Emergency Trick For Mixing Unfamiliar Songs [Free Lesson]

Ever been playing a song in a DJ set and suddenly realised you haven’t got a clue how it ends? Maybe it’s a brand new song that you just had to play despite not having had time to properly listen to and prepare it, or maybe it’s just a song you haven’t played for a long time and you’ve forgotten a good mix-out point.

Either way, in the old days of vinyl, we just had to get on with it and hope for the best. However, with modern DJ systems, there’s a cunning little trick that will let you listen to the way the currently playing song ends (and even put a cue point at the mix-out point) – all while the track is actually live to your audience. Here’s how it’s done…

The “last-minute hotcue trick”

This plays on the fact that when you load a song that’s currently playing onto another deck and add a hotcue, it will automatically show on any other instance of that song that’s loaded, including the one that’s playing. So what we’re going to do is quickly load the track that we’re playing onto the spare deck on our DJ controller.

In this instance, I’m using instant doubles, but you don’t have to. Find the place that you want to mix out from and add a quick hotcue there.

What you’ll see is that that hotcue now appears on the currently playing track as well, meaning that we can now load the track we actually want to play next onto the other deck, get it ready at the place that we know we want to mix it in from, and as soon as we reach that new cue point on the playing track, we can trigger it knowing that it’s the right place to mix out from.

Read this next: How Pro DJs Know Where To Transition (Plus A BIG Cheat)

Et voila! We’ve got ourselves out of a little hole and performed a tighter beat mix than we had any right to, all done on a track with a “mystery” ending that we didn’t hear until a few seconds earlier.

Where to find more tricks like these

Thank you very much to Stuart Jones, one of our students who shared that with us. It’s been sitting in my inbox for months, and I thought it was about time I got it into the world!

If you’re interested in learning all the tips, tricks, and techniques of digital DJing that make it so much easier to DJ now compared to the old days of vinyl – especially if you’re returning to this game having previously DJed on vinyl or CDs, or indeed if you’re just brand new to it all – then do come and take a look at our Complete DJ Course.

It’s helped thousands of DJs just like you to get up to speed with the way DJing is done today using modern gear.