How many times have you handed your music to the DJ for your performance and, when you get on stage, it doesn’t sound quite right? When your sound isn’t consistent, your performance suffers. Here are a few things you can do to help guarantee that everything goes smoothly from the first to the last second of your performance. This is intended to be non-software specific… and only a little geeky.
Rule #1 – Stay as close to the original as possible.
It’s inevitable that your music will go through several edits on the way to you deciding that it’s ready. When editting your music, you want to start with the highest quality recording possible, and always make your edits to the original source! Remember GIGO, which simply means “Garbage In, Garbage Out”. The first thing you will usually do is import your music from CD, or you will already have the music in an mp3 format. MP3 is a compressed format, with a specified bitrate.
Bitrate primer. When converting analog to digital, there is going to be a quality loss (it’s inevitable). The bitrate determines how much information will be kept (in comparison to the original), and how much will be thrown away. Take for example a box of crayons. If you want to copy a picture, the more colors you have available, the better copy you can make. Now say you only have access to 3 colors. You probably will not end up with a photorealistic interpretation. If you must work with an mp3, make sure that it’s imported at 192kbps, and it will most likely be as close to the CD as you can reasonably get.
It’s very important to note that the quality of your music will be determined by the lowest bitrate that it was ever saved. If you take a 192kbps recording and save it with a new compression of, say 64bps. Then you play it and realize “Oh, this sounds like twice fried caca”, so you then take that 64kbps file and save it as 192kbps, guess what you will have? If you guessed “Triple-fried caca” then you are right. So always work as close to the source as you can, and you can be sure that your sound quality won’t degrade significantly as your choreography develops.
If you are playing the full song , uncut, with no speed modifications then this does not apply to you. But please read this article on creating a hot performance.