In part three: counting and recording BPMs, what those ‘gain’ knobs on your mixer are for, and doing your first basic ‘chop’ mixes...
Hopefully you’ve spent the last four weeks counting the beats and bars of every track you’ve heard, and now understand dance music structures. So what about BPMs? Beats Per Minute are very important to get to grips with if you want to mix successfully. When you’re first learning to mix, knowing a track’s BPMs can be very useful, as it’s often difficult for the untrained ear to hear slight differences in the speeds of two particular tracks.
To calculate your BPMs you could buy yourself an electronic BPM counter, or your mixer may have this function built-in. If not, do it the old-fashioned way: count the beats for a minute. Do this three times, add your results together, and divide the total by three to get a pretty accurate result. After you’ve calculated your BPMs, write them on stickers and put them on your records. This all comes into play when you first go to beat match: you’ll know right away whether to speed up or slow down your tracks.
Gain control
These days almost every mixer on the market has gain pots for each channel (sometimes called trim or level). These are not here just for fun, and are not supposed to be on full all the time. Their simple function is so you can match the levels on both channels, so that when you move the crossfade the output stays uniform.
Your crossfade also slightly lowers both channels when in the middle to compensate for two channels playing at once. You will probably have some form of metering on your mixer to get your levels right, usually LEDs: for a clean undistorted signal you should try to keep your levels to about 0db or +1db. Doing this will not only give you good sound but will give you lots of ‘headroom’ to turn one channel up if you are playing something that’s cut quiet an album track, for example. Get used to watching your levels: your mixes will sound smoother, your speakers will last longer and your mix CDs will sound great too!
The chop mix
Now, on to our first mix. The ‘chop’ or ‘drop’ mix is so-called because you go straight from one track to another. The ‘chop’ mix is the most basic of mixes, but is often underrated: it can be used to great effect to give impact, change set style or simply to get out of trouble. Someone once told me, ‘A good chop is better than a bad beatmix’ – this is so very true, and if you’ve ever been in a club when a DJ has done a long mix that’s horribly out-of-time you’ll know what I mean!
There are, however, a couple of types of chop mix. There’s the one where you simply cue your track and whip the crossfader across as you let go of the second record. The other is where you bring into play the virtues of running mixes: matching the speed first and releasing the track at a certain point at the end of a phrase. This is what I call a speed-sensitive chop mix.
This may sound very basic but it gives you good practise in cueing and ‘pushing off’, or ‘releasing’ a record at the right speed. This in turn will help you later on with your mixing, as there will be less corrections to deal with. Practise your releasing technique by cueing a track on a beat and pushing it forwards and back in time with another track.
For beginners, there are a few points here to remember. When you are cueing a record, never press too hard. Under your record the slipmat is there to do a job, if you don’t press too hard the slipmat will work and the platter beneath should be spinning around as normal. If it’s not, you are pressing too hard! Admittedly this is more difficult if you’re using belt drive turntables, but always use the least amount of pressure necessary to hold on to the record.
Source: I-DJ Mag
