate
Thank you, I’m glad you found it useful. I spent a lot of time writing this one.
In reality you were actually a little off and you’re hearing the galloping I had mentioned in Part 1 <– I don't get this part. Do you mean that even if you do all of the steps in the first part of the article you still won't get rid of the gallop?
@wainwright – Thanks for the question & sorry if that was a bit confusing. What I was saying there was that if you followed all the steps from Part 1 perfectly, you would get a perfect mix. But since if you’re reading this tutorial you are most likely a beginner, you are probably not going to pull it off perfectly without a little practice. So while in a perfect world you would have a perfect mix, in the real world, as a beginner, you are probably going to get a decent mix but you’ll still hear some galloping because your technique isn’t perfect yet. And as I described in this post, that’s not a problem because you can adjust the track so that it synchronizes perfectly.
Thanks for this excellent tutorial. Just finished reading part 1 and part 2, heading over to part 3. Great post!
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