A few handy ‘Top Tips’ always help when getting to know the ins and outs, functionality and features of any new DJ product. Of course with the Prime Series gear, there’s a multitude of different, powerful, creative and expressive features that can help your DJ workflow and improve creative performance at gigs. We recently launched our Denon DJ ‘Top Tips’ video series across Social media, and it’s great to see you guys referring to these for a ‘quick fix’ tutorial on popular or often used techniques. Here’s the first four to check out, with more to follow over coming months.

Get Visual – Stand Out!

Gloriously displayed on the circular, central jog wheel screens on the SC5000 and PRIME 4, you can easily add your own DJ logo, a venue or event artwork, or indeed any other custom graphics to your gear. Normally, loading any song with album/track artwork in its metadata, will add that to the jog wheel screens – replaced by the artwork of the next playing track. Using the below ‘Top Tips’ method illustrated, you can ‘lock-in’ your custom logo/artwork, which will stay constantly displayed at your gigs, over-riding the prior ‘changing artwork’ feature. This is of course very cool for Social posts, when the film crew or photographer is in-house or just to mark a special occasion – for example, a Prime Series user recently displayed the names of the bride and groom at their wedding party!

Hard Times

Well, it’s more like ‘good times’ really (cue Chic and disco music playing in the background!). PRIME 4 has an  internal 2.5″, SATA drive bay on the unit’s underside. In addition to the (3) USB ports and 1 x SD input for your media sources, PRIME 4 users can attach an SSD or HDD for permanent use as a large capacity, super-fast media source. With an internal drive (and no drive capacity limitation) always inside the PRIME 4, you can have 1,000’s of songs and terabytes of music, easily accessible, and no need to remove the drive to add even more music in the future.  Installing, formatting and updating with music, is fast and easy – this ‘Top Tips’ video shows you how.

Tune In – Zone Out!

When presented with an early preview of the PRIME 4, one mobile DJ world influencer said, “hey, with this Zone Out feature, I can add another chargeable service to my wedding DJ package – thanks guys!”. PRIME 4’s Zone Out feature is a world’s first on a standalone DJ system, offering DJs the ability to play a separate music playlist to a different room or location, whilst rockin’ the party on the main venue’s dancefloor. A continuous music playlist can be set in motion, so the DJ doesn’t have to worry about cuing up tracks individually, or even streamed, curated music playlists (eg: Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music etc) can be run, as a ‘line-input’ source via a smartphone/tablet etc, to the separate location. Whether you’re a mobile, club, bar or event DJ, this gives your clients yet another reason to book your services!

Beat This

Looping techniques are super-popular for adding some creative ‘zeal’ to your DJ performance, as a mixing aid or even saving the night as a track approaches its dying seconds (loop capturing). To make sure your loops are accurate [timing-wise] however, it’s important that a track’s Beat-Grids are positioned correctly too. Of course, Beat Grid editing can be done on Engine Prime software, but what about when you haven’t got your PC/laptop with you, or want to edit some tracks whilst travelling? No problem – Beat Grids can be edited easily on the Prime Series hardware itself. Coarse, fine-tune adjustments plus double/half track BPM too can be changed and locked back in on the PRIME 4, SC5000 and SC5000M. This ‘Top Tips’ video show’s how easy this is to do, including some looping techniques for some performance inspiration.

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