69Beats performs at the Red Bull Thre3style World Final in Santiago, Chile on Dec. 16, 2016. (Alfred Jürgen Westermeyer/Red Bull)
69Beats, the 2016 Red Bull Thre3style Poland Champion, has shared some advice on how to create a Thre3style routine. The 28-year-old DJ has been inspired to help beginner DJs as the submission process for this year’s competition approaches.
In a lengthy message posted to Facebook and YouTube, 69Beats broke down his “Fire Story” sequence, which he performed at last year’s world finals. The sequence is based on “storytelling,” a technique in which a DJ strings together multiple “word plays” to tell a story.
“Storytelling is nothing new in [the] DJ world,” 69Beats wrote. “There are many, many sets with many different approaches to storytelling. For me storytelling was a natural ‘level-up’ from just simple word play.”
He continued: “While preparing for Thre3style 2016 I wanted to take [it] a little further for myself so instead of just mixing tracks with the same phrases I started collecting tracks that had the same theme and doing bigger combos of them. And while [I was] collecting ‘fire’ themed songs I started to see that some of them [were] actualy [sic] creating a sequence of events and decided to make a full routine based on that.”
69Beats also wanted the routine to be versatile as possible. “The whole sequence is flavoured with as many different techniques as possible – scratching, juggling, tone playing/pitch playing, fingerdrumming [sic], cue point drumming etc.”
Watch his sequence and read his breakdown below.