I have been getting lots of emails and comments lately asking for a post on different kinds of DJ software. So today I will let you in on one of my personal secrets – the beat making software that will teach you how to make beats for your DJ mixes!

The reason I have kept it a secret for so long is that I didn’t want people to know just how easy it is to make really awesome beats for your music when you have the best beat making software. I figured that if everyone knew about this, they wouldn’t be as impressed by my music. But then I decided that I’d rather give out solid tips to my readers than worry about what people think about my own work.

So here you go – one of the best beat making software I know!

For a long time now, I have been using Sonic Producer to make my beats. I had tried a few different programs before, but most of them were not as good as this one, so I stuck with it. If you want to hear an example of what kind of beats I make with Sonic Producer, you could listen to a few samples at their website.

So you can see, the beats sound very professional and high quality. That’s exactly why I stuck with this software after trying a bunch of other ones. But there were 2 other main advantages – lots of features and simplicity. It is so damn easy to make awesome sounding beats with this beat making software that I didn’t want to put it down when I first started using it. I spent hours making one beat after another. In fact, even if you don’t yet know how to make beats, this beat making program will help you learn quickly.

Here’s how it works. You get a screen that looks like this:

You can either record from an instrument that you have, like a keyboard, or just use the built-in instruments in the software. That’s what I do, since I find that easier and quicker. So after you choose what kind of instrument you want to get your sounds from, all you have to do is click on the squares where you want that sound to play. Depending on the BPM you choose, you could think of each 4-square segment as 1 second in real time. So if you want to play a drum once per second, you just click every 4th square in a row. But regardless of your BPM, the cool thing is that with the way this is designed, your sounds will always be properly spaced. So even when you change your BPM, everything is preserved.

This can mimic the sound of having a complete drum set.

Here’s what the other parts of the screen are for:

This is what I was talking about when I said there are a lot of features. You have full control of the volumes on every channel, you could export to high-quality MP3 format, change the tempo and do whatever else you want with it.

I don’t mean for this to be an advertisement for this software. In fact, I don’t think this is the absolute best beat making software. But I do think that it’s one of the best for beginners who don’t yet have the experience in how to make beats in Ableton, Fruityloops and other more advanced software packages. I have just been getting requests to reveal some of the software that I use and this is one of them. It’s up to you if you want to use it, but the point is that it has my recommendation. Another DJ software I have been asked to make a post about is Atomix Virtual DJ, so that will be in one of my future posts pretty soon.

If you want to watch some videos of how to make beats with Sonic Producer, check out their website!

- The Mixing DJ

If you’ve been keeping up with the DJ scene in the past few years you have no doubt heard of a DJ software program called Serato Scratch Live, by Rane. This is by far the most popular DJ software being used, to my knowledge. Serato Scratch Live is not just a piece of software, but actually a DJ mixing system. It allows you to connect your computer or laptop to your DJ CD players or vinyl turntables and your mixer. You can then play any music from your computer as if you had the record on your turntable. No more lugging around heavy record crates, no more bulky CD cases or scratched CDs. Everything is on your hard drive. So, let me introduce the basics of Serato. This is how the setup looks:

Serato Scratch Live setup

As you can see, the setup comes with software that goes on your laptop and an audio interface, which is more or less a 2-channel sound card, that connects to your turntables and mixer with RCA cables and to your laptop via USB or FireWire. You could also use your microphone with it. Your DJ headphones stay plugged into your mixer.

A summary of how it works:

• Serato plugs into your turntables or CD players to receive the audio signal coming from the record or CD.
• Serato picks up the signal coming from your laptop, which is where your music is actually stored.
• Serato then sends that audio to your mixer, and you hear the music through your speakers.

It’s pretty straight forward because when you’re actually using it, the experience is the same as if you were playing regular CDs or records. But here’s the trick – you’re not playing regular CDs or records. You are playing special Serato CDs or Serato vinyl records. They have a special timecode, which tells the Serato interface and software exactly where you are in the track. It’s like a time signature, so if you’re on 1:23 of the track Serato knows to play 1:23 of the audio file on your computer. If you spin the track back, the software knows exactly where to pick up in the audio file. And so on.

Here is what the Serato Scratch Live software looks like:

Serato Scratch Live software

This may look confusing at first but you’ll learn how to use it pretty quickly. You can browse through your entire music library and select whichever songs you want to play.

Beatmatching is easy with Serato Scratch Live

The middle section shows you a visual representation of the waveform of your audio track, so you could see where the different audio frequencies fall. This lets you easily see where the bass and treble hit, thus making it easy to beatmatch. (You do know how to beatmatch, don’t you?) All you have to do is line up the beats on both tracks and make sure they’re playing at the same speed. Which is also easy because Serato tells you the current BPM of the audible tracks. To make it even easier, the bar at the top shows little lines to represent where the size of the measures in both tracks, so you can be sure to line them up precisely. Honestly, it’s really easy to beatmatch with Serato.

You control everything from your hardware

Even though the actual audio is stored on your computer, you control everything from your turntables and your mixer, just like you would normally. Of course, you now have your laptop as an extra tool to help you beatmatch and make some cool effects (I’ll get to that in a bit) but for the most part the DJ experience is the same so you don’t have to learn anything new. It comes pretty naturally.

Special features

Of course, the software has extra features that you may not normally have with your turntables or CD players. For example, you can set cue points. You can see those in the image above under “Markers.” Cue points let you return to that exact point instantly anytime you want. The reason they’re called markers and not cue points is because the audio plays instantly from that point instead of cueing the track at that point. It’s the same as the Memory function on the CDJ-1000, so if you’re familiar with that CD player you know what I’m talking about. This feature can be very useful, especially if you like beat juggling. I’ve seen this used most commonly to mark the beginning of where you want the track to play from. So you can skip an intro if you don’t want to use it in your mix. If you set the marker right at the first beat, you can always return to that beat with confidence. Oh by the way, these markers get saved in memory, so you don’t have to make new ones every time you use the software.

Easy looping

It’s extremely easy to make seamless loops in Serato. There is a loop feature that lets you loop at any interval from a fraction of a beat to 32 beats, or maybe more, I don’t remember off the top of my head. Regardless, it’s really easy to loop and you can just from one loop interval to another. So say you are looping a 1/4 beat loop and you want to let the loop go but you don’t want to get too far into the track yet, so you can change it from 1/4 beat to 16 beats. There’s a variety of effects you could create if you get creative just with the loop feature.

Lots of other useful features

This is just a basic overview of some of the most commonly used features. I’ll go into more depth on how to mix with Serato Scratch Live in a later post.

You will love Serato Scratch Live

Honestly, if you’re serious about DJing and you want to learn how to DJ with Serato Scratch Live DJ software, you should just get it and play around with it until you master all the features and all the things you could do with it. But it won’t even take you that long to see that it’s worth the investment. It’s no coincidence that you see DJs all around the world displaying stickers like this one:

I Love My Serato Scratch Live!

Did you find this informative? Do you have any questions about Serato Scratch Live? Leave me a comment below!