How to DJ Mix like a Professional (for Beginners) | ‘From 0 to DJ’ #3 ✅

In this chapter we are going to see an introduction on how to DJ mix music like a professional. 🙂

DJ Mixing with a Pioneer Controller

In the previous chapter we learned about the buttons, functions and basic elements of a mixer, controller or DJ software.

Table of Contents

How to start mixing music like a DJ? What you need to know

1. Choosing the Music to Start Mixing

First we must take into consideration the music we are going to mix.

There are many ways to mix and once you have learned the basic techniques, you can experiment without limits. However, we are going to start with the most basic but professional mixes. For this we must know that for a basic mix, all music is not useful.

We assume that we are going to work with electronic music genres. The normal thing is that the tracks, songs or original pieces are built with the complete structure, including some blocks that we call extended.

The most popular electronic music usually has radio editions, which summarize the track and eliminate the extended sections. These radio versions will not work for us.

To start with we will need tracks with extended blocks, now let’s see what they are.

1.1 What are EXTENDED blocks?

Most electronic music tracks and songs usually have at the beginning and at the end some extra fragments, without too many sounds or too much melody, they are essentially rhythmic. They have a function of introduction, and progressive ending of the track.

This is usually called “extended”. In fact, if we search on the internet for any song + “extended version”, we will find it with these extra blocks, which are not usually found in ‘Radio Edit’ versions. But be careful, not in all musical genres we will find them.

This is the aspect of the sound spectrum of the Extended Fragments in most of Electronic music

Those points of so much intensity, usually are the drums, the beats that mark the rhythm.

The Extended blocks have a function of introduction and progressive ending of the track.

It is in these blocks that we have the perfect time interval and the track is empty enough of sounds to mix and match with other track (which also have an extended structure) to make a transition without the mix sounding bad or saturated.

1.2 Extended Songs vs Radio Edit Songs

To clarify this, let’s listen to a couple of examples. But let’s keep in mind that this distinction usually only affects the most popular, mainstream music, since less commercial music doesn’t usually have radio editions:

Extended Version: Original edition with its introductory blocks and ending blocks, we can also find them as ‘club mix’. (These are the ones we need to learn how to mix).

Let’s listen to an example of extended blocks (first minute and last minute):

Radio Edit: Edited for a more general listener who is not so interested in listening to a complete piece, but in ‘getting to the point’, going straight to the points of greater emotionality and musicality, choruses, easy to remember phrases…

Now let’s listen to the same track, on a radio edit and with vocals:

As we can appreciate, besides eliminating the extended and adding a vocal, they have also ‘summarized’ the track, with appreciable cuts with respect to the other one. With these versions we can’t learn how to DJ and mix. Since they start already with the vocal and with the melodies. It does not allow us a progressive mixing.

2. How to mix the songs: Beat Matching + Phrase Matching

2.1 The Musical Phrases

Once we are clear about the right music, let’s take a look at some essential music theory to understand the mixes:

Tracks can usually be divided into several blocks of 32 beats.
The beat normally coincide with the kick drum in most genres of electronic music, although not in all (Not in Drum&Bass, Dubstep or Trap but in all derivatives of House, Dance, etc).

Sometimes these blocks of 32 beats are very distinguishable between them almost without paying attention, because of the changes they present. For example: Downbeats, Upbeats, In and Out of Instruments, In and Out of Melodies…

The blocks of 32 beats are called phrases.
32 beats = 1 phrase

With this information we are going to move on to understanding the mix. This will be covered in more depth in the next chapter on how to count beats, bars and phrases.

2.2 The First Mix: The DJ’s Mission (Beat Match + Phrase Match)

Our mission as a DJ for a basic mix is to match two songs by synchronizing the beginning of a phrase of each song. So that the respective phrases develop together and thus we will avoid alterations in the rhythmic patterns.

We will start with the most basic mix: Synchronize the Final Phrase of the first song, with the Initial Phrase of the second song.

(of course we will have to match the beats of each track)

From there we should be able to do it elegantly and cleanly without being able to see that we are making a transition to another track or song.

With this introduction we can begin to understand the concept of mixing.

2.3 Visual Example of a Mix and Transition of Two Songs

Now let’s see how a transition would look like by visualizing a two-track layout.

Schematic of a 2-track mix in the Logic Pro production software editor.

And that’s the essence of a basic mix, to make your first mixes with professional results you must match these blocks.
If you feel lost for now, don’t worry, we’ll go deeper in the next chapter.

Now it’s your turn 👇

We hope you have understood how to DJ mix by the most canonical way. This type of mixes are the ones we can listen to in the typical podcasts of famous DJs. Priceless, very elegant and progressive mixes.

In the next chapter we will see these structures in depth and how we will do to count the beats, the phrases and recognize the blocks within the tracks.