3 Deck tips

I've been using three decks for a while now and am at a reasonable standard. Thing is I can't get all my mixes as tight as I'd like coz I tend to make a few small slips now and again. These usually happen when I'm mixing two records together and attempting to cue up the third.

Just wondering if any of you guys have found any techniques that have helped you for moniting the mix while cueing the third. I tend to just listen to to the third and swap back to one of the tracks mixing at regular intervals.

Any tips for mixing on 3 deck would be appreciated.

Cheers T.

PM Wragg. He plays on 3 decks some times. He might be able to give you some tips mate.

Tis all about perfect beat matching. With 2 decks, you only have 2 choices, speed up, or slow down. If you do one, and the beats slip out worse, then all you do is the oposite to sort it. Adding just one more deck into the situation throws this all out of the window. Make sure that your beats are perfectly matched, and then dont touch em. Ive managed to mix 6 decks, (well, 4 turntables, 1 pc, and 1 cd), with 2 mixers before, and to be honest, the hardest part is keeping track of which track is on which channel on the mixer. Other ways you can sort sloppy beats out is by nifty little tricks.

Say you have 3 tracks mixing, and some beats are slipping, but your not sure which track it is. If you kill the bass on a track, and the beats stop slipping, then its that track which is out. You can use this to your advantage by droping the bass out on the last 2 beats of a bar, and the bringing it back in,(if your quick enough then you will of sorted the slipping beats).

Another thing - Never touch the pitch on the first track which was playing. By doing this, you are only concentrating on mixing 2 decks over the top, and not trying to match all 3 together.

Hope this helps..

Cheers for the help guys. :lol: have taken what you said on board.

Had a go on two earlier to try and check my cueing, think that part of my problem is that I cue it fine the first time then when i'm in the mix and it goes out slightly I adjust the pitch to compensate too much and it starts going out the other way, its a downward spiral from there. Just got to restrain my self from doing that.

T

Well that comeswith basic mixing skills of being able to beat match perfectly, id advise doing that before trying to throw another deck in

That is a fair point. But i have been mixing for a long time now and would not have introduce another deck if i thought I wasn't at the standard to do so.

I think i was a bit unclear in my former posts about what I was talking about. When mixing on three decks sometimes when cueing up the third record you have a very short period to do it. This means that your first estimate has to be as close as possible. I think that even the best DJ's in the world would not be able to cue up a record in about 10 seconds and never adjust it again, especially when they have to monitoring what is mixing already.

I was meaning that after a brief listen I managed to cue up the record much better than I thought, so only really small adjustments were needed, which i was over doing.

Still mixing on three deck is difficult and I am interested in how people go about it, mono split headphones cueing, listening with one ear to what is already mixing and cueing with the other, etc.

T
[/quote]

My two cents;

- don't rush (even if he's your favourite DJ)

- think before you act, 'cos sometimes you can **** up an otherwise good mix by rushing to push the platter when you should be slowing it down or the other way around; it still sounds way better if your beats are slowly drifting apart than if you jerk your record the wrong way... Also think before you adjust the pitch, because you might end up doing more harm than good...

- try listening to the two records playing as though they were one record, 'cos if it sounds as a single track, you're doing a good job, but remember which record has the hi-hat and which has the kick drum (for instance) - that way you should always know which record's speed to adjust...

good call ;)

i'm playing from 6 years on the bulgarian techno stage .. i started with CD (for two years maybe less) and now i'm playing on 3 decks (not perfect, but ok :) so my advice ..

learn your ears to hear two songs at the same time .. the third track will come native from your heart

just a friend advice at all :lol:

so keep turntables movin'