It can be very hard to capture what a club or dance DJ does in a two minute video, so I wanted to showcase the subtleness and creative power of Serato DJ in a less obvious but just as powerful a way.
I wanted to show off the following:
- Allen & Heath DB4 integration with Serato DJ
- Allen & Heath K1 native support
- Club Kit
- Serato DJ looping and FX control.
There’s a lot of tweaking going on here. Lots of EQing, filtering, delays, reverbs, and looping as I rearrange, re-edit and re-imagine four tracks.
The first track was a modulating hookline I played until a saved loop started repeating the synths. I applied an Auto Filter and Tape Delay to this and manipulated the frequency of the track up and down while adjusting the delay depth. I slowly filtered this down and sat it back in the mix for a while.
At the same time I played another track with more beats. I had this track running through the Allen & Heath Xone:DB4 channel effect with delay on. These effects were developed from the Allen & Heath touring range of mixers and the sonic characteristics are really lush. I allowed the track to slowly come in and dropped the bass after I built up some of the delay feedback. This track I kept running throughout the video, and at some point I used the Beatjump feature to move seamlessly through the track to hit the melodic synths near the end of the mix.
While I am happy to use Sync when I have it available, I really felt that I wanted to show off how natural Serato DJ is to use with CDJs. The control through the Club Kit is tight and I live mixed the two CDJ tracks into the mix.
I took a loop partway through the first track to add some top end energy, and kept this filtered nicely using the silky sounding Allen & Heath EQs. These are a pleasure for long mixes, and allow for layering multiple tracks together snugly.
With the final track, I was just taking some chords and filtering these into the mix, saturating this with some Serato DJ reverb and more delay from the mixer.
As the video winds up I ended by bringing the feedback on all channel delays up quite high, and washed out the mix as I faded each channel down allowing the tape loops to circulate into a echo washout!