Recently I had the chance to
tour with Delerium and play theaters and ballrooms across the U.S. and
Canada rather than the usual DJ booths in clubs. It was a refreshing
change, but also an important reminder that you need to keep your live
shows fresh and interesting to crowds who want to see a compelling
performance.
Simply spinning on a pair of CDJs isn’t really the most exciting thing
to watch, so I wanted to share some tips and techniques on how to spice
up your rig.

My
DJ setup consists of an Allen & Heath Xone 3D mixer and Ableton
Live 7 software.  The beauty of the software world, when paired with a
hardware controller – is that you can change your setup to suit your
tastes. You’re not married to the effects on your DJ mixer, and you can
piece together your dream mixer from scratch, making changes on the
plane or in the hotel room minutes before a gig. Everyone does it
differently, and most people immediately take off the preset overlay
and stash it with the manual. Here’s some ways I set things up for my
shows:

- Drop the faders. Cap everything at -6 or -4dB, even the effects,
and keep the master at unity to ensure good gain staging so you don’t
clip the internal mix bus. You can crank the main mix on the DJ mixer
(in my case the Xone 3D) or the house mixer – which is usually a
DJM-800. As always, try to avoid clipping at all stages of the mix.

- Choose your effects carefully. Try to think what effects are
really going to make a difference and excite the crowd.  My bread and
butter effects are beat repeat, delays, filters, and reverb. These help
to build anticipation and tension throughout the set. Experiment with
combining different chains of effects – this is where software really
triumphs over hardware mixers.

– Multi-Assign. One of the biggest advantage of hardware MIDI
assignable controllers are the creative possibilities of twisting two
or more controllers simultaneously, liberating you from the constraints
of a single mouse click. Additionally, you can create massive control
chains in Ableton Live by assigning several values to one knob. I use
the various knobs on the Xone 3D to control different values of beat
repeat, changing the note divisions and timbre of the sound. It sounds
simple, but this really brings a performance aspect to your DJ’ing and
turns your controller into more of an instrument than a simple mixer.

More importantly, you liberate yourself from staring at the computer
screen and can focus your eye contact and energy on the DJ mixer and
the crowd in front of you.

-
Tactile vs. smooth touch. I really like having tactile response when I
press a button, but many Ableton Live users prefer controllers like the
Lemur that have a more visual display, but instead provide a smooth
flat surface. Find which one you like and run with it. The best setup
is probably a combination of both worlds, as one of the problems with
the Xone 3D and other controllers is that you can’t see the current
values and active assigned controllers without shuffling around on the
computer screen.