Whether you invite your friends into the DJ booth very much depends on what kind of place you’re working at. If you take your girlfriend/boyfriend with you to a party as your DJ Assistantto make your life easier by getting drinks and taking requests, it’s probably welcomed. If you’re in a club, how- ever, and your other half sits grumpily behind you in the DJ booth, takes up space, and gets in everybody’s way, the club manager may eventually ask her or him to leave the booth.
Your friends will just want to have a laugh in the DJ booth and will probably end up ripping the needle off the record, or pressing Stop on the CD decks for a lark. If you got your friends into the club for free, make them pay their way by spending most of their time on the dance floor, having the time of their lives, keeping the night looking like a huge success.
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How Do I Remove the Beat, or Vocals?
How you go about removing the beat or vocals from a track is a tricky one.
For an entire tune, you can’t. Sometimes, you can remove enough of the fre- quencies from a sample (a small section) of music so that it sounds clean enough for you to play over something else.
A friend of mine, in a band called Pacifica, did this with a sample from Blondie’s
‘Heart of Glass’. He used that guitar riff as the hook to a tune he’d released (‘Lost in Translation’), and halfway through, he wanted to use the ‘Ooo ooo – aa aa’ vocal sample. Unfortunately, even the cleanest sounding part of Heart of Glass still has drums and a bass melody over it. Eventually, with patience and a good engineer using compressors, expanders, filters, EQs (equalisers), and a little voodoo magic, the sample was cleaned up for use in the song.
The danger with EQing out the music from a sample is that by removing the frequencies that make the drum sounds and music, you also remove the fre- quencies that make up the vocal sample. So when you cut the high frequen- cies to remove the high-hats cymbals, you also remove all the sibilance(the sssssssounds like a snake makes) from the vocal. The same applies to the bass and mid frequencies.
As a result of sharing frequencies between the vocal and the music track, it’s impossible to remove all music from an entire song, leaving only the vocal.
If you hear a vocal version of a tune, it’s an a cappella(vocals with no accom- panying music) released by the artist, or maybe someone has recorded a very good imitation of the vocals, and used that, hoping no one could tell the difference.
You can, however, remove only the vocals. This method is by no means per- fect, but it may work for you. When music is recorded, the standard procedure is that the instruments are pannedleft and right into a stereo signal, but the vocals remain centered in the middle. With computer software (in my opinion Cool Edit is really good for this process) you can remove everything that’s in the centre pan (the vocals), leaving only the stereo music information.
This doesn’t give you perfect results (you certainly won’t have a clean, CD-quality audio track that you can play on its own), but you may end up with something that you can add your own sounds to, using this stripped tune as a foundation for a new creation. Some tunes work better than others with this method, and like everything else in DJing, it takes a lot of time and practice to get right.
How Do I Choose My DJ Name?
When you come to choose your DJ name, the first thing to ask yourself is whether your real name is good enough or if you want to be DJ ‘Something’.
Pete Tong, Paul Oakenfold, Paul Van Dyk, Erik Morillo, David Morales, John Digweed – they’ve all got realnames instead of ‘DJ Tong’ or ‘J to the D’ and so on.
However, you may decide that your name isn’t powerful enough to be dis- played on a billboard (here’s hoping), or perhaps you’re looking for anonymity.
In which case you can create a full name pseudonym (such as Bob Sinclar – real name Christophe LeFriant) or come up with a DJ name, in DJ ‘Something’
format, or just one name. That’s why I came up with Recess, because I figured John Steventon wouldn’t look that good on the back of a bus.
When trying to pick a name, think of what you do, who you are, what you play, how you play, what your other interests are, what your real name is – and see how you can mutate that to a good DJ name.
Or, if you’re lazy, or looking for inspiration, check out the Web site called Quiz Meme (www.quizmeme.com)where you type your name, and it spits out a DJ name for you. I typed in John Steventon, and got DJ Flowing Cranny. I typed in Recess – and got DJ Vinyl Artist; so it must be right!
Another way to come up with a name is to mutate words. Think of ten words that you’d use to describe yourself or your music, and consider if they (or any derivations of them) would be good. For example, if you’re a deep house DJ who likes to fish you might come up with DJ Deep Lure, which could then be mutated into DJ D’Allure. Or not . . .
However, how you’re commonly known is still one of the most personal ways to create your DJ name. Nicknames are a great start, but if, like in my case, you were called something stupid like ‘butter’ at school, you may want to explore other avenues. Alexander Coe had the easiest name change in the world, and is now one of the most famous DJs on the planet – he could’ve chosen Xander, Zander, Alex Coe, or anything else as his DJ name, but instead, he chose Sasha (which is the Russian derivation of the similar Aleksandr), and that worked out very well for him!
In my case, Recess is bit of both. My initials are J.R.C.S. and I dropped the J to leave RCS, which I mutated to Recess. (JRCS reads too much like jerks . . .)
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