UCLA Extension Digital DJing Lecture 3
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And wow, who woulda guessed that DJ Hapa and Mr. Choc of the World Famous Beat Junkies would stop by and see you all perform! Totally unexpected! Well now you have a story to tell - your first time DJing with Ableton was in a room with 3 of LA's best DJs. w00t!
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Arbiter mashups are meant to stand on their own and are indeed complex and beautiful compositions. For DJing, however, you don't need to be a composer. I know Thomas mentioned simple 2-element mashups aren't interesting, but that depends on context. He's right, if we're talking about standalone songs. But in a live mix, 2-element mashups are great - they add variety, they delight crowds and put a creative twist on songs they've heard before. So keep that in mind. When you mash-up songs in a live mix, of course you usually don't let the songs play out for 3-4 minutes, but make transitions after a minute, 2 minutes, or even 30 seconds. So it's quite a different animal when you're being creative to move the crowd. My Twiistup mix is exclusively mashups for the first 22 minutes. Now, none of what I did was complex or as elegant as Arbiter material, but in a live mix, it made the hip-hop more exciting and kept the audience engaged.
So keep that in mind - you don't have to be like the Arbiters for this class. Start simple, then build up. It's very tough to go cross-genre, so maybe start with hip-hop mashups which are easier. As you get more comfortable, you can branch out - change a drum or bassline, chop up accapellas, etc.
Some things that can help you -
1. Mixed in Key - this program is great for figuring out mashup elements. It will BPM your songs and tell you what key it's in. It's not perfect and you still need to experiment, but it gets you there faster.
2. Listen to what's out there to help you. Some good repositories of mashups online are at Mash-Up Charts, Remix.vg, Mashuptown, and of course, the wonderful world of Bootie.
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5) You can use looping to help with warping. So if a song is particularly stubborn, you can try fixing the warp markers by hand for 8-16 bars. Then loop that section. When you've set your loop, click the loop bar so that it changes color. Then hold down shift + your up or down arrow. The loop bar now jumps forward or back in 8 or 16 bar chunks, depending how long your loop is. So when you jump ahead, all you have to do is check to see if the end of the loop is right and then adjust accordingly. And so on.
If you haven't watched the tutorial I posted on warping in the previous post, please do so. That's basically what you will do 90% of the time. It will only take you about 10-20 seconds per song once you have it down.
Now, for warping Acappellas, which we will do together in class, here is the methodology I use:
1) Warp the original song
2) Grab the BPM of that song after it's warped from the clip view (where it says "Seg. BPM")
3) Plug that BPM into the master tempo box in the top left
4) Take the acappella and listen for the chorus, which always starts on a "1". Be careful, sometimes the chorus comes in a half beat before a one. In that case, just not the syllable or word that does line up with the 1.
5) Plunk a warp marker in that spot on the chorus - right click the transient marker for that spot and select "Set 1.1.1 Here". If there isn't a transient marker in that spot, you can make one by double clicking in the wave on the spot you want.
6) Now, right click on that warp marker and select "Warp XX BPM from Here" - that XX BPM is the same number you plugged into the master tempo on the top left (that's why we did that).
I use this method and it works for me pretty well. I also find it the fastest. You should still listen to the acapella after step 6 and make sure it works. play a drum loop to see how it sounds with the acapella (you can use the metronome too). If the song starts to go out of synch, it's cuz your "1" marker was off. But that's ok, you know where the chorus' should be, so just zoom to the next chorus and make sure it's starting on a bar. And now you should be good to go.
And remember, you don't have to use an entire acappella. Sometimes we just want the chorus or particular verses. We'll practice this in class.
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you're So Close to me, get that Dirt Off Your Shoulder
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