How to Choose a CD Player for DJing

Series Summary

DJs, or disc jockeys, play prerecorded music for an audience at a party, club or on the radio. There are different types of DJs including turntable DJs and radio DJs. Turntable specialists use actual records or discs, while radio DJs use music files, CDs or jingles. Turntable disc jockeys use different techniques to often manipulate the sound of the record including mixing, phrasing, cutting, scratching and beat-matching. Radio DJs are known for their personalities and often host radio programs that feature the music they play on the radio. The first DJ to play music on the radio was Reginald Fessenden who played Christmas music over the radio from Brant Rock, Massachusetts.

Are you an aspiring disc jockey? Do you need tips on mixing and turntables? Watch these informative videos and learn how to DJ from an expert! Learn how to set up your DJ equipment such as headphones, monitoring speakers, amplifiers and cables. Get tips on fading music by using an equalizer or EQ. Watch as our expert DJ uses samples to spice up the music. Learn how to make a loop and use other mixer effects. Get tips on turntables too in this helpful video series!

Video Transcript

"Hi I’m DJ Brady on behalf of ExpertVillage.com, and today we’re going to go through the equipment needed to get started as a successful DJ. We’re going to start off with the CD players, today we’ll be using the Denon 620F, and it’s a 19 inch dual deck rack mountable CD player. This is the control deck, the CD decks are down lower, the functions you have are cue, which will be used for stopping and pausing and also returning back to the cue point functions. The play button as which you can see when I hit play, start playing the CD and when I hit cue, it goes back to the cue point, adjustable cue meaning that I can adjust my cue point, set a new cue point and play from there and when I hit cue it will go right back to that point as well. On the CD player, we have the pitch adjust, which is a function carried over from the turntables, pitch down, pitch up and what this does is it adjust the speed of the music that you’re playing so you can beat mix from one song to another. After the pitch adjust, you can use the pitch bend functions which will speed up and slow down the music in small increments as you’re playing it, so if you’re playing the music, you can speed it up or slow down to catch up with the song you maybe cueing in with. This CD player also has hot starts so you can set a hot start and then come right back in from that spot, it’s got 2 of them. It’s also got an AB loop and then an exit button for the loop. This CD player also has on board effects. Filter, turn that on and you can adjust your filter from low pass to high pass. It’s also got a reverb function and a flanger function, not all CD players come with this, some CD players will come with more effects than that. Also on the CD player you have your single or continuous function, most of you guys will do single because you don’t want it going on to the next song as the first one ends. You can go through your time functions and see your total elapsed 2 seconds and 58 frames into it and reset it back to original 2 seconds and 2 frames, total remaining on the entire disc, total elapsed and back to remaining. Most DJs like to use the count down, the total remaining, that way they know how much time is left before they go on to the next song. On the Denon, it’s go a knob for going to the next track and then it’s got the eject button up here and I’ll press eject and it will eject the corresponding tray down below. Take your CD, plug another one in and close it back up. "