Become a Pro Tools DJ – Andre’s Production Diary Part…

Hi guys it’s Andre.

It’s now my 27th week as volunteer at Bentztown Studios in Stuttgart.

Do you know what really sucks being an Old School DJ still using vinyl? It’s not the exorbitant prices for vinyl, the heavy cases you have to move to every gig, buying new needles from time to time, it’s recording. Once you f**k up a transition in a record, you have to start the whole freaking recording session, which can be a total pain if you mess up the last transition in a 2 hour session. That’s why a lot of studio mixes are done in Pro Tools. You can restart anywhere in the mix, you want. I’ve tried the same and here’s the result:

[soundcloud width=”100%” height=”81″ params=”” url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/20033316″]

It’s just a small sample to show it.

You don’t need to be a DJ to create smooth transitions in Pro Tools. It takes you a few minutes, so let me show you:

Elastic Audio, the Grid Mode and cool Pitch Plugins like Pitch N Time make Beatmatching easy like never before.

Once you’ve beatmachted your tracks, it’s time to put them together.

Move the both tracks, how you want the first song to end and the second one to start.

To smooth your transition, add a fade in to your second track.

Add an EQ to both tracks and activate the High-Pass filter on both. Enable Automation on the High-Pass filter frequency knob.

Switch the view to see the automation.

Here’s my Automation view. As you can see, I cutted the bass on the second track. By using automation, you can filter out the bass on your first track while you’re bringing back the bass in the second track. Of course, you can do this with any frequencies, you want filter or cut.

Repeat this, till you’ve got a whole mix. Here’s a sample pic of my session with fades and Automation

Of course, there are tons of ways, Plugins and opportunities to create a stunning DJ Mix with Pro Tools, but this would fill a whole Production Diary and that would be to much for just one post. Let’s see, maybe I’m gonna do a second part.

I still won’t give up playing with vinyls, but it’s definitely fun and easy to create mixes with Pro Tools.

Cheers and have a nice weekend.