NewSc2

Forget about me trying to hold back from slaughtering this blog with mixes, cuz it’s probably going to continue. I’m going to call this one my Pliny the Elder mix. The last mix was my Pliny the Younger/Stone Russian Imperial Stout mix, and the mix before that was my Ruination/Old Rasputin/Orion mix. (Hint: those are the beers I drank before/during the mix)

I took some of your guys’s comments into consideration, and I had a long discussion with Sellers about DJ theory yesterday. A few things bothered me about my last sets. I really like them both — they’re not generic — but after listening to them a few times 1) they didn’t seem like they would work on a dance floor, 2) some rushed song changes — I would’ve liked to hear a few of those songs for more than a couple minutes, and 3) they sort of lacked a good general direction.

Points 2 and 3 seemed like they were there because my mixes were only about an hour long. I’m not sure if anyone could easily tell, but a few of my mixes weren’t perfect — songs would either end too early or come in too fast. I’m still trying to work on that, and I’m also trying to kill songs better by throwing them into the background and having the incoming song grab the listener.

Most of my songs are 7-10 min., and I’d cut most out around the 4 minute mark. So with this mix, I let songs breathe more (hopefully not by too much).

It’s a much longer mix, clocking in at 2 hours, 45 minutes, and it’s meant to be a club-style mix, bringing the night in with Deep House and going into Techno and Progressive.

The first 50 minutes are soft, inviting, and building, and after a brief (25 min.) melodic techno (trance?) transition, the meat of the mix gets to some grooving techno. It finishes off with 30 minutes of soothing progressive.

A few things I learned:
- Leaning over a laptop and mixer for 3+ hours is kinda hard on the legs. I can only imagine how it feels for those 8+ hour sets.
- A 2 hour, 45 min. mix takes a long time. Including some basic song organizing and setting up, I started around 11pm and didn’t finish till about 3am.
- Ableton’s song timer isn’t 100% accurate (it varies by BPM).
- 2 minutes left in a song = 30 seconds to set up your next song before the mood starts to die.
- Loop, loop, loop!
- Songs within a Beatport crate (i.e. bought at the same time) generally go better together than songs purchased a month, or even a few weeks prior.
- Need more dancy Deep House, need more groovy Techno.
- Cirez D is Eric Prydz aka Pryda. Did not know that. Played 2 of his songs in this mix =X
- 1 bottle of Pliny the Elder is good for about 2 hours of mixing.

Without further ado: (166 min.)
NewSc2-2009-02-07_(Long).mp3

Hate to slaughter the blog with sets, but here’s another new mix. It’s a deeper/chiller mix than the one below (probably cuz of the rain). Pretty dubby and slightly housy. I don’t have a tracklist handy, but off the top of my head I remember some Solomun & Stimming, Henrik Schwarz, 16 Bit Lolitas, John Digweed, and Ben Klock.

I got into this sort of dub techno phase about a month ago, after I listened to Lee Burridge’s RA podcast. I’ve since gotten back into more dancier stuff (a la the set below), but I wanted to capture this mood before it slipped outta my system.

P.S. Keep the feedback coming! Thanks to all of you who actually downloaded and listened to my last mix

Download and listen: (58 min)
NewSc2-2009-02-05 Deep Techno, Dub House

A few months ago, I recorded several mixes that turned out pretty well. There were parts of the mixes that had mistakes and weren’t stellar, but there were also parts that showed a lot of potential and had movement and direction.

Well, since May, I stopped mixing for a couple months, and over the past few weeks I’ve been getting back into mixing, with bad results. I don’t know why but I couldn’t get songs to start at the right time, I’d be playing songs that didn’t feel right (even though I bought them and used them well before), and I’d rush mixes, do sloppy mixes, not gauge parts of songs correctly… I’d basically be doing everything equivalent to trainwrecking on Ableton. Melodies and voices would come in and out whenever they pleased, and I had a hard time bringing songs in and out of mixes.

Last Thursday, Sellers came over and we mixed for a couple hours, and over the past week, I’ve been frantically listening to my old mixes, DJ mixes, and my songs to figure out where I was going wrong.

I don’t know how it happened, but over this past weekend, it all came back to me. I could predict when those filter sweeps and breakdowns would occur, and how to phrase mixes correctly. I’m not perfect, and probably not quite close to how I was in May, but it’s nice to be able to do mediocre mixes again.

I’ll be posting some of my more recent sets soon.