The Making of "SmakMyBadger": Creating a harmonic multi-genre DJ mix in Traktor Pro 2

This blog post details the preparation behind my weekly DJ mix on www.insanityradio.com where I enjoy showcasing the recent new releases of various Electronic Music genres.

I've now played 67 two hour sets on the radio and here's a look at what goes on behind the scenes.

This is how things look when I've created a new playlist and added the newly downloaded tracks to it:

I analyse all the tracks with the following settings, this tends to do a fairly good job in general but I never trust it 100%, I will manually check all tracks later.

This is how the playlist looks after analysis, I'm mostly interested in the Key of each track at this point because it is very important to mix in key.  Here is the playlist ordered by Key after Analysis:

I have a separate playlist where I have a track of each key in so that I can remember the conversions, I use the Comment2 field in Traktor to keep note of the Camelot Notation:

Here is the playlist with the Camelot notation filled in:

Next up I order by genre then try to arrange the tracks so that they will be harmonic:

On each track, I check that the beatgrid is correct and that the gain is set correctly.  I turn off Auto Gain for this and adjust the gain while listening to the chorus (this tends to be the loudest part of the track) until the volume meter is just out of the orange zone.

I add a maker for where I want to mix into a track (2) and then a Load Marker (7) 16 bars before this. I also add a marker where I want to mix out of a track (4) and a Fade Out marker (5) 16 bars before this.  Each track also gets a 32 bar loop (3) that I can play with during the live mix:

Once all tracks are set like this, I can preview the mix using Traktor's Auto Cruise feature, you need to activate SYNC for this which I don't use when mixing live as I find manually beat-matching is more accurate and dependable.

While previewing I can listen out for any potential issues in the mix with grids, gain or Traktor's Key Detection being incorrect.  I prefer to manually check each transition if I have time, but this way I can get on with something else while checking the mix and enjoying the new tracks.

Auto Cruise will not change the BPM for you, but you can adjust it manually during Auto Cruise. One of the fun parts of the show is manually transitioning these jumps in BPM.

Auto Cruise is also really useful if you have to leave the decks for any amount of time, emergency bio breaks for instance, you can enable SYNC and Auto Cruise and then head to the bathroom, just remember to deactivate any loops first.

Here is an example of the result of this preparation from a previous weeks show.

I hope you found this useful! If you want to see how this sounds live, tune into www.insanityradio.com each Saturday 8-10 BST.