Beats Per Minute are your friend!

Okay, raise your hand if you use beats per minute (BPM) to find your next song. Oh really? Most of you are like, "what's BPM?" Some of you are like, "isn't that cheating?" And a few of you are saying, "I don't use them cause they are too confining."

BPMs are the amount of downbeats in a minute of a song. Slow songs are 40 to 70 bpm. Hip-Hop and R&B are from 65 to 130 bpm. Dance/House/Electronica… from 115 to 150 bpm. The best thing is Scratch Live can automatically calculate the BPM of almost every song that has a drumbeat. No more counting out each song by hand. No more finding a BPM counter to help find the BPMs quicker. No more running your MP3s through another program to get the BPMs.

The function is called Set Auto BPM. It is found next to the Build Overviews button. Make sure you click the check box next to Set Auto BPM. There is also a drop menu called Range next to it. Unless all you play are songs with the ranges listed in the drop menu, I suggest keeping it at none. If you want to get the BPMs of a lot of songs at the same time, do not plug in your Serato box or TT-57SL to your computer. Highlight your files you want to get the BPMs for (you can only highlight songs next to each other). Grab them and slide your mouse cursor over the Build Overviews button. When you see a green plus sign, let go of the mouse button. The overview will be redone for your songs, adding the BPM into the right column. Oh, and make sure you go over to the right-hand side where you can select what columns are visible, and select BPM.

The BPMs of some songs will be exactly twice as fast or twice as slow as they are supposed to be. Go to the song that has the wrong BPM. Double-click the BPM value to select it. Hold down Option (Mac) or Alt (PC) and hit the down or up arrow… down halves the figure, up doubles it. Other than that, Set Auto BPM is almost flawless.

For some reason, however, "The Money" by DJ Pharris keeps coming up as 72 BPM, and I know it's faster. Not to worry! Do this to one song in your library so you are seeing what I'm seeing: select the song, double-click on the BPM value and delete it. Then place that song in the deck. In the top right-hand corner of the deck, instead of seeing a number, you see the word Tap grayed out. Start the song, place your mouse cursor over the Tap button and tap your mouse button to the downbeats. You don't have to do it for a whole minute; only until the number that comes up stays steady, then hit Enter. You have now set the new BPM value for the song (which for "The Money" is 95 BPM).

NEXT: Why BPMs make you a better DJ.

Introduction

A lot of DJs ran out to get Serato Scratch Live as soon as they saw someone else using it. It is a phenomenal piece of software! I love it so much that I'm getting rid of my thousands of records because I simply don't need them anymore. But I've noticed most DJs are not using hardly any of the features of the program. They are looking for music the same way they looked for music when they were using CDs or records. They go into import, find their music folder (where most of their music may or may not be) and then start searching through thousands of folders to figure out what they are going to play next. Maybe they have a clue on what they want to play, but every 2 minutes for 4 hours (or more) they have to mentally go through their whole library to pick the next song.

Hell to the naw!

In this blog, I'm going to give my tips and tricks on using Scratch Live easier. I'm not a turntablist, but this program (and the Rane TT-57SL Mixer) has made me into the next coming of DJ AM, Kid Capri, Tiesto and Louie Vega combined! Any DJ can get 50% better just by using Scratch Live properly, and it pains me every time I see a DJ struggling to find a song (and taking the whole song to do it)!