More jogwheel beatmatching

Hi guys,

I certainly hope you’re enjoying this whole learning process. Let’s dig a little deeper this week and beatmatch 2 tracks at very different BPMs. We are now getting to a point where it is difficult to teach and explain things in words. It’s therefore important that you watch the video as below I will just be giving an overview of what I do in the video.

The actual process of beatmatching is the same when the BPMs are very far apart. The issue here is that once you’ve released on time, you will get out of sync straight away and won’t have time to make jogwheel adjustments to determine which way to adjust the tempo. This is where you must really listen to the music and feel the beats. The skill you need to learn is the skill of being able to hear which track is the slow one and which is the fast one without requiring any adjustments. Let’s take a look at the process involved.

• Play track 2 and leave it running.
• Make sure track 1 is a lot slower than track 2 and get the cue point set.
• Now play track 1 and try to hear the beats of both tracks together. You need to be able to hear that track 1 is slow since in a real situation you won’t know beforehand whether it is or not. One method is to tap your feet to the rhythmyx of track 2 and listen to track 1 to determine which is faster.
• Now that you’ve determined that track 1 is slow, cue it up again and increase the BPM quite a lot.
• Play track 1 and try to make jogwheel adjustments like we did in the previous tutorial. If you are able to sync up the beats with jogwheel adjustments then beatmatch like you already know how. If you are still too far away from the desired BPM then stop, make a big adjustment and start again. You want to get near enough that you can beatmatch using the skill you’ve learned already.

In the video I will be beatmatching tracks at completely different BPMs. I will also show some methods you can use to determine which track is faster than which. These are:

• Tapping of feet or nodding of head
• Changing the bass frequency
• Jogwheel bursts

Until next time….

Before continuing on, you really need to spend a lot of time on the past few tutorials until you start getting a hang of things. Keep practising and the skill will come to you in time. The next thing we’ll look at is an alternative beatmatching technique called ‘pitch riding’ which doesn’t rely on making jogwheel adjustments.