Transcription
As DJs, we know the difference between a good set and a bad set can be preparation. Track management can take hours, but by the end of this video, I'm going to show you how to prepare a whole set in minutes.
If you're like me, you like to have your tracks prepared before you wander up to the decks. It helps calm the nerves and helps ensure that you can deliver smooth mixing. Unfortunately, this part of the job is the one that most DJs hate the most. It's really tedious, time-consuming. Have you ever seen how fast James Hype can move his up faders? That's how fast we're going to be processing tracks by the end of this video. Stick around till the end because I've got a bonus tip that will help you get rid of the number one most annoying thing in Record Box.
Right, so in Record Box, the first tip I'm going to teach you is how to load a track onto either Deck 1 or Deck 2. This may not sound like a big time saver, but when you're dealing with maybe even 100 tracks, every time you're dragging that track physically with the mouse is wasting time. This is really simple. All you need to do is press Shift and Left to load it onto Deck 1, or Shift and Right to load it onto Deck 2. You won't believe how much time this is going to save you.
The next trick I'm going to teach you is how to actually play these tracks. I've shown you how to load them on Deck 1 and Deck 2. If you're like me, you like to preview the track a little bit while you're analyzing it. A really quick way to do this is if you want to play on Deck 1, you press Z, and if you want to play on Deck 2, you press N. Your timing is really good, you can use this to quickly see how two tracks blend together without ever leaving the keyboard. Okay, I did about four takes of that and I never quite got the timing right, but we're going to move on.
Next tip I'm going to show you is how to correct the beat grid. Sometimes you'll find that Record Box has detected the beats okay, but it's set the start of the bar in the wrong place. You can see on this track here that it's set the bar a bit too early. The drop is actually here. If you're going to correct this manually, what you'd have to do is go into the Grid Edit tab with your mouse and then select this bar icon here. Doing that over and over again on tons of different tracks is really tedious and it's one of the main things that I have to correct in Record Box. Let's set the bar back to where Record Box initially put it, and I'm going to show you how you can easily do this with a keyboard shortcut instead. We line up where the drop is, and then all you need to do is press Option or Alt on Windows and 3, and that immediately sets the bar there. If you're on Windows, then you can replace Option with Alt for this tip and any other ones that use Option. This is a massive time saver and really helps correct your beat grid a lot faster.
Setting hot cues. Typically, when I go through these playlists, I only set hot cues on the drop and I deal with the rest when I'm live. If you like to set more hot cues as part of your process, it's nice and easy. If you're on Deck 1, the keys 1 to 4 will set the first four hot cues. Set cue point A, another one here, press 2, and so on, all the way up to 4. On Deck 2, 6 is the equivalent of the first one, and then upwards to 9. So to set the first one, press 6, then 7, 8, and 9. And that's a really quick way of setting hot cues without having to manually go into the hot cue panel, moving your mouse, and then setting them all.
The next tip I'm going to show you is going to save you loads of time manually scrubbing back to the beginning of a track. All you need to do is press Shift and A for Deck 1, or Shift and H for Deck 2.
If you like to analyze your tracks on the go, maybe you're on the way to a gig, you might well be on a very small laptop screen, so it's important to get as much screen real estate as you possibly can whilst you're doing all this analysis. Very quick way to do that is just to press Spacebar, and that shrinks down the deck so that you get even more tracks on your screen at once.
I mentioned before, sometimes it's nice to hear how tracks will sound together when you're mixing them ahead of time. If your timing is not the best, as previously demonstrated by me earlier in this video, you can quickly turn on BeatSync for Decks 1 and 2 by pressing Q and Y, and this just makes it easy to see how the tracks will sound together without worrying too much about beat matching.
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That combined with the keyboard shortcuts for playing tracks on Decks 1 and 2, which was Z and N, can really help you very quickly plan out your set. I thought it'd be interesting to time how long it would take me to get through a whole playlist, enough for about an hour of music, depending what genre you're playing. For the purposes of this, I pre-analyzed the tracks in Record Box, so that part was done. That's going to depend how fast your computer is, so it wasn't really fair to include that as part of the testing. What I wanted to do was correct any beat grid mistakes, make sure the BPM was right, and set a hot cue on the drop. The reason I only set one hot cue is because I use this as a basis when I actually play the track out live. I can just use beat jump to move it backwards and forwards and set other cues if I need it, just save some time in the track preparation. You may need to add a little extra time if you're tagging your tracks as well, which I often do, but I just wanted to show you how fast you can get through the bare bones you need to do to play a set. Let's see how I got on.
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The final tip I'm going to show you is correcting the BPM. Depending what genre you mix, this may or may not be a problem, but as I mix mostly drum and bass, this does my head in. Record Box will very often half the BPM on drum and bass tracks, so it will say 87 rather than 174. I'm very lazy and can't be bothered to do maths when I'm mixing, so I like to have this set to the actual BPM. The way you do this manually in Record Box is you have to go to the beat edit again and then double the BPM like that. I'm going to show you how to do that with a keyboard shortcut. What you have to do is go into the preferences, so the little cog icon, select Deck 1 or Deck 2 depending which one you want to do it on. Towards the bottom, you should see somewhere "Double the BPM value". Now you're going to need to set this custom yourself, so you just click the little plus. I like to set this to Command and Backslash and just confirm that. And then, just for the sake of completeness, I set the "Half the BPM value" to the key next to it, so Command and Apostrophe on the Mac. And that means that you can now use that keyboard shortcut to change the BPM without having to go in the horrible beat grid edit mode. So you can see I can now easily double or half the BPM what I want.
What I want you to do right now is to jump into Record Box, find those tunes you could never be bothered to process, and do it. If you've got any other cool Record Box tips and tricks, please drop a note in the comments. And if this has been useful, please do like and subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.
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