Hence the need for a “crash course” in what makes a great house mix, which you’ll find in this article.Įspecially with house and its derivatives, mixing is important because the music is made to be mixed. In the past, as DJs spent months and years nailing the mechanics of beatmixing manually, they also had time to figure out slowly most of the things I’m about to share.īut today, when it’s perfectly possible to line two beats up within minutes of unboxing a DJ controller, new DJs aren’t afforded that time – hence they get frustrated because they know it sounds wrong, but have no idea why.

“Complement and emphasise” in your DJing.

Always know which track is dominating the mix.

Use keymixing – but don’t be a slave to it.

Pick the right places in your tracks to mix.Be careful when mixing anything other than drums.While today’s sync functions mean that with digital music, it is so much easier than it was “back in the day” using vinyl and even CDJs, these modern functions are never going to do much more than match the beats for you.Īnd while that may sound great at first, you’ll soon realise that simply lining up the track you want to play next, hitting sync, hitting “play” where you hope it may sound good, and going for it, simply doesn’t sound good.Īnd that’s for good reason – because even the most advanced DJ system cannot do any of the things I’m going to outline in this article for you – things that good house DJs do instinctively, but that you have to learn.

Click here to download your free “house rules” posterįor those of us who got into this whole hobby marvelling at how DJs can seamlessly blend together a whole night’s-worth of music without dropping a beat, being able to beatmix house music well is an important goal.

Combining two songs together