Keep your mixer covered when not in use, and remove any dirt build-up before it gets the chance to find its way into sensitive areas. Keep your mixer clean and free of dirt, and give the faders a quick lubrication every couple of months so that your mixer lasts for years.
Chapter 9
Ear-Splitting Advice about Not Splitting Your Ears:
Headphones
In This Chapter
Knowing what makes a good set of headphones
Stopping to think about headphone and amplifier volumes Protecting your ears when faced with excessive volumes
The funny thing about headphones is that they’re probably the most important part of your DJ setup because you can’t mix properly without them, but, strangely, many DJs treat them as an afterthought.
The only time I’ve ever really panicked in the DJ booth was when I couldn’t hear clearly through the cheap headphones I was using. I couldn’t hear any bass, couldn’t hear how the beats were playing together, and was effectively mixing ‘blind’ (or should that be ‘deaf’?). If you’ve followed the same cheap path that I did, when you do start to demand more from your headphones, put some thought into what you need, and don’t just get caught up in current fashion trends.
And no, your iPod headphones won’t do. . .
Choosing a Good Set of Headphones
As you advance your DJ skills, you start to become aware of all the things that are holding you back from progressing. Cheap decks and a basic mixer are nearly always the first things to be upgraded, but consider what your cur- rent headphones sound like. Can you hear a good, solid bass thump? Or are the mid-range frequencies drowning out the rest of the music? Better head- phones will improve your beatmatching a lot faster than a new mixer can.
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The following six factors can help you when deciding what to buy:
Weight/Comfort. Ideally, you’re looking for headphones that are light- weight so they don’t hurt your ears when they’ve been sat on your head for a couple of hours. That’s not to say that lightest is best, though. If the headphones are too light, they may fall off when you lean forward to look down at the mixer, or they may be so light that they don’t sit tightly over your ears, letting in a lot of external noise as a consequence.
Because you may be wearing them for four hours at a time, the ear cups need to be soft and sit comfortably on your ears. The headphone band that joins the two ear pieces needs to be comfortable when worn on your head in a normal position, but still be just as comfortable when you twist the band backward to free one of your ears to hear the monitor (speaker) in the DJ booth.
Closed-back. Closed-back headphoneslike those shown in Figure 9-1 have the outer parts of the ear cups sealed, so they don’t let as much external sound through to your ears. This enables you to clearly hear the next tune you want to play in the headphones while in the DJ booth, where you get a lot of background noise coming from the dance floor.
The best style of headphones are closed back and sit nice and tight on your ears, a bit like ear mufflers, but with speakers inside!
Figure 9-1:
Technics headphones with the closed back design to the earcups.
Wide frequency response. At school, you were probably taught your hearing ranged from 20 Hz (the deep, deep bass sounds) to 20,000 Hz (really high, hissy sounds). In reality, your hearing is probably closer to 20 Hz to 16,000Hz, although children and dogs can hear up to 20,000 Hz.
Quality DJ headphones can typically cover the frequencies from 5 Hz to 30,000 Hz so they cover the bass and sub-bass ranges all the way through to the stuff only really dogs and sound engineers can hear!
Low impedance.If you don’t know anything about impedance, it’s okay, you don’t need to, but it’s all about electrical resistance. You only need to know to try to match the impedance of your headphones as closely as pos- sible to the impedance of the mixer you use. A large mismatch can lead to distortion, unwanted noise, and sometimes a drop in the maximum volume your headphones can play at (all things you really don’t need when DJing).
Fortunately, most DJ equipment manufacturers are well aware of this issue and design their equipment within the same impedance range. This isn’t something to lose a night’s sleep about, but impedance can play a big part in the quality of the sound you hear if you hugely mismatch it.
High sound pressure level. Sound pressure levelis just a way to describe how loud your headphones (and speakers in general) can play at. You want your headphones to be able to play loud to let you cope with noisy DJ booths, but as always, please remember you don’t have to turn up your headphones too loud (see ‘Remembering that the Volume Doesn’t Have to Go Up to 11’ later in this chapter).
Have a realistic budget when upgrading your headphones. If your current pair only cost £10, you won’t benefit much by getting another pair for £30. Save up some more money and start looking to spend around £100 on a set of Sony, Sennheiser, Technics, or Pioneer headphones, which I think are the market leaders. Don’t be fooled by fashion. Few people care that you have the latest, best- looking headphones. And to be honest, no one (apart from fellow DJs) is going to care about your headphones anyway, they only care about the music!
Realising no one cares about headphones
I remember one night when Alex P did a guest spot at a club I had a residency at, and the other DJ (Dave Armstrong) and I were left wandering through the club, feeling a bit bored whilst wait- ing for him to finish (because remember, DJs don’t dance). At this time, the new Sony MDR- V700 DJ headphones had just come out, and they were the fashionable choice of the dis- cerning DJ – including the two of us.
Thinking we were being really cool and funny, we both put on our headphones, and wandered around the club, talking to people we passed, and had a bit of a laugh. I look back at the image now of two guys with matching headphones on their heads in the middle of a nightclub, with Dave trying to chat up all the girls, and I cringe.
I think that Dave pulled in the end though.
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These considerations play a major role in deciding what headphones you eventually buy, but other features are available that may yet swing your deci- sion from one pair to another.
Single-sided, coiled cords
Coiled cords are the curly ones that you sometimes see guitarists use (Brian May from Queen uses a coiled guitar lead). By coiling the cable, manufactur- ers are able to offer a lot more length to the DJ without the danger of a dan- gling, long, straight cable that can bunch up on the floor and trip you up.
Single-sided cables are attached to only one earpiece, and the cable travels from one ear-cup to the other through the headband.
Only after spending an evening in the DJ booth with a pair of headphones that don’t have single-sided cabling, do you realise why this simple design is so important. By the end of the night’s mixing, after repeatedly putting on and taking off your headphones, putting them down, picking them up, drop- ping them under the decks, and so on – you’ll have spun the cable round enough to almost strangle yourself as the two cables twist around your neck.
A single-sided cord has nothing to wrap around, and stays out of the way, keeping you breathing happily for the rest of the evening.
A single-sided, coiled cord, such as the one on the Technics RPDJ1210 head- phones that I use, is perfect for giving you a long, coiled cable, which allows you to move around in the DJ booth, and the single-sided cord means that you don’t end up garrotting yourself by the end of the night!
Swivelling earpieces
Sometimes the headband on the headphones can feel slightly uncomfortable when you pull one of the ear cups back behind your ear to listen to the live sound. Swivelling ear cups mean that you can pull the ear cup behind your ear, but the headband stays across the middle of your head.
This setup is advantageous not only because of comfort, but because it also reduces the stress on the headband. Cheap, plastic headphones (like the cheap ones I started with) can snap after being twisted backwards too many times.
User-replaceable parts
Sennheiser’s HD25 and HD25SP headphones are designed to be completely modular, with each piece user-replaceable. This design means that you need
never stress about these headphones breaking or malfunctioning. Provided you have the spare parts in your DJ bag, all you have to do is replace the broken part, and keep on mixing.
Having been in the position where someone wrenched the cable out of my headphones one evening when they stood on them (my fault for leaving them on the floor) the opportunity to instantly replace the cable would have been fantastic. (I had to mix with only one ear working for the rest of the night).
Stick it to your ears
Figure 9-2 shows an example of a ‘stick’ headphone that has only one ear-cup.
By wedging the cup between your shoulder and your ear, you can cut out more external sound, and hear the music a bit clearer through the one ear- piece. However, I still prefer traditional headphones, which let you do exactly the same thing, and still give you the choice of hearing the music in stereo – and you won’t end up with a strained neck from craning it to one side. DJs such as Fatboy Slim and David Morales have used this style of headphone with great success, and their heads don’t loll to one side, so absolutely noth- ing is wrong with this design.
Figure 9-2:
The Stanton DJ Pro 3000 STK ‘Stick’
headphones.
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Remembering that the Volume Doesn’t Have to Go Up to 11
Please forgive the Spinal Tap reference (watch This is Spinal Tapif you don’t understand the ‘Up to 11’ reference!), but the only person that knows you’re playing the headphones at full volume is you – you can’t show off to anyone, as no one else can hear. Playing your headphones at full volume harms you and your mixing more than it’ll make you look cool. You don’t need music to be loud to enjoy it, and you certainly don’t need to look forward to wearing hearing aids in your future.
As a drummer from age 10 who also used to go to loud rock concerts, a club- ber who used to go to clubs at least four times a week (and dance right next to the speaker, because it was somewhere to keep the drinks!), and a DJ from age 21 through to the current day, I’ve always surrounded myself with loud music. I pay the price for that now by having a constant ringing in my ears (something called tinnitus). Although it doesn’t affect what I hear, you don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night and just hear a ringing in your ears, believe me. Do everything you can to protect your ears. You are not invincible.
In addition to causing irreversible ear damage, if you play the music in your headphones too loud, you’ll find mixing a lot harder. Beatmatching (see Chapter 12) is easier when you find the perfect level to listen to the head- phones, while the amp is still blaring out at 130 dB.
When beatmatching,you need to listen to two tunes at the same time to work out if their bass beats are playing at the same time. The most common tech- nique (single ear monitoring) involves listening to one tune in one ear through the headphones and the other tune in the other ear from the speak- ers or monitor in the DJ booth. Playing one tune so that it plays louder than the other makes it harder to concentrate on the bass drums from both tunes.
For more information on the single ear monitoring technique, and guidance on how to check that you’ve set the levels (volumes) of both the amplifier and the headphones correctly, go to Chapter 12.
Using Earplugs
Earplugs can make a world of difference to your future hearing, and the qual- ity of your mixing. I encourage you to use earplugs when practising in the
bedroom so you’ll be used to using them when it comes to DJing in a club. I only wear one earplug during a mix, protecting the ear that listens to the music from the monitor, but I always keep another on hand to pop in my other ear when not in the mix.
Remember, the decibel level in a club can be upwards of 100 decibels (deci- bels, abbreviated as dB, are a way of calculating how loud sound is) and as a DJ who gets work four or five times a week (if you’re lucky) you’re exposed to this level more often than any clubber. So, although I recommend using one ear plug in your ear open to the monitor when you’re mixing, I strongly sug- gest that you plug the other one in when you’re not.
Even though during a mix, I don’t have an earplug in my headphone monitor- ing ear, that ear benefits from the protection given to the other ear. Because the earplug reduces the loudness of the music that enters the ear that’s open to the monitor, you can reduce the volume at which the headphones are play- ing. If you didn’t lower the volume of the headphones, it would be harder to concentrate on the music from the monitor, making it harder to beatmatch.
Even though you’re standing next to a really good quality monitor, the noise levels and acoustic sound inside a club still make hearing specific parts of a tune quite difficult. Maybe you want to hear a subtle change in the melody, or you want to hear the hi-hat cymbals as they change, or you just want to hear the bass drum beats stand out from the rest of the tune. You can sometimes have difficulty picking out these parts with the combination of sound from the dance floor and the monitor, and you may (wrongly) consider turning up the monitor in the DJ booth to try to hear the music better.
You experience this difficulty because the sound waves from the dance floor and from your monitor in the booth mix together, making it harder for you to pick out and concentrate on the parts of the song you need to. Using an earplug means that the sound waves have to travel through the foam before they get into your ear, so the music sounds a lot clearer. Wearing an earplug is like running a brush through tangled hair. It’s much easier to separate the hair if it’s been brushed (or filtered in the earplug case), and pick only the parts you’d like to concentrate on. (Just make sure that the person whose hair you’re stroking is happy with this!)
The basic foam earplugs that you get from the chemist cost about £1 for three pairs and aren’t designed specifically for listening to music. They’re designed more for getting to sleep when the person sleeping next to you is doing an impression of a sawmill. They do a very good job at cutting out high volume levels but aren’t good at retaining the quality of the music (they don’t really let through the high frequencies so they’re like sending the person with tangled hair to get it all cut off to fix the problem).
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If you think that the cheap foam earplugs still aren’t letting you hear what you need to hear in the music, you have two options – buy more expensive ear plugs off the shelf or get some professionally made for you:
Off the shelf:You can find lots of great designs for earplugs that try to maintain the quality of the sound that enters your ears. To mention only one, Hocks Noisebrakers (shown in Figure 9-3) embrace the laws of physics to bounce the sound coming into the earplug back out again, which has the effect of not letting anything over 80 dB into your ears, without sacrificing the quality of what you’re listening to. They cost about £15, so are a step up in price from the basic foam ones, but they do work well, and save your ears while still making it easier to mix.
Custom made:Custom-made ear plugs from companies such as Etymotic and Advanced Communication Solutions (ACS) are costly (around £165 for the ACS ER-15s), but they have a superior ability to maintain sound quality while reducing the volume level. An impression is made of your ear cavity in order to make an earplug that fits snugly into your ears, and your ears only (see Figure 9-4).
For more information about earplugs, check out www.earplugstore.com.
Figure 9-3:
Hocks Noise- brakers earplugs.
Figure 9-4:
ACS custom- made ER-15 earplugs
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Chapter 10
Letting Your Neighbours Know That You’re a DJ: Amplifiers
In This Chapter
Choosing the right amplification for your wallet and environment Getting to grips with connecting it all up
Keeping the sound down to save your hearing, and your neighbours’ sanity
Each stage of the DJ equipment chain is vital. Without the amplifier and speakers, you’d be the only person to hear how good a DJ you are. In this chapter, I cover the various methods of amplification, the best way to con- nect and place your speakers, and how to play at a volume that won’t get you ejected from the neighbourhood.
Choosing Suitable Amplification
Not only do you need to choose a method of amplification that’s suitable to the size of room you’re playing in, but also for the size of your wallet – which are both important factors. The key word here is suitable. If you’re just in your bedroom practising at a moderate volume, you won’t have much need of a £3,000, 1,000-watt amplifier and set of speakers, so save your money!
The different ways you can amplify the signal from the mixer so you can hear it through speakers are via:
Your home stereo.For the bedroom DJ who has a good-sounding stereo with a spare input to plug the mixer into. This is the method I use in my practice room.
Powered speakers (each speaker has a built-in amplifier).If you don’t have a home stereo, or the one you have doesn’t have a spare input,
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