Many people who are aspiring DJs are making the difficult decision of whether to use vinyl records on a turntable or to DJ with CDs on a CDJ-type CD players. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. Most good clubs that you might DJ at have the ability to play both CDs and vinyl and you can bring whichever you prefer.

Playing vinyl is considered the most authentic approach to DJing. The art of DJing was born on turntables and most old school DJs would never consider doing anything else. The downsides are the turntables are delicate and expensive mechanical objects. Records themselves are also rather fragile and expensive to buy.

DJing with CDs is probably the most common approach these days. They are most commonly played with CDJ decks made by Pioneer or similar products sold by competing companies. These are special CD players that are designed to emulate the ability of a turntable to adjust the speed of a track and to move within a track as easily as possible in order to queue up your songs and match the beat of two overlapping songs.

One of the main benefits of playing off of CDs is the ability to download music from the Internet. This gives you easy access to a much broader selection of music than you would be able to easily get on vinyl, even if you live in a large city with a lot of record stores. Most CD DJs burn their own CDs with all of their favorite tracks. If a CD gets scratched, broken or lost, they can simply burn a new copy very quickly and cheaply.

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I often get asked “where do you get your music from?” while I’m DJing, and in this article I’ll tell you! Be it the next big indie track, a fresh and banging Electro House tune or just something nice, I’ll show you where to keep in the loop for the new and happening music.

Let’s get started!

BBC Radio 1 playlist. At BBC Radio 1 they keep a playlist of what’s hot at the moment. They split this list up into sections with their “A list” being the most popular songs at the given point in time. The “B list” and “C list” are songs becoming more popular and it’s very common for these to move up to the “A list” as weeks progress. Simply search for “Radio1 playlist”.

Online music stores. Dance music stores such as Beatport, DJDownload, TrackItDown, Traxsource, CDPool etc keep regularly update charts of what is the most purchased on the site and most purchased in a particular genre. This can be a great way to listen and easily buy new and upcoming music. Keep these sites close as they”ll keep your music fresh! It’s worth mentioning CDPool as these release dance (and other genres) music promos every month that you can subscribe to and listen to previews online.

Dance music forums. Most often you’ll find great members on music forums letting you know about the hottest new music to hit the world. They’ll happily post links and reviews of the new tracks for your listening pleasure! Keep a list of the favourite ones you find and quickly revisit them once a week.

YouTube. Subscribe to certain labels/record companies and they’ll post their new music within days of being completed to get the buzz created! I often learn about new tracks, search YouTube for them and find they’ve been added months ago with over 100,000 views and ratings!

LastFM. This is a great community of music lovers and record producers/labels which works really well for new and upcoming music. You can listen to songs, see what’s most popular and see what’s got hype at the moment!

There you have it! I hope you’ve found this article useful and find all the new music you could ever need!

If you’d like to keep updated on new dance music please visit Track Pot.

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One of the secrets of progressive house is to use a sidechain compressor. What you do is put it on a dirty bass track or whatever else you want to create a ducking effect whenever the kick drum hits. Basically, the way this is done is to put a copy of your kick drum on a separate track, and then you run that as the signal into the sidechain compressor. Whatever track the sidechain compression is on will start pumping with the beat. You hear this kind of sound a lot in progressive house tracks. I personally love the effect, and use it a lot. The reason I like it so much is because of the fact that if you put it on a phat bassline, it will duck whenever the kick drum hits, which let’s more low end bass from the kick come through.

Here is a video tutorial I made showing exactly how to use a sidechain compressor to create progressive/electro house in Ableton Live: