How to Scratch an Acapella in a Mix!

Scratching can be 50/50 when doing it in front of the crowd. You either win them over or lose them. So doing it tastefully and in the right places in a mix is the key to express yourself musically with your scratching and to keep the crowd dancing all night long.

Always remember that less is more when it comes to scratching, and always remember that musicality comes first. So apply your musical sense in your scratching to make sure you’re not over doing it. Sometimes keeping your scratching simple is also the key. The crowd can’t tell if you’re doing a 2 click flare or a baby, so keep it simple and easy to understand. I personally do combos of forwards and transformers. But feel free to do any scratch you’re MOST comfortable with! If you read this far, comment “musicality comes first when scratching”.

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► SCRIPT:

3 key points we’re going to look at are the following;

1. What sample to scratch
2. What song are we gonna be pairing it with
3. Where are we going to scratch it.

So first we have to select an acapella sentence, and it should be pretty simple, understandable and short.

And what I chose for the routine was this:

*plays “Put your hands up acapella”*

So that’s continuous loop.

Anyway for this tutorial, I chose this specific sentence because the key of this song matched the other song perfectly.

Speaking of the other song, in selecting that, we must find a song that doesn’t have a very loud and pronounced chorus. Something more bassy and drummy with less mid.

Scratching over song is us overlaying a completed song, so finding a song that doesn’t have a pronounced chorus is best, because by scratching an acapella over it, we’re simply complimenting the song and not over powering it.

And so the song I selected was *Freeze by Nina Las Vegas*, and we’re going to be scratching over it’s 64 beat chorus.

*Plays chorus*

So scratching over a chorus for me is the best place to scratch over a song, but knowing how to do it tastefully is the key to make a scratch routine sound musical.

So how are we going to do it?

The first step is to play the song we’re going to scratch over, and to wait for the chorus section.

The 2nd step then involves manipulating and scratching the acapella over it. But the question then is, what scratches to do and in what pattern?

Well Here’s how I did it for the first 32 beats of the chorus,.

So to not sound like a scratch maniac right of the gate, I decided to first play the acapella for 8 beats and then when we reach the acapellas “hands part”, I chose to baby scratch the hands sample for 5 beats, so when we release it, the one on the acapella which is “PUT” will land on the one of the song.

And I repeat. So I wait for another 8 beats, and then when we reach the “hands part”, to switch things up, I do a chirp scratch with that sample for 5 beats. But it’s up to you what scratch you want to do, just remember to scratch the hands sample for only 5 beats or your timing will be off.

So after that, we enter the last 32 beats of the chorus and start hearing the claps, and this is the part where things get really energetic.

So once we reach this section, we switch our scratchting up and start scratching the “hands part” every 2 beats. So we only hear “put your efffing”.

And again we scratch the hands part for only 5 beats and then we release.

And we do this pattern until we reach the end of the chorus.

Now it’s totally up to you what scratch you want to do on the hands part, feel free to perform any scratch you want.

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