The REAL Way to Set Master Levels on Your Pioneer Mixer

[@EricBishard]

One more thing for DJs to be aware of, and I think is a great reason to always keep you levels in the green. When you are mixing two tracks at once in a DJ mix and recording, if you record just at 0db or in the yellow each track will sound great and have no flattening of the wav UNTIL the transistions where there are two channels playing at the same time. If you record like he did into something like Audacity you will see that each track when being plated by itself looks great, but during those transitions will have that clipping or flattening. So what I do is not even record at yellow but only in the greens. This gives me a good dynamic range across the entire mix and I can potentially make it louder in post very easily. As a producer who would send tracks to a mastering house, they prefer this as well as they can work with a track that has lower levels but one with clipping they really cant work with. I once asked them to help me with a DJ mix and same advice was given. Record in the green bruh.

[@DJActionVasquez]

Yup, this is a good demonstration of how each piece of equipment has different output levels. This is one of the reasons I love long channel lights, like the controller in this video. It's more accurate like that. I have a Denon dnx1600 and it has long channel lights and I use Traktor which allows me to set track levels within .1 db accuracy. So this is a great 1/2 combo. But yeah a lot of dj's don't get into the engineering aspect of audio and many have horrible sounding systems. Two worst problems -- gain staging and no / bad eq'ing. Dj's need to learn exactly how each piece of their equipment behaves (as you demonstrated) so they can get the best sound out of their systems.

[@danielb6737]

This is great information hard to find elsewhere. Thank you for the video!

[@tonycammie1269]

Grate video for noobs to learn from. I have a ddj 1000.... I use vdj... Im a bit confused over this level setting... I was on a roland 202... But with the ddj it's totally different and the sound levels of different tracks are very noticeable.... I have it set on - 3 dB with auto gain on no higher ... But it's just don't work sometimes one track comes in way too low.... I try my best with headphones to manually set with my ears but dose not help me not having a decent set of headphones.

Doesn't the XDJ have something like 6dB headroom, meaning, that the VU meter shows +6dB? So 6dB on the meter would actually be 0dB, believe it's configurable for some. That would explain the difference.

[@DJFeelsGoodman]

I don't remember the actual spec from Pioneer, but from what I experience on the recording, it seems like you're right about the +6dB = 0dB

[@tonycammie1269]

On the ddj 1000 there is a matter out dB setting.

[@TheGund518]

THIS IS AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[@DJFeelsGoodman]

Hope it was useful for ya

[@EricBishard]

What he talks about here at one pint is leaving room for effects. This is similar to a DJ transition. Leave room for that, when two tracks are being played at once, you will notice the levels shoot up. As a DJ you should be aware of this. Two tracks at once is always louder than one track at a time. See my other comment.