DJing with live. Party DJing.

[Bernie Lomax]

As of now, I use serato scratch live to dj parties. I do a fair amount of blending and scratching, but the most important part about the parties I am doing is the song selection, and a clean transition... whether it be a drop on the 1, or a short blend. I'm not interested in the whole set being warped to the same beat, or even dropping in loops and live remixing right now... I'm just talking about playing good songs back to back with enough control to make it sound good.

Does anyone use live for this purpose? Anyone have any tips or techniques they'd like to share? It would be cool to be able to do a party using just a laptop and a midi controller with some faders and midimapped keys.

Thanks,
Low Down Bernie Lomax

[henry ford]

i do some simple mixing of tunes like you say.....i play reggae , and i warp to the basslines not the drums......i chop the songs up into logical pieces......then ill copy certain loops and put them on a different audio track , using a band pass filter to isolate certain aspects of the loop. such as isolating or removing the baseline , that kind of thing..........so when im playing , ill play the altered loop , then drop in the normal one..perhaps simultaniously cutting out the previous song...a simple , yet most satisfying effect
for reggae...


other things you can do , is send the altered loop to an effect such as delay , and fade it in slowly.......then drop the normal one....

even tho you dont want to warp entire songs together etc , its a good idea that you do...so you can scan through the whole song and find pieces you like for djing

[John Sweet]

I did my first couple of parties before I had enough tracks warped for it to make a difference, so I just winged it. As long as you have headphone cueing, it's really doable.
Just set global quantize to "none" & make sure yr triangular start markers are at nice spots in each of yr clips. You can even make copies of clips by holding option & dragging them to an empty cell. This is nice for dropping a break, then a chorus, then whatever other part of the song as 3 clips you can loop just by retriggering them sweetly. If you tap the tempo as much as possible, then you can also still get interesting Ping Pong Delay & Beat Repeat matched effects as though you were playing warped tracks.
I'll bet you start to like the idea of warping, though. For party purposes, the beat just goes on and on. Try downloading some ringtone or karaoke MIDI of some tracks you have. Drag them into Live & they're instant extra synth kicks & basslines, no other effort required (a HUGE benefit of warping).