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Digital DJing

Nick Meador

In my effort to understand how Girl Talk works, I started exploring the world of digital DJing. I found a program called TRAKTOR that lets up mix up to four tracks at once. It lets you access your iTunes library, or really any folder on your computer. You can call one “master” and the others “slave.” When you change the tempo of the master, the others follow automatically (within a range of about 20 BPM). If you click “key,” the pitch even stays constant as you alter the tempo. You can change the equalizer settings (high, mid-range, low), volume for each track and left-right speaker balance. There’s also an alternator switch to change between left and right “decks,” as if you had two turntables in front of you. There are a few effects like reverb and beat masher that you can turn on with a different button, and dozens more controls that I haven’t yet mastered. On the demos below, listen how the three songs come and go as I alternate volume levels and apply various effects.
                 
This is the first step (or the last step, depending on how you look at it) to doing what Gillis does in Girl Talk. If you have already isolated the elements of various songs, then you could simply use a program like this to mix them together. But if you have little experience or talent, you can still easily have a good time. You can output this to a stereo to share the joy with your friends, or you can click “record” and save your creation to listen to later. The music outputs as a WAV file that can easily be converted in iTunes to MP3 and then uploaded to your iPod or similar device. Or, as I did with these demo mixes, you can load them onto an MP3 host like imeem.com and send it to anyone around the world! Thank goodness for the Internet. Just be careful – this activity is addictive, and you can easily pass two or three hours without even noticing.

Questions? Comments? Contact Nick Meador at meadorni@msu.edu