There is an intro video which you should watch first, then a written version of that lesson, then a set of videos showing exactly how to do this on all major software platforms.
By the end of this, you’ll be able to successfully beatgrid disco, funk, soul, rock and any other music where your software doesn’t get it right, opening up all kinds of new possibilities in your DJing.
Get the cheat sheet: Free printable “mindmap” PDF
This is actual DJ school training from Digital DJ Tips, the world’s leading DJ school. We have courses from names like DJ Jazzy Jeff, James Hype, Laidback Luke, DJ ANGELO and more. Click here to learn more about our wide range of DJ courses, and how we can help you.
A beatgrid in DJing is a “grid” laid over the beats and bars of each track by your DJ software, to tell the software where the beats and bars occur in that track. It usually works fine automatically with modern music, especially modern electronic music, as the beats remain 100% constant – the BPM doesn’t shift at all, even by 1/100th of a beat, from start to end. You need do nothing to get the benefits of having it when DJing.
But when it comes to older music – the disco, funk, soul, rock and 80s music, for instance, of the title of this free lesson, but equally any music where the BPM may drift even a little bit, auto-beatgrid analysis by DJ software often comes unstuck. That’s when as a DJ preparing music for your DJ sets, you need to get in there and utilise “flexible”, “elastic” or “variable” beatgridding features to fix things up for those tracks.
A “flexible” or “elastic” beatgrid is a grid that shows the software where it will need to slightly “stretch” (slow down) or “contract” (speed up) sections of any given track, in order to keep that track’s tempo or BPM constant when it is played by a DJ in a set.
The reason for beatgrids at all is that software doesn’t actually “listen” to your tracks as you play them – it instead follows the grid in order to know where the individual “thud, thud, thud” main beats and bars are. This info is used when you press sync to beatmix, and also for accurate auto-looping and rhythm-based effects – echo, delay etc. Accurately beatgridded tracks enable many of the tricks of modern DJing.
Once we’ve fixed this on those hard-to-beatgrid tracks, we can mix with those tracks like any others in our collection. As long as your software can do this type of “elastic” or “flexible” beatgridding, it can magically made hard-to-beatmix tracks as easy to mix as the most uniform electronic music.
Firstly, we check whether our DJ software has got the beatgrid right by itself – often it has, and DJ software is getting better at working with tracks like this without our intervention, ie “auto applying” flexible beatgrids. Just look through the track, making sure the grid lines on the waveforms clearly line up with the beats.
If our software hasn’t got it right, we go in and edit the track manually, moving through the track and checking/altering the grid so it sits properly on the beats.
This can be a somewhat time-consuming process, and there is a knack to it, but once we’ve done this for a track, it’s done – we’ve magically made a hard-to-mix track as easy to mix as the most uniform electronic music.
All we then need to do is be sure we keep a backup of our music and our DJ software’s database, because this is where the info is stored. If we lose these, we lose the work we’ve done on our grids (and anything else we’ve altered about our tracks in our DJ software).
The same way it can lock the key as we speed the track up or slow it down, or alter the key of a track without affecting the tempo. Once the software “knows” where a track speeds up and slows down slightly, because we’ve edited its beatgrid to show it that, it applies digital processing to the track as it plays, to slow down or speed up the track to compensate for this, therefore making the track play at a 100% constant tempo.
It does this without changing the pitch of the track, so as long as the track didn’t have any really big tempo changes in the first place (ie a deliberate change of speed), then this will not be noticeable to us when we play it back, yet the track will now be easier to mix with sync, apply auto loops to, and so on.
Now you understand what beatgridding is, why flexible beatgridding is sometimes necessary, and how it works, it’s time to start doing it with your music.
Depending upon the software you use, how you do this (and even if it possible) is going to vary. What follows are lessons for five of the big platforms: Serato DJ Pro, Rekordbox (works for Rekordbox DJ and exporting to USB), Engine DJ (for Engine standalone gear), Virtual DJ, and djay Pro AI.
If you’re a Traktor user, you may wonder why your software isn’t here. As of Dec 2022, it is not possible to beatgrid like this in Traktor. They have promised it though, and as soon as it is, we’ll update this training to reflect that.
Here are a few tips to help you as you start to “tame” those hard-to-beatgrid tunes:
This is a lesson taken from Digital DJ Lab, the longest-running, biggest and best DJ training programme for hobby and semi-pro DJs just like you – DJs who want to keep up to speed with how DJing is done today. There are nearly 100 similar lessons covering all aspects of DJing in Digital DJ Lab, just like this, plus much more.
Join thousands of DJs who’ve already discovered Digital DJ Lab – come and learn more about it here. (And shush – this is just for our best and most committed members. But if you’re down here reading this, that’s you!.)