In this free DJ tutorial, you’ll get to know the layout and key settings of Virtual DJ with a tour of the software. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by the features and preferences available to you. The best part is that the software is free and available for download on their website at www.virtualdj.com.
For those who are audio impaired, here’s a full text transcript of the lesson:
Alright in this tutorial we are going to go over Virtual DJ, give you a quick overview of the layouts and some of the setup functions and just the overall features that this really impressive and someone underrated software for DJ’ing can do. So, as you look at the main screen, you will see the traditional two deck layout, and in the middle we have our mixer with 3-band EQ as well as volume for each side, and a cross fader. And if we look a little closer at the actual deck itself you will see that you have the turntable with the transport functions, sync functions, pitch control and there is also a section for effects, the filter sampler, the loop section and yes some hot keys up here. So moving on we see down below we have four tabs one for the browser, sampler, effects and the record function. So the browser is where you can arrange your tracks and find your tracks to load onto your decks.
So what’s cool about Virtual DJ is that it reads crates from other software including iTunes, Serato and Traktor so it’s a ready to go if you are trying to migrate from different DJ software. Right here I have a little folder with couple of demo tracks today and you can load it just by dragging it onto the track and let’s just take a listen. Up here you can jump to different parts and the track is bringing it to the beginning, adjust control is over here, pitch bend. Effects are here and you can select from a variety of effects and I will engage it by clicking on it and there are two parameter controls and which change depending on the effect that we are using and to turn it off click on it again. There’s dual high pass, low pass filter. And a feature that I really like on Virtual DJ is that you can control adjust the key independent of the tempo.
So this is really good if you’re trying to mix and key and get different tracks to lock in. There is also a keylock so if you want to change the tempo but the not the pitch you have that as well. As far as looping we have the auto-loop functions which you can also bring down to really fast speeds and there is also manual looping where you set in and out points on the fly like so. Cue points are triggered up here. And there is also a sampler and you can just few one sample to trigger as they you have a go through that you like to use all the time just leave it on top or you can go the sample tab and you can load up even more samples and just to give you an example there is a siren, that’s one sample. So the sampler can play either in a loop mode like so and you can actually adjust the size of loop with this arrows.
You can also switch the modes or just non-loop mode where it will just play one time all the way through. You have volume controls for each of your samples and another feature I like is that you can record samples on the fly of the deck that’s playing. So if I had to play this and let’s go to an empty sample spot and now you saw me just record that and we will hear. So that’s the sample I just recorded on the fly which is really nice feature. So under effects you can access the different parameters and controls for a specific effect. And you can customise it with the sound you want and you can also assign them to either deck 1 or deck 2 from this window. But you could also do it from in the actual deck itself. And under record this is where you can setup to record your mix to either burn into a CD or upload to share with the rest of the world over the internet.
So another cool feature inside a Virtual DJ is that it comes with built-in video mixing. Under the video tab here you can see two different decks to put videos on and you can link the video cross fader to the audio cross fader or you can have it run independently. You can also play videos and have music already embedded on it or you can just take the video and have it go over the songs that you are playing on the audio decks. Virtual DJ also has a DVS control so you can use time-coded vinyl or CDs if you prefer that. Going under the configuration setting you can see that it supports up to six decks. I am going to show you the four decks layout and you can see over here. So depending on how you like to DJ you can add multiple audio sources via the config setups through the settings. Now as far as formats Virtual DJ can handle a large variety of audio and video codecs from AAC, MP3, WAV, AIF to MPEG video, MOVs and Flash so the whole list is under settings.
You can see that it’s pretty impressive list so you won’t run into many issues if you have multiple formats for your media. Now when it comes to using a controller Virtual DJ supports a large number of them. You can see from this list if I scroll down there are pretty much every popular controller on the market. And I found that even if you don’t see yours in list in here it still can possibly be supported. So don’t let that stop you from trying out this software. So overall Virtual DJ is a very well thought out DJ software that gets you the ability to mix audio and video its DVS control has nice effects section, a sampler and I do like the fact that you can use multiple decks and it reads crates from other software’s. So if you are coming from Serato or Traktor the transition will not be that difficult.