The Digital DJ Tips Podcast

This one was recorded on 4 July, but despite the date, we still had a busy show answering questions from students about a wide range of topics. We covered the fallout from Pioneer DJ deciding not to support older controllers in the latest version of Rekordbox. We talked about the right way to promote events and why, despite loads of advertising and hard work, most of the people at one student's ev...

Is it time to redefine DJ success? Drugs, groupies, private jets, insomnia, amnesia, hearing loss, mental breakdown: Say you're a DJ without saying you're a DJ, right? Well, we say no! It's time for a grown-up definition of DJing success - and I had one to propose to start the three topics we covered in this month's Inside Track. We moved on to "The strange world of DJ software". "Things fall apar...

We started with a question that a lot of people resonated with, which is the lack of exciting new DJ gear recently, and we looked into some of the reasons why new equipment might have slowed down. Also this week, we had lots of DJs working on their first gigs, but one in particular who's returning to DJing after 40 years wanting to know what might have changed. And we had a reticent British guy wh...

Beatgridding your music has been a necessary evil for digital DJs who want to use features like sync, loop, beat-tied effects, accurate hotcues, and so on, for many years. However, while beatgridding 2.0 improved on beatgridding 1.0 by handling songs with slightly varying BPMs a little bit better, not much has changed over the years – until now, that is – because new software is now able to use AI...

A really busy Your Questions show this month with hundreds of questions from our students, the best of which feature here. We talk in some depth about quick mixing, what it is, when to do it, and - more importantly - how to do it. We talk to a head teacher who's started to get the DJ bug and land himself some gigs, but now wants to know how to get more and more. And a student wants to know why old...

Following the epic DJ fail at Coachella by Grimes, rather than piling in and criticising her, we thought we would use that as a springboard to talk about ways that DJs can avoid the inevitable errors that happen in any DJ set. The conversation on this podcast quickly underlined the fact that these things do happen, but that there are things that you can do to make it less likely, and to recover qu...

In this month's show we tackled a wide range of questions. We spoke about producing music when half deaf, worries about DJing when visually impaired, keeping children interested in DJing, why the hell your software needs to have a database (and whether that database looks after itself), and lots of other questions across our big areas of DJing, gear, music, mixing, performing, and success. As ever...

A very tech-oriented edition of the show this time. We're looking at new Bluetooth features that have been added to DJ equipment and asking when DJs should be using these, and when they should not. We're also looking at the whole subject of rotary mixers because AlphaTheta, formerly Pioneer DJ, has just launched a mixer called the Euphonia, which is an extremely high-end (and very expensive mixer)...

1:57 Why do some DJs judge others for using the sync button?  8:49 Does the Engine DJ 3.4 update include the Denon DJ Prime 4?  14:10 What's the best way to clean up a messy DJ library?  21:00 How many genres should DJs include in a mixtape?  27:37 Tips for improving EQ blending between tracks?  38:22 Any advice for upgrading DJ lights?  42:25 How our DJ training works In this month's show, we sta...

In this month's three DJ topics, we start by looking at Recordbox 7 software which has just entered public beta. Does it deserve the jump from Recordbox 6? What new features are there? What has the community been wishing for in Recordbox and does it deliver this time? We take a deep dive under the hood with an exhaustive look at everything we found in this pre-release version of this major DJ pack...