So as not to alienate all the readers who aren't DJ's I decided to post a somewhat brief tutorial of how the practice works.
To begin: where does the music come from?
Some DJ's use vinyl turntables like this Technics 1200 ( the industry standard)
Others have moved away from Vinyl and use CD's in devices called CDJ's
This is a Pioneer CDJ 1000 (the industry standard CDJ)
Now, once you have two turntables or CDJ's the sound has to go somewhere:
Where does it go? Both plug into what is known as a mixer
This is a Pioneer DJM 800, a common sight in nightclubs:
Here's a common setup, two CDJ's placed on either side of the mixer.
A new trend in the DJ world is the use of computers, but I will delve into that later.
Now you have an idea of the equipment, but what does a DJ actually do?
Mixing 101
For this example lets assume you have two CD's in the CDJ's that are both plugged into the mixer. For the sake of expliantion we'll call one CDJ "Deck A" and the other "Deck B". You play the song from Deck A, while the song is playing, you choose your song in Deck B. As the song is playing through the speakers in deck A you listen to your song in Deck B through your headphones, and perform what is known as "beatmatching".
There are a few ways to beatmatch, but we'll cover the most common one: the one ear method. Your objective is to match the two songs so the bass beat of one is indistinguishable from the other, creating a seamless transition between the two songs. As the song is playing from Deck A on the speakers the DJ "cues" the song from deck B into the headphones. From there one ear is used to listen to song A while the DJ holds a headphone with song B in the other ear. From here they adjusts the speed of the song in deck B to match song A exactly.
Once the song is beatmatched the crossfader is moved over on the mixer and a basic mix has been performed.
