In this video, I'll be showing you a basic overview of the DDJ-SB and how to get started with your first mix. So, to start with, we need to load a track to both decks.
We can use the browse area which is located at the top here.
We've got a scroll wheel which we can click in to choose different tracks and with that, and the back button, we can navigate through different menus.
So, as I'm scrolling, you can see on screen, it's going between 'All' and 'Crate 1'. If I press the scroll wheel in, I'm in 'Crate 1', and I can now choose a track.
Just above the browse scroll wheel, there's a load button for left and right, so load it onto left and right decks.
So, I'm going to load a track onto the left deck and then that's ready to play.
To make sure the track we've loaded plays through the speakers, we need to make sure the crossfader is on the left side for the left deck, the upfader is all the way up and the master volume is set at a level where we'll hear it.
So, now this is set, press 'Play' and then we can now hear the music.
In this video, I will show you two different kinds of mixing and for both of these styles, you need to understand a few things about music.
So, the first is obviously a track speed and that's known as BPM, which is beats per minute.
For all kinds of mixing, you do need to be aware of the speed and sometimes you do need to make them as close as possible before mixing.
Adding to that, you need to learn how to count both beats and bars, so you can mix at correct points in the track.
All modern dance music has what's called a 4/4 beat timing and each track has four beats to a bar.
The next step up from that is what's called phrasing and a phrase is a collection of bars, which is usually four or eight depending on the genre of music.
So, when we place a mix, we usually want to place it at the start of a new phrase.
When the new phrase of music starts in a track, usually there's an extra element added, so it could be a new instrument or a crash or something is taken away.
When mixing dance music, it's always best to start the mix at a new phrase.
This is to make sure they blend seamlessly.
So, the first style of mix I'm going to show you is called a cut and that means we're going to cut directly from one track into another track.
So, at no point there will be two tracks playing together; it's just going to be one or the other.
I'm loading the track onto the right deck, same way as I did it before, using the scroll wheel, and then hitting 'Load' for the right deck.
What we're going to do is we'll have the track on the left playing out loud and then we use our headphones to find the part of the track on the right that we want to bring in.
The headphone controls are located in the centre of the mixer and to hear one of the tracks in your headphones, you need to press the 'Cue' button, so it lights up.
So, now the right 'Cue' button is lit up, I'm going to hear the right track in my headphones and obviously our headphone levels here and make sure we're turned to 'Cue', so we can just hear this track in our headphones.
So, now I've loaded a track that I want to mix in, I'm going to find the part of the track where all the drums and bass are in, so there's most impact when I cut the track in.
So, I can see the bass and drums kick in here, so I want to cut from there.
So, I'm going to set that as a cue point.
So, if I scroll up to that point of the track using the platter, hit 'Pause', then I can hit 'Cue' and what that means is when I hit 'Play', it's going to play from that cue point.
So, with the track on the left playing out loud, I'm going to bring my fader into the middle, then I'm going to count the bars in, one, two, three, four.
So, what I did there was hit 'Play' and cut the crossfader across to the right.
So, that was a cut and, as you can see, it's very simple to do.
So, now we're going to do a blend where we're going to mix two tracks together over a much longer period of time.
This involves matching the two BPMs of both tracks, so they're both the same and the way we do that is match the track we want to bring in to the track that's playing out live, so we're only going to adjust the track in our headphones as opposed to the live one.
We can use the 'Cue' buttons in the same way, so we'll select the track we want to hear in our headphones, and the track playing out loud, we'll listen to with the other ear.
To make it easier to demonstrate in this video, I'm going to play this all out loud, so you can hear exactly what I'm doing.
The track on the left is playing out loud and this is the one we're going to mix in.
The first thing we need to do is press 'Play' on the beat of this track in a new bar to make sure they're in time.
So, now they're both playing but the speed of this one isn't quite right, so what we need to do is, first of all, get it back in time before we can adjust the speed.
We can use the platter to do that and we can either push it back to slow it down or bring it forward to speed it up.
You can also look on screen to see the waveforms and you can actually see each individual beat and, as you adjust it, you can see whether they lock in or not.
So, let's start that again. One, two, three, four.
So, I'm going to slow it down a bit.
That sounded a bit worse, so I'm going to speed it up, so now I'm thinking that maybe I need to adjust the track, so it's faster.
So, with the tempo control here, if I bring it forward, it's going to speed the track up, so if I bring it a little bit faster, get it back in time again.
That's sounding better but it's still slightly fading out.
What we can look at for a guide as well is each deck shows you the BPM of the track playing, so as I increase the track on the right, it gets close to 125, which the track on the left is.
So, I'm going to bring our track here playing back to the beginning again and I'm going to play it in time with the track out live.
So, what I'm doing now is testing that beat match to make sure that they're both in the same sort of speed before I start my mix.
It's sounding about right to me, maybe it's a bit fast, so I'll just adjust the tempo, just try and get it as tight as possible.
So, that's sounding pretty good to me, so once we've got our beat match, we can start to do our mix.
So, we can bring it back to the beginning of the track again, obviously you would have done this in your headphones, so the fader would be over to the left anyway, and then at the beginning of a new bar, we're going to hit 'Play' on the track on the right.
So, we'll adjust it in our headphones and then using the crossfader, we can slowly bring in the new track.
If you bring it in just slightly and the track starts to go out, you can obviously use that to adjust and we can get the beat match back on.
As the track progresses, we can begin to bring the crossfader across more and more to the track on the right. Obviously, keep going until the track on the left has been completely mixed out, so just the track on the right is playing.
So, that was a basic blend mixing two house tracks together.
The main thing we did there was match the two speeds of the tracks using the tempo fader.
There's another way to do that and that's using the 'Sync' button and when you press 'Sync', what it does is automatically lock both BPMs, so they're both exactly the same.
It will lock the deck that's not live to the track that is live, so it won't interrupt live playback.
One other thing to show you as well when beat matching or adjusting speed is sometimes, as you adjust with the jog wheel, you can get quite a horrible pitching sound.
If you're mixing a track in a live situation and you have to adjust it to get it right, that can sound really obvious with that really big bending pitch sound.
So, we've got a 'Key Lock' on the SB and when activated, it basically gets rid of that bending pitch sound.
So, that's without.
So, the 'Key Lock' really helps in a live situation as it won't affect the pitch of a track and helps when disguising beat matching.
I've just shown you the fundamentals of mixing by matching the speed of two records together.
There's a few more things you can do to make it sound a lot more refined and a lot more polished mix.
The first of those is each channel on the mixer has an EQ and we've got the ability to take out or to adjust the low, mid and high frequencies of each channel.
What we can do with this is say, for example, we're doing a long blend in a mix and we bring in a new track, sometimes they can sound quite bass-heavy, so it's always a good idea, as you bring in the new track, to make sure you have some of the low end taken out.
That can get rid of too many muddy sounds at the bottom and, as you do use the fader to bring in the new track, you can gradually work the EQ, so you're taking the bass out of the old track and bringing the bass into the new.
You can use the mids and highs as well but these won't have as much impact but you can use them for effect if you want to.
In a similar fashion to using the EQ when mixing, the SB has a filter on each channel as well. You've got a high pass filter and a low pass filter.
When you turn the filter to the left, you've got the low pass filter and that cuts out the high frequencies leaving only the bass.
If you turn to the right, you've got a high pass filter which cuts out the low frequencies but leaves the highs. I'll just demonstrate that quickly.
If I turn the filter to the right, all of the low frequencies are now taken out, so it's just sort of the high hats and the high ends of the track.
If I turn it the other way to the left, it's taken out all the highs and just leaving the bass.
So, you can use those when you're mixing tracks as well.
If you want to take out the bass, you can start by having the high pass filter on, as you bring the track into the mix , so it won't interrupt with the lower ends of the track.
That's when you're playing live and, again, you can just gradually work those in the same way you would with the EQ.
The SB also has a brand new feature, which is called the Filter Fade and that basically incorporates the filter into the fader.
So, if I activate it and I've got a track playing, when I start to fade that track out, it slowly cuts the bass out for me and so all that's left is just the really high end as well as the volume being taken down as well.
Again, going the other way, if you're bringing a track in, it's going to slowly bring that bass in.
So, that's been designed to give the filter a really smooth curve as the fader goes across and that can really help especially when learning with long blends and more house-orientated mixes.
So, when using the Filter Fade, instead of using one hand to do the crossfader and another one to do a filter or the EQ, it frees up a hand to say maybe work the FX or some of the performance pad features.
The next video will show you how to use the FX and all of the other features on the SB and then, in later videos, we'll go into more detail about mixing both house music and, again, mixing hip-hop.