| I’m going to take
you through the basics of
CD mixing. But first…
when I made the transition from being a vinyl
DJ to a CD
DJ a few years back, I found
the main obstacle was how to organise my music. I’d
had a set system within my record box, but now that was
out of the window. My biggest problem was recognising
the tracks I wanted to find. I’m useless at remembering
record titles or artist names, and I’d recognise
many tracks simply by their covers. But now I found I
suddenly had loads of CD-Rs with black marker pen scribbled
on them… they all look
the same!
With my
vinyl, I used to separate my tracks into little sections,
from warm-up music through to the harder stuff. I find
it’s best to do the same with my CDs. The trouble
was, many labels would send me all their tracks on one
CD, so there would be a mixture of all styles of music
on one CD. This confused me, as I didn’t know
where to place that CD in my CD wallet, and I kept forgetting
to play certain tracks because the CD was in the wrong
section!
So now I burn those tracks onto single
CDs and place them in the correct section in my wallet.
This is just a Abhishake tip to feel more organised.
I also use one of those big CD wallets that shows you
a page of 12 CDs at a time. I now recognise tracks by
certain markings on them, and you could even put little
stickers on them if it helps.
Cueing up
Okay, so let’s get on with it – time to
start learning to mix from CD. Thing is though, you’ve
never touched a CD deck in your life – how on
earth do you use the thing? Today’s CD players
can look pretty daunting because they have so many different
features, so for now, let’s just concentrate on
cueing and playing a track. Newer machines now have
an emulated vinyl mode, which I’ll come to in
a minute – these are very easy to work –
but first let’s go through the ‘traditional’
cueing process of a regular CD deck.
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