Question about production vs. DJing ?

Wanted to ask a question for anybody who likes to produce their own music and also has experience DJing. I like to make music in Ableton as a hobby, but I do not have any midi controllers for using Ableton with, and I often struggle to handle transitions between sections that I make in session view. I have had some success doing this, but it is cumbersome and also not very fun or intuitive to set up transitions in arrangement view and then do trial-and-error with editing audio files.

Now for the DJing part. My main friend group consists of a bunch of buddies I met in college who are part of a DJ crew, and one of them offered to teach me how to DJ. I was thinking of taking him up on this and buying twin decks with a mixer (digital DJing), and my ultimate goal would be to learn how to use the controller so I can then import my own stems into there and be able to intuitively do transitions and mixing on there when making songs. I would probably get one of the Pioneer controllers for this. Wanted to ask if anyone does anything like this and if you would recommend it, pros and cons, things to be aware of before pulling the trigger, etc. ?

I tried this with stems I created some time ago. It really worked well and the songs turn out quite different. It doesn’t sound as polished as if everything is created in the daw but you really get a different feeling what works, what part is boring and how to put fits together.

I think aphex uses this as well - you can also mix against other tracks to get a feeling of the energy and your stems in a real environment so to say

I always just made music too, using reason/samplers etc. I'd tried DJing vinyl in my teens but found it less fun and unintuitive but 20 years later I got rekordbox and it's much more fun and easy.

Set it up with 4 decks, upload all your stems on there and i find it's a lot more straightforward to mix than trying to use a daw

Me I'm a producer first and DJ second. I've probably DJ'd about 30 times over the years in clubs/venues and DJ'd on radio on Sub FM about 10 years ago for a few years too. I love DJing but don't give it enough time.

I like making fart noises with my mouth, and record into the computah

  On 1/10/2024 at 11:18 PM, oscillik said:

I like making fart noises with my mouth, and record into the computah

Sample upload or it didn’t happen