How To Make An Intro Edit (Without Owning A DAW)
An intro edit is an instrumental run-up on the front of a track so you have something to mix into. Here is what making one actually involves, by hand and the quick way.
Most DJs have far more music than they play. Not because the tracks are bad — because they start cold. The vocal is in at bar one, there is no instrumental to ride, and mixing into it means either a hard cut or a scramble. So the track sits in the crate.
An intro edit fixes exactly that. It is a version of the track with an instrumental run-up bolted on the front — normally 8, 16 or 32 bars — giving you something to beatmatch, blend and build tension over before the record itself lands.
What actually has to happen
It sounds like a copy and paste job. It is not, and this is why most people never bother:
- Find the real downbeat. Not where the file starts, and not where the waveform looks loud — where bar one of the phrase actually is. Get this wrong by a beat and everything downstream is off.
- Separate the instrumental. The run-up has to be instrumental, or you get the vocal twice. That means stem separation on the section before the drop.
- Tile it to length. Take a musical chunk and repeat it until it fills 8, 16 or 32 bars. It has to repeat on a phrase boundary or the loop will feel lopsided.
- Align the join. The original track has to come back in on the one, to the sample. Close is not good enough — a few milliseconds out and it flams against whatever you are mixing from.
- Kill the clicks. Every join needs a short fade or it ticks, and on a loud system a tick is a pop.
Do that in a DAW and you are looking at an hour a track the first few times. For one record that matters, fine. For a crate, it never happens.
The shortcut most DJs use, and its limit
The usual answer is to let someone else do it — record pools. And for current releases that works. Pools cut intro, clean and short versions for new music while it is being pushed.
The problem is the back catalogue. Pools edit what is current. The older records — the ones you know will go off, the ones nobody else is playing — almost never got the treatment, and nobody is going back to do it now. If you want an intro version of a record from 2004, you are making it yourself.
The tracks most worth having an edit of are exactly the ones no pool ever edited.
Doing it in a few clicks
This is the job IntroEdits does. You pick the track from your crate, click the point where you want the record to drop, and choose how many bars of run-up you want. It handles the rest — the downbeat, the separation, the tiling, the alignment and the fades — and lays the vocal lead-in over the tail of the run-up so the track walks in rather than suddenly appearing.
Then you audition just the seam. If the join is right, save it. If not, move the drop point and listen again. An edit takes about a minute, which is the difference between editing one track and working through a whole crate in an evening.
Picking the drop point
The one decision left to you is the one worth thinking about. A few things that help:
- Drop on the phrase, not on the loudest bit. The obvious energy peak is often a bar or two after the actual phrase start.
- Listen to what comes just before. If there is a vocal pick-up or an ad-lib leading in, dropping just after it throws away the best part of the transition.
- Try the same track at 16 and 32. A record that feels rushed at 16 bars often sits beautifully at 32, and you will not know until you hear both.
Which length to use
16 bars is the default for a reason — long enough to beatmatch and ride a blend, short enough that the floor does not drift. 8 bars suits a quick cut in a busy set. 32 suits openers and long blends.
There is more on this in how long a DJ intro should be.