I’ll start by saying I’m not a super ‘conventional’ DJ, as most of my work is with live bands. My company has some DJ/Hybrid band concepts that are pretty unique in the way we work. I essentially started learning to DJ a couple years back, with the primary motivation of figuring out some unique and fun ways to incorporate the DJ concept with our live bands because I’ve never seen a product that really hits the way I wanted in that realm. I think we’ve accomplished that, and it’s an ever changing and growing, but highly successful product for our company. I do DJ breaks and after-parties in a more traditional fashion, but I can’t play most of the typical wedding DJ tracks because our bands play the vast majority of that big catalog of material. I digress…
While I understand ‘mixing in key’ to a deep degree from being a musician and having the theory knowledge most DJ’s don’t have the luxury of starting out with, I hate always having to think about keys as it can dictate sets for you rather than playing the bangers you know work. Especially in short 20-30 minute band break sets, I needed some ways to move through keys quickly. The first thing I used, and I’m sure a lot of people do, are what I refer to as ‘key agnostic’ songs. Straight rap / hip hop, and some various edm tracks just have very little key relevant material, so I use them a lot to transition between keys. But especially in a chill dinner set vibe, I needed something to give me that freedom at any moment. Here’s what I came up with, and I’d be curious to know if anyone has tried something similar, or has any similar ideas.
Basically what I do is find two buttons on decks 1 & 2 that aren’t used, or that I can live without. More recently I switched to Slakjaw’s touch OSC concept and I have the two buttons for each of decks 1 & 2 at the ready in big ‘hard to miss’ buttons on my ipad. Either way - the flow is this:
Using decks 1&3 as the example (though I create the same things on 2&4), I map one button to three functions:
a. Load instant double on deck 3 from deck 1
b. simultaneously SOLO the drum stem on deck 3.
c. simultaneously MUTE the drum stem on deck 1.
So what I end up with is sorta like the built in function on the Rane FOUR, except instead of having a solo’d vocal on one deck, I have drums only on deck 3 and everything else on deck 1, running in sync.
At whatever time is appropriate, prior to mixing a new song in from a key that doesn’t work otherwise, I jump over the deck 3 and create a quick 1 or 2 bar loop.
Now you probably see where this is going, but with the drum loop on 3, I can now ditch deck 1 in whatever creative way I want to, but we’ll just say a fast easy echo out at a good moment for sake of example. I then have an easy task of mixing in a song on deck 2 over solo’d drum loop from the song that was on deck 1. With even a beat or two of space, the key change is pretty irrelevant.
The second assigned button on each deck is simply an ‘eject deck 3’ button to get rid of the deck 3 (or 4) loop that is running.
There are millions of possible enhancements to this, but the general idea of separating the drum stem and looping, or not looping, or whatever simply keeps the groove cooking and gives space to move into a different key… or a different genre. I find it fun to kick a song off with a drum groove from another song that doesn’t really ‘fit’ and quick-switch to the correct drum groove on the first beat of the verse or something. Like I say - a million ways to go after that basic operation.
This is an honest question, becuase I have no idea - is this a common trick people use? Thoughts on improving it, or alternative ways to accomplish similar things? Feel free to steal the idea if it works for you. 
