What's the Deal about Beatmatching anyway?

Heads up: This is post is not just about 'Beatmatching', it's music theory in general.

As a newcomer to DJ-ing, the first thing I did (as anyone would do) was to research endlessly on the internet on how to improve skills. Almost every forum thread I came across, the emphasis was on beatmatching. Wait a min? I thought that was to be taken for granted, especially with mixing tracks in the same genre. So why was everyone emphasizing on learning beatmatching skill? I felt it was mandatory enough with DJing that maybe I should stop calling it a 'skill', like it was something special.

It's like saying, "While learning to drive a car, one of the skills is learning to steer." You wouldn't be driving a car if you didn't learn to steer. It's Mandatory.

General advice goes like this - Match the BPM - Match the downbeat - Match the bars - Match the phrases, etc. But that information is not advice. It's supposed to be known and felt. As a DJ (or someone aspiring to be a DJ), one should first develop a deep understanding for music itself. This means, to develop an ear for beats, bars, phrases, keys, scales, everything technical required for mixing. These aren't concepts to be learned when the situation demands, these are to exist in the head, before even touching the decks.

Let's take the example of a person learning to be a guitarist. First, He's got to understand basic musical theory (before even touching the guitar), or at least have a pretty good feel of how music works. Then, he moves on to putting theory into practice. Right from pressing down the strings, to plucking and strumming, it's all practice, but not without primary understanding of music itself. Without the music theory, his practice is just robotic and blind memorizing. A guitarist would know this perfectly well. Did you ever come across someone who says, "I can play the guitar!", you hand it over and all they play is a line of "Happy Birthday to You"? That's robotic playing. For a guitarist who knows what he's doing, the next note or chord is not played just out of memory, it is anticipated based on how the song is flowing. It's... natural. It's music after all.

When we translate this to DJing, sadly, musical theory is thrown out of the window and people just jump onto the decks and start mixing. I think this is why DJing quality is deteriorating rather quickly. Moreover, established DJs complaining about the newbies using automatic tools, aren't even hitting the right spot. Beatmatching is only the tip of the iceberg, there's a lot more to be known than just 'beatmatching'. People with no knowledge of musical structure, tempo and scale just dive into this saturated pool.

I hate taking advice, so it would be hypocritical of me to give advice. But I would just like to state that for me, DJing is more than just beatmatching or phrase matching or other technical things that should have already been known in the first place. I'm not saying you should know how to physically beatmatch without even touching the decks (that's ridiculous). It's about already understanding how it works. It's about pre-visualizing a track before it's even played. It's about breaking down a track into smaller components in your head, without forgetting how it sounds when put together. Suddenly the SYNC button usage, the Vinyl vs Digital wars, and other 'shortcut tools' are irrelevant ramblings of frustrated people.

You're playing out music to an audience. You're playing out an emotion. Understand why you feel a certain way with a certain track. Understand how you can fill the gaps in the current track with subtle elements of the second track. Mixing is not simply, the 'skill' of aligning beats perfectly and crossing over from one song to another. You're trying to find that perfect piece that fits neatly into the gaps and solves the puzzle. When you step back and look at the larger picture, you and your audience have made a beautiful musical journey.

DJ-ing : Simplicity vs. Chaos

Markus Schulz came to Hyderabad recently (May 1, 2015), and I wasted no time in agreeing to check it out with my friend. Though I don't listen to trance too much, I do enjoy it for the basslines, the typical trancey synths, the high energy and sometimes even the smooth vocals. Schulz is a big name in the genre so I knew the event was worth attending. It was pretty well organized (sticking true to the timings) and though not a lot of crowd showed up, some energy was floating around. The opening act was performed by Whosane and Anastasia, and headline act by Schulz. I noticed a stark contrast between the 2 acts and that is where the point of this post comes up. A simple difference between the 2 performances, which drew a sharp line between a brilliant set and a rather poor set. Chaos vs Simplicity. I may not be a professional DJ, but as a musician, I understand how things work with music so my views are purely based on this knowledge.

The Chaos

Artists Whosane and Anastasia from Mumbai. Ok, I actually don't know where to start with these guys because I didn't know where the set started. In fact, I couldn't feel the performance like a journey through a set. There's only 1 word to describe it, Chaos! I couldn't tell what genre they belonged to either. While Anastasia seemed to be enjoying herself with hip hop tracks, Whosane seemed to be more into house and dubstep. I've already mentioned 3 distinct genres. There were more and it was meaningless. There wasn't any flow, no technicality, no rhythm or key. It seemed like the 2 were in a small club just force-smashing tracks against each other that wouldn't go well. The last 20 min of their set was just 'boring'. I never thought I'd use a word like that for a performance that was playing music over 90 Decibels and involved beer and friends.

Whosane used the ever-hated airhorn siren sample several times and my friends and I had to shut our ears for those excruciating seconds. And then came the effects. Overdone and chaotic again. Echo was their only solution to jump between genres. Echo fade out a 128BPM track and slam in a 90BPM hip hop track like they did something super creative. They did this so many times that it got boring. There were a couple of goof-ups which I actually don't mind. It tells you they are human after all. I think there was a moment when Whosane mis-timed and jumped to a wrong cue point, and the crowd noticed. There was another part where Anastasia was trying to sing along to the track and boy it went all wrong with timing and key. Sorry. Anastasia has got to stay off the mic, and Whosane has got to stay off that damned airhorn and FX button! Overall, I felt they really belonged to a club atmosphere where clubbers are just waiting for hit after hit to be slammed in rather than craving a memorable experience.

The Simplicity

 Then came Schulz. They only word I can associate with his whole set was 'Simple'. He was practically hiding behind the decks when he set off the intro. Nice and smooth buildup. When the breakdown came he finally showed himself and the crowd went mad. The most noticeable improvement in the set structure compared to the previous artists was the genre selection. He knew what genre he belonged to, and his BPMs probably ranged only from the late 120s to mid 130s. And that was all that was needed. Despite my friends and I being quite technical with music, we never noticed a key clash. I'm sure he moved between keys but it was just bloody smooth. His mixing style was basic. As far as I could tell, he was bringing in the #2 track during the second half of the #1 track and just waited for the first buildup-breakdown sequence of #2 to silence out #1. From there #2 takes over completely and no one would ever know. Very simple and effective. No need of magical effects and ear-bleed inducing airhorns.Visuals were abstract, trippy and stunning. They were synced well with the audio and the screens provided lyric motion graphics for the vocal tracks, something that a lot of DJs are doing these days. One memorable scene was when the lyrics were talking about sunset, and the screens changed to a serene sunset scene to make him look like he was on a beach playing out the music. The overall effect looked beautiful.

His stage presence was simple too. Just the regular hand stuff, no over dancing, no getting on to decks, no river rafting over crowds or cake smashing. Of course you wouldn't expect a trance artist to do cheesy stunts. He was clearly enjoying his music and that was enough. I read somewhere that he pre-edits some of his tracks to blend better, but it just shows that he does his homework to put out a neat set. The speakers system let him down a bit though. They started jarring mid way through the set and the Mids were cut out for a while. Suddenly the energy dropped. Somehow the sound quality improved later. Friends say, over the years, he has slowly moved from a darker to a more commercial housey feel with his music, which is probably the taste of most listeners these days? Maybe.

Overall 90 min of good music and energy. After the poor first act, we were joking that Schulz might book a flight back home right there at the venue. Thankfully he stuck on and imprinted a great night's memories in our minds.

Rediscovering Music Part 2 : Mixing in Key

So my last post about Rediscovering Music was written in April 2012. Close to 3 years later, I felt I had write something more about it. In 2012, I was very very new to the whole Electronic scene so I did not have any idea about how deep this genre really went, but as of 2015 after a lot of listening, I have to admit, it's deep, like really deep! 

For a relatively young and currently desperate genre, Electronic music has some of the most obscure artists and producers, some of whom actually prefer to stay away from the spotlight. And I've mostly found that these not-so-popular artists produce the best kind of electronic music. One of my favorite examples is Michael Cassette.

Anyway, apart from 'exploring' the scene, I've also been playing around a lot with my good old DJ Controller, the Numark Mixtrack Pro. I'm really really glad I brought it back to India with me. Should really thank my friends for introducing me to DJing, I enjoy it so much now, I can't help but play around with it everyday after coming back from work.

So Part 2 of Rediscovering Music is about Mixing in Key. Here's a home DJ with not much experience, writing a blog post about DJing techniques, how funny! But to be completely honest, Mixing in Key doesn't really have much to do with DJing. So much so that as far as I know, a lot of DJs don't even consider it or even know about it. Over the last few years (after my 'Rediscovery'), I've been paying a lot of attention to mixing quality at clubs. I may not be able to see who's behind the booth and what techniques he's using, but I can mostly tell what's going on, simply by concentrating on the elements of the individual tracks. Almost all of the time, I've found DJs mixing pretty decently, but not paying attention to the key. The smart ones usually get away with it by mixing the silent portions of the track or cutting the new track in at a good spot. During such times, the sudden key change doesn't feel awkward. But there have been enough times, when I've heard very well beatmatched but horribly dissonant mixing. It was immediately clear that the DJ was mixing out of key.

For a musically trained ear, in my personal opinion, out of key mixing is almost as bad as a non-beatmatched mix. It's not the trainwreck kind of bad, but definitely gives me a kind of awkward feeling like fingernails on a chalkboard during the transition of the 2 tracks.

Very soon after starting to experiment with DJing, I almost accidentally discovered key mixing with two tracks that went a bit too well together. It only took a few seconds to realize that they were composed on the same scale. I never looked back after that. And so I jumped back to the basics and laid out my keyboard in front of me. I sat and played each track against my keyboard and found the root notes for them and listed them out. Here I had another amazing accidental discovery. For a few of my tracks, I ended up noting down the fifth note of the chord instead of the root note. It still blended well with the track from 5 notes away. That was pretty interesting to me, but it also made a lot of sense. It was clear that the relation was musical and technical. I pulled out the paper and pen and started counting the 5th notes of every minor chord (almost all the tracks were in minor keys) and soon, I was ready. I had a full loop of notes. I got overly excited and went online to see if something like this was done before. To my disappointment I found it almost immediately - It's called the Circle of Fifths which has been around for a long long time. At least, I was happy that my loop of fifth notes was exactly the same as the circle of fifths, so I did get my musical theory right.

Another disappointment hit me soon after this, there was software out there that would find the key for you! It was unbelievable. It looked like every possible aspect of DJing that required skill was being eliminated with digital help. It's kind of sad actually. Either way, it wasn't going to affect me. I trust my ears more than any software and will follow my method to finding the key even if it takes longer. It will help me feel the tracks a bit better and find out the particular elements that give it its key. 

My Circle of Fifths mixing worked too brilliantly! It was the moment I decided, no matter what, I'm sticking to this technique. I don't care how long it will take for me to find that perfect track that keeps the vibe flowing and sounds musically right, but I will find it and I will use it.

For the first time, I felt confident that I could start recording my mixes and show it to people. I knew that my musically arranged tracks would undoubtedly blend well, and now I just had to pay attention to the feel of the track which was simple - just feel the track! My mixes were not going to be a bunch of my favorite tracks put together. They were going to be structured and arranged to form a proper musical journey which 'felt good' and was also technically sound. They may not be perfect, but they are very much 'human'.

Today's digital advancement seems to have made the whole DJing thing a kind of a lazy art. Technically, a non-musician with no sense of rhythm or scale, can still DJ because the computer helps him out by finding him the key, analyzing the BPM and also syncing the next track to match the speed. The "Press-Play" DJ is truly a reality. It's not a terrible thing to happen to music but taking these tools for granted is where things fall apart. Not all keying software is accurate, and not all BPM analysis is accurate. So when things go off, it's only the real musician who can save the day.

To close it off, I would say Mixing in Key may not be given enough importance in the world of DJing, but I put it at the top of my list for a well structured musical journey. It's something that almost feels natural to do. Hope the word spreads around.

Signing off with an embed of my latest mix on MixCloud.

Alpha Rex Epsilon - Harmonic Mix by Rajasekhar Lutikurti on Mixcloud