The key to DJ mixing is finding the right balance between the cued record and the live record. If you’re using your headphones fully on, you might want to have the cue balance set so that the live record is playing quite faintly in the background, and have your cued record loud when you’re finding the beat.



On the other hand, some people prefer to have the two tracks at the same level. You can even have the live record louder than the cued record if you really want to – again, there’s no right or wrong way to do this, just find the solution that works best for your ears. You can change the balance between the two records at any time, if you want to check the sync more closely.



It can be quite difficult to tell if your cued record needs to be faster or slower to match the live track, even at the best of times – if you’re listening to the cued record with one ear on the headphones and the live track blasting out all around you, it gets even harder again. However, the more you practise, the less you’ll be guessing – you’ll learn (hopefully) to identify which track is running faster and get them matched with fewer errors as time goes by.



As I mentioned previously on the online DJ tips site, it’s often much harder to pick out which disc is slow when the tempo difference is small. Large tempo mismatches will send one record galloping off much faster than the other, so this should be quite easy to spot and rectify.



When the two records are almost (but not quite) in sync, you may hear some minor phasing artefacts. This is difficult to describe, but happens when two identical (or near identical) sounds, such as a typical house music bass/kick drum, are played slightly out-of-time with one another. This creates an interference wobble in the waveform, which will differ depending upon which kick is coming first and how much delay is between the kicks. After an extensive amount of listening experience you should be able to detect the sonic differences between a cued record that’s too slow and one that’s too fast.



Again, this is one of the most difficult skills of Djing, and there’s no magic formula to getting it right – what you need to do is keep mixing as many discs as possible, change the tempo of one record so that it’s running slightly too fast and listen to what that sounds like. Then change the tempo again so it’s running slightly too slow and listen to that. Keep doing this until you can tell the difference between how the two cases sound. You should then be able to apply this knowledge to pretty much any two records that you might want to mix, and your mixing abilities can develop from there.



If you are still playing two copies of the same track, then setting them slightly out of time will cause a very distinct phasing effect – this is sometimes deliberately used as a more advanced DJ effect, but it also is a good way of illustrating the concept of ‘waveform wobble’ or phasing itself.