Complete Guide To DJing With Radio Edits

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If you’re a wedding, mobile, party or hobby DJ wanting to figure out how to DJ with radio edits – nothing more than the commercially available versions of songs – read on! In this article I’ll outline the exact way to do it, based on how we teach it to our students here at Digital DJ Tips.

Radio edits – versions of songs that you hear on the radio, in Spotify playlists, and so on – are the easiest to get hold of, and the ones everyone wants to hear. So why do so many DJs jump through hoops to avoid DJing with them?

Whether it’s joining expensive professional download pools (once you’re getting gigs and can justify the expense), or meticulously making your own edits with intro and outro beats to make them easier to mix, you may fid yourself tempted to spend a lot of time and effort getting versions of today’s pop hits that are easier to beatmix with, for your DJ sets.

But what if I told you that you could mix easily with just the radio versions? No searching for special edits, no expensive DJ pools, no hours preparing your own mixable versions? Just grab the latest hits, and mix! It’s a much more purist way of doing things (“I’ll work with what I’ve got”), is a lot more fun… and the incredible power of today’s DJ systems mean it is actually easy to do.

So if you’re a wedding or mobile DJ, a party or hobby DJ, or just a lover of the craft wanting to figure out how modern DJ systems can help you to mix better with nothing more than the radio versions of songs, read on! In this article I’ll outline the exact way to do it, based on how we teach it to our students here at Digital DJ Tips.

Contents

1. Prepare your music
2. Learn the skills
3. Make the right decisions when performing
4. Taking this further

How To DJ With Radio Edits

Firstly, if you want to see some examples of the kind of DJing we are talking about here, I’ve got a place where you can go to find them. We recently released a DJ course called Mixing For Mobile & Wedding DJs, which is all about mixing with radio edits. Click here to go to the course info page, and watch the five-minute video there – it has many examples of us performing this type of mix in it.

1. Prepare your music

There are five things you need to do to every radio edit you want to use in your DJ gigs:

Check your beatgrids

Beatgrids are the beat and bar lines your DJ software lays over the top of all your songs when you analyse them upon adding them to your library. Beatgrids show the software where the beats and bars of the music are, so that when you press sync, loop the song, or use a rhythm-derived effect (echo, delay), it all sounds tight.

Having the beatgrids correct on your songs is the first step towards this type of DJing, because you are going to be unashamedly using sync, quantize and the other powerful features of your DJ set-up to mix like this.

Read this next: The Easy Way To Beatgrid Acapellas

4. Analyse for key

Mixing in key (“harmonic mixing”) is a revolution in DJing, and makes all DJing – especially DJing with radio edits – sound much better for your audience and ultimately more fun for you. Mixing like this makes it sound like the musicians who made the records you’re playing were all in the room together, making sure their instruments sounded great when played at once – it’s amazing.

To mix well with radio edits, you need to have a basic understanding of how to mix in key, and also of how shifting the key of songs to match them to each other can help you to mix “anything into anything” – we call this fuzzy keymixing, and it is really the “second” revolution in keymixing for DJs, after key analysis itself.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that for creative DJs, the combination of key analysis and fuzzy keymixing has changed everything – and it is easy for all DJs to grasp, no musical knowledge necessary. Just bring a pair of ears!

Read this next: The Ultimate Guide To Keymixing For DJs

5. Build minisets

A “miniset” is a small playlist of tunes you tend to play together. If you play one tune, then you often play this one next, then another, in a little “cluster” in your DJing – that’s a miniset. For this kind of high octane,”quick” radio edits mixing, you need to pre-plan and formalise this.

You do this by setting up “minisets” in your DJ software or system, where you group together small clusters of tunes that you often play together. Once you’re “in” a miniset, chances are you’ll play at least some of those tunes next, before moving away from the miniset.

You won’t necessarily play them all, or play them in the same order every time, but DJing this way means that as you progress through a DJ set, you play from “miniset to miniset”, not “song to song”. This is a far less stressful and achievable way of DJing, and it will give your audiences the impression that the tracks are “flying out of the crates” effortlessly as you play banger after banger – a great state of affairs!

Before we move on, if all of this sounds intimidating, don’t feel you have to go and do all of the above to all your music immediately – just start with the songs you want to play at your next gig, for your next mix, or on your next livestream, then add a few at a time plus all the new music you buy from now on.

2. Learn the skills

You know when you’re watching a TV chef, and they have all the right kitchen equipment, and they’re about to start a recipe with not only the cooking gear but all the ingredients artfully arranged around them, ready to effortlessly make the recipe in front of your eyes?

Just by owning any modern DJ controller or system, and preparing your music as described above, you’ve got yourself to the DJ version of that point. Now it’s time to “cook up the magic” – and so what follows is a summary of the skills and techniques of mixing with radio edits of songs:

1. Basic counting – beats and bars

All your tracks have a beat (duh, it’s dance music – tap your foot to any song – that’s the beat), and those beats are arranged in sets of four – those sets are called “bars”. And things tend to come and go in songs every four bars (vocals, basslines, verses, choruses etc). These sets of four bars (or multiples of four – usually eight or sixteen) we call song “sections”.

That’s it – that’s basic counting. Once you can spot these sets of four (four beats, four bars) in songs, and arrange them in your head into rough “sections” (intro, verse, chorus, breakdown, drop – the names aren’t important), you already know the right places to mix in and out. Bottom line: If you can count to four, you can do this!

Don’t let anyone tell you you need to be somehow “musical” to perform complex and impressive DJ mixes – this is the simple trick that underpins it all. What’s more, it’s instinctive. Everyone on your dancefloor knows where the drop is, right? They’re counting and they don’t even know it. So are you.

4. Using “cue play” to start your tracks playing

You know those hotcues you added to your songs back in prep? That one you put on the first beat at one of the places you may typically want to mix in your song from? Locate one of those hotcues. Now, count a beat in your head. (“1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4…”). Now on a set of “1, 2, 3, 4″s, press that cue button each time. On the fifth time, instead of pressing the cue button, press the “play” button. That’s a basic “cue play start”.

It adds drama to the start of a song, and you can do it “cold” or over the outgoing song. Either way, it’s a simple, fun way to quick mix when you’re using radio edits that don’t have easy beats for proper beatmixing. Use it with Quantize, and your system will even correct all the timing for you if you happen to be a bit sloppy. Easy!

5. Using effects for added polish

Your DJ system has powerful, professional-sounding effects built in. Many DJs don’t use these often enough – probably because they’ve heard lesser DJs totally overusing them and ruining DJ sets! But three effects in particular, when used sparingly, will always enhance a quick-mixed radio edits DJ set. They are:

1. Reverb – Hit reverb on a track when you want to mix into something else, then stop that track. You’ll get a gorgeous, “big room” sound that has a long “tail” (the audio continues for a few seconds after the track stops playing), which gives you the perfect breathing space to wait 1, 2, or 4 beats, then start the next song playing. It sounds clean, intentional and musical
2. Echo – Same deal, but this time, there is an actual echo that carries on after the track has stopped. Usually you’ll set this to a single beat in length, so the echo carries on the last beat of the previous track, but DJs also often use a half beat setting. Either way, it keeps the beat going but tells the audience the song has finished, making it sound completely natural when you start the next song playing on its first beat, just as the final echoes of the previous song fades out
3. Filter – Your DJ gear (usually) has a knob (under the EQs for each channel above the channel volume fader) that is called the “filter”. Turn it to the left, the track immediately sounds like you’re hearing it through the walls from the next room, Turn it to the right, all the power goes out of the track, with just the hi-hats and cymbals left. Both have the effect of minimising the impact of the record, which means as soon as you start another song that doesn’t have a filter applied to it playing, the audience’s attention switches naturally to that one. It’s a great “one knob” trick to use when quickly beatmixing between two songs

So – the trick as a radio edit DJ is to mix and match the techniques above, always based on accurate counting, to keep your DJing varied, simple and functional.

Preparing it on the deck

So you’ve picked a next song, and loaded it up. There are two big considerations the creative DJ will look at here:

1. What’s the BPM? – If it is faster or slower than the current song by some margin, you can’t beatmix it – and so you need to use one of the many techniques that don’t require beatmixing, or execute an obvious, synced, BPM shift. But if it is a close BPM, you can use a beatmix to transition. This is the first, fundamental decision
2. Will I use keymixing? – You ALWAYS choose the song first, then decide how to mix or whether to match keys second. But if it is in the same key, or a compatible key, or you can key shift it (see fuzzy keymixing) to work, then you have the ability to do something more creative. In our course, Mixing For Mobile & Wedding DJs, we have dozens of examples of how this is done, all explained and taught, to help this important concept become a habit

Finally…

This article has revealed how the very best modern DJs who play events such as parties, weddings, corporate gigs and so on, expertly mix radio versions of songs, in a way that gets them noticed, and gets them repeat bookings.

It is not enough to play records end-to-end nowadays, fading between them – today’s audiences were brought up with EDM and superstar DJs, and they know what good DJing sounds like. Your job as a mainstream DJ in the 2020s is to apply that showmanship, flair and technicality to the simple, radio versions of the biggest tracks ever made.

I hope this has helped you to understand how it’s done, and inspired you to level up your game. However there is only so much that words can do to explain music and musical technique..

That’s why we made Mixing For Mobile & Wedding DJs. As the world’s leading DJ school, we have trained thousands of DJs on these skills, and this hugely popular course – aimed at beginners and at DJs who know how to do the job but who haven’t yet mastered the mixing side of it – shows you how it’s done.

In short: If you want to learn this, Mixing For Mobile & Wedding DJs is a phenomenal investment in your DJing.

Click here to learn more about the course.

Now get good, get out there, and make the moments!