Day 364 – Tried to DJ

I’ve tried my hand at a few musical new things over the year from learning to play the otamatone and kalimba, to trying to recreate a song using my own beatbox sounds. One thing I’ve always fancied trying my hand at though is DJing, and I figured with New Year’s Eve right around the corner now would be a good time to discover if I have a hidden talent for it or not.

One of my favourite albums to run to is one called Feed the Animals by Girl Talk and is basically a mash-up of hip-hop and pop. I love the energy of it, and how the music seamlessly mixes in and out of each other and is something that definitely inspired me during today’s challenge. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get anywhere near. I don’t have access to any of the proper DJ equipment, so I tried to play around with some free software on YOU.DJ.

The website mainly sources songs from Soundcloud, which means you don’t have access to all of your favourites, but there is still a really good selection. Once you’ve picked two songs, the software will match the beats per minute so that you can, in theory, mix from one to another whilst remaining on beat.

I played with a few different songs, but had the best fun trying to mix Hypnotize by The Notorious B.I.G into Let’s Go Crazy by Prince – I actually had some success getting the iconic openings to mix into each other but I could not figure out how to record it for the life of me. So you’ll just have to trust me, it really didn’t sound that bad!

This was really fun to play around with but difficult to get anything that sounded good. The co-ordination and dexterity you need to keep everything on beat and sounding like it should is amazing, it’s definitely deep-end my appreciation for any DJs out there.