I am new to DJing and struggle to hear the beats through the headphone, even if I turn it louder.
Any advice on this topic. At this point I only get lucky by visually lining up the beat grids. But I feel this is the wrong tactic.
Do you split cue, and use both ears? Do you cue both the master and the cued track to hear them together in one ear? What works for you?
I have both master and cue playing in the headphones at the same time, I don’t use an external monitor speaker. What type of headphones are you using? I use Sennheiser HD-25s and find them to be nice and clear for DJing.
Also, if you’re just starting out it’s quite normal for it to take a while to get the hang of. If you’re strugging to hear the kick drum in the headphones you could instead try focusing on the hi-hats and see if that’s any easier. It also depends on the genre, of course. Some tracks that have loads going on are much harder to beatmatch than something that’s more stripped back.
I have Audio Technica ATH-M50x.
Maybe it was just really noisy music. Will try different options.
It might also be that the SC live speakers are directed too much at me, making it difficult to discern.
I wonder if I shouldn’t stick to only the headphone for a while and switch off the SC live 4 in-built speakers.
Yeah it’s definitely worth giving headphone-only mixing a try 
I had some better success yesterday by putting earphones over both ears, and not splitting cue. Main and Cue overlayed in both ears.
I can then clearly hear the two beats when they are out of phase.
Much more difficult for me when split (left ear cue and right ear main). The ‘booth’ speaker is too diffused, while my headphones are super sharp.
I start to regret the SC Live 4 inbuilt speaker. Could have just bought a cable xlr to 3.5mm to loop my Harman Kardon Go+Play speaker in (at least here I could point the speaker away from me, and to my friends on the dancefloor at home), until the time I could afford real PA system.
But maybe once my ears are trained and I am not thinking about it, I will enjoy the inbuilt speakers again.
Great to hear you had more luck with mixing in the headphones. Playing with a split cue takes quite a lot of practice, but it’s worth learning eventually
Yeah, realised I find it challenging to focus and overlay each of my ear channels!
Starting to wonder if I have hearing difficulties, attention difficulties, or if they are just things that will resolve with practice.
Definitely going for a hearing test, just to know what I am working with!
It takes a good while to perfect the art of hearing one track in one ear and the other in the other.
The best thing to do is just keep at it and it’ll eventually fall into place.
But please don’t whack the volume up thinking that will solve it, you’re just damaging your ears for nothing.
Make sure you’re lining tracks up in phase (32 beats) as that will make it easier to pick them up, and also mess around with dubby records with prominent kick drums. Also learn to use the percussion and rhythm to line the tracks up as that’s where you can nail it.
Iirc it took me over a year before I was comfortable at hearing which way the music was out and being able to adjust accordingly.
Actually enjoyed switching off the SC Live 4 integrated speaker and only using my headphones.
The dial between cue and main got used a lot more, and the recorded session was far more accurate.
Going to train my ears on this before introducing booth volume slowly. Also don’t want to get used to taking time in headphones/cueing. My favourite DJs are the ones that give the headphones a quick listen, and 80% of the time are engaged with the audience.