We've picked 8 more of our favourite tips and tricks from DJ Mag’s How I DJ video series, covering the Slip mode, acapellas, intelligent playlists, and much more.
Since 2020, DJ Mag’s How I DJ video series has been a steady stream of pro-level DJ tips and advice. The series asks some of club music’s leading DJs about their influences and the development of their craft, along with dynamic demonstrations of their go-to techniques. Across 16 episodes, it’s become one of our chosen sources for mixing inspiration, so we decided to rewatch every episode and select some of our favourite tips and tricks.
We recently looked at the techniques of 8 of the DJs featured so far, with supporting explanations and ideas for expanding on their advice. We now look at the other 8 DJs featured in the series….
“You cut the loop down,” says the UK DJ Eats Everything, “then change the tempo and change the pitch range—+/- 6, +/- 10, +/- 16, wide—take the Master Tempo off, and it a creates [the CDJ makes a waaaaaahhh sound].” With a loop cycling on a 1/4-note, Eats completes the technique by pressing the Out Adjust button and using the jog wheel to slowly extend the loop frame-by-frame, creating a yowl like a robot malfunctioning. In the demonstration, he deploys this trick as rowdy flourish to finish a transition between loopy techno tracks. Stripped-back, drum-led music suits this technique especially well, as there aren’t as many melodic elements fighting for the same frequency space as the waaahhh.
It’s hard to know the full scope of this trick’s potential. As the loop, pitch fader and jog wheel are essentially creating their own effect, you’ve got all of the other FX at your disposal to play with. For instance, on a setup with Beat FX and Color FX, throwing the pitch-bending loop into a huge cavern of reverb while slowly closing a filter creates a kind of experimental ambient track. That might sound a little too pretentious for a dance floor setting, but it highlights just how weird you can get with this one.
“I like to loop acapellas,” says the Swiss house and techno artist Andrea Oliva. “Use the vocal almost like an effect, in the build up, in the break.” Taking a phrase from Celeda and Danny Tenaglia’s classic “Music Is The Answer,” Andrea layers vocal loops of differing lengths over the track’s he’s playing, responding dynamically as it reaches its breakdown. Andrea explains that he picked up the technique in his formative years. “I admired a lot of US DJs back in the day,” he says. “David Morales, Little Louie Vega, Masters At Work—the use of acapellas, certain bits of a vocal, looping it, and making it sound like an effect.”
In the ’90s house era Andrea’s talking about, it was common practice for house labels to include acapellas on their vinyl releases. These days, we have the convenience of the internet, with Beatport alone stocking almost 15,000 tracks tagged as acapellas. Digging for vocals online also means that key/harmonic information is often available. Even if you don’t tend to mix harmonically, if you’re layering an acapella over music with prominent chords or melodies, it’s worth paying attention to their musical compatibility. If you don’t, the results can range from pretty good to terrible. But with a little extra effort put into key compatibility, the acapella can sound seamless in the mix..
“The DJS-1000 works as a sequencer and sampler but I’m using it as a sampler,” says the Spanish dance artist Danny Avila. “The main way that I use it is by activating the repeat option.” By synching the DJS-1000 to the currently playing CDJ, Danny creates drum rolls with the claps and snares he’s loaded onto the unit. As he demonstrates, the big advantage here is being able to inject extra energy into your set exactly when you feel it’s needed. Put another way, with the DJS-1000 you have the option to respond to the audience moment by moment—a step in the direction of live performance.
If you are looking to enhance your sets with elements of live performance, the DJS-1000 was designed to bridge the gap between these two worlds. It has the same size and feel of a CDJ, so the learning curve is pretty easy. You can play live drum sequences drawn from the onboard samples; load your own samples (perhaps taken from your music productions) and build whole songs with the unit’s 16 performance pads; or select Scale Mode and play melodies and basslines. The DJS-1000 flies a little under the radar, but the adventurous DJs and live acts who use it tend to really rate it.
“On rekordbox you’re able to create a folder by key,” says the uptempo DJ and producer SHERELLE. “One of the biggest mixes I’ve done is the Essential Mix, and when trying to compile that I started to gather that I was really into the key E. So I said, ‘Excuse me playlist, can you find me all the tracks with the key of E, between the BPM of 80 to 160,’ and it gave me a whole host of tracks.”
For the uninitiated, Intelligent Playlists are rekordbox playlists created automatically when a track you add to your library meets specified criteria. In SHERELLE’s example, once she’d told rekordbox that she wanted a playlist of tracks in the key of E, it would group all tracks that had been tagged or analysed as such. And from then on, any tracks in E added to the library would appear in the playlist.
Explaining the full scope of Intelligent Playlists could be an article in itself (we cover aspects of the topic here), but the gist of their appeal is captured in SHERELLE’s example. You set up a minimum of one criteria and let rekordbox do the digging for you. Expanding on the E playlist idea, SHERELLE might then want to make a separate playlist of the E tracks she’s played most frequently—the best of the best. That would just need an additional criteria—say, DJ play count is greater than (>) 3—and the list would be created. With 23 different criteria and the ability to add your own custom tags, the organisational and creative scope of Intelligent Playlists is vast.
“Rap music and hip-hop, it’s all about the vocals,” says the rap DJ Tiffany Calver. “So when you can bring in an instrumental, it’s always a good saving grace to be able to blend in another track.” Tiffany is highlighting perhaps the central challenge of playing hip-hop: how to mix vocal-led tracks with song structures that aren’t built for DJs? In her demonstration, Tiffany has both the instrumental and acapella version of Aitch and AJ Tracey’s “Rain,” and is transitioning into Fat Joe and Lil Wayne’s “Make It Rain.” “I can bring the instrumental down when I want to loop [the vocal], which means when we get into the next record it’s a lot cleaner and it just sounds a lot cooler.”
Tiffany’s tip also highlights the thematic angle of hip-hop DJing that you just don’t get with most dance styles, especially the instrumental ones. She selected back-to-back tracks on the theme of rain, and (mixing considerations aside) she could have also dropped rain-orientated tracks from down the years by Ashanti, Missy Elliott, SWV and Pop Smoke (The Weather Girls probably wouldn’t work here, but you never know). Don’t underestimate the power of this sort of thing. Although straightforward, it tells the audience that you’re asking them to connect dots between tracks, and anything that increases engagement in your set is surely a winner.
“The other way that I like to do loops is sometimes to use the Slip,” says the BBC radio DJ Jamz Supernova. “The difference is that because you’re doing it so manually, it doesn’t always work. But sometimes I think when you’re DJing it’s nice to try stuff, the DJs I always admire are the ones who try stuff, even if it doesn’t work.”
If you’re unfamiliar with them, Slip mode or Slip loops are when you loop or scratch a track and it doesn’t lose its real-time play position. For example, if a DJ loops “1, 2, 3, 4” and then exits the loop, the next thing they hear will be “9, 10, 11, 12.” So the risk Jamz refers to here is that when you return to the real-time play position, it may or may not sound musically coherent and/or in time.
When it comes to how to use Slip, we like this take from DJ Carlo: “Using Slip mode is one of the funnest and easiest things to do when DJing—and I personally use it to show off.” As Carlo shows, a good place to start with Slip is a one-beat vinyl-break effect, practising the timing to release the effect on-beat. In Jamz’s example, she uses the Slip Loop on a CDJ as a release effect, briefly looping a vocal phrase before taking her finger off the touchscreen in time with the music. The exact applications of Slip will depend on the style of music you play, but it’s worth finding your own flow with it. As Jamz says, it’s an effect that can create standout moments, even (or especially) if it doesn’t go well.
“The way I approach a DJ set is as a listener or as a raver,” says the UK garage artist Conducta. “I don’t ever want to think about going to the smoking area, I always want to be on my toes.” Conducta explains that his aim is to never lose a dance floor’s momentum. A breakdown in a track may be a needed breather, but it’s also an excuse for people to sit down or hit the bar. His solution? A track ready to go on a third CDJ. From what he’s saying here, it seems that the aim is less about slamming in a new tune and more about creating some sonic movement if it’s needed.
If you’ve got access to a third deck, an alternative might be having a folder of percussion or drum loops ready to rock. This ties in with some of other tips we’ve explored here, whereby you’re using a DJ tool to fix a mix issue, or responding to the crowd in the moment. What goes in that folder will depend on the genres you’re playing that night, but a flexible selection of rhythm tracks that don’t have a prominent pitch could be useful in lots of different contexts. This will be especially relevant if, like Conducta, you want the crowd to remain in your grasp for your whole set.
“Sound effects add to the atmosphere,” says the BBC radio DJ Kenny Allstar. “There’s a difference between just playing a record and then playing a record that hits and you’re hearing, like, a million-and-one glass smashes and you’re thinking, yo, this is it!” For Kenny, dancehall is perhaps the best genre when it comes to DJs using sound effects—laser horns, bombs, glass smashing. It’s a tradition that goes back to Jamaican soundsystem DJing, where DJs would use enormous blasts of effects to hype the crowd and smooth the transitions between records.
Kenny says that he packs a whole bank of sound effects, and demonstrates the way that he uses the sound of a truck driving past as a mixing tool. This choice of sound isn’t just random, either. The truck ties in with his “voice of the streets” tag, which he uses during his radio and club sets. For DJs and producers in genres like hip-hop and dancehall, the judicious use of IDs and tags is a way of worming your DJ name into people’s heads, like an advertising jingle. “Sound effects can be part of a DJs brand if they’re used properly,” Kenny says.
