The title is a bit of a double entendre. Obviously it is a mix. But as I create this mix, I have some big changes going on as well. In Q1 of 2022, I’ll be moving from Seattle to London. I have mixed emotions about this. It is exciting, but it will be a big change as I’ll need to purge a lot of my material possessions to fit into a London-sized flat. One of those things might be my DJ controller. Given workload, life responsibilities, and various interests, I seem to be struggling to keep up with DJing. I am not sure what London will have in store for me and this hobby. But for now, it felt good to just spend some time in the mix. The tracks that make up the mix have varied messages, I initially tried to arrange them to build some type of story arch. But that wasn’t how the mixed best. And, I guess the chaos of them not making sense together kinda feels like a more accurate reflection of this move.
Yup, it has been almost 10 months since my last mix. And, I haven’t played around with my DJ equipment as I would have liked to. So, today, I decided to. There is not a lot of new technique in this mix. The transitions aren’t particularly great. But it felt good to take some time to pursue a hobby! It’s good to be back.
One thing that is challenging in improving at anything (specific to this post, DJing) is letting go of what you know and are accustomed to try things that will ultimately make you better at what you are trying to do. In putting together this mix, I really wanted to do it 100% live, but let it go as I struggled to figure out how to practice to prepare myself. Similarly, now stuck at home in quarantined due to COVID-19, I am interested in getting better at design work, but struggled to figure out which software to use. So, this mix really is about experimenting.
To get it out of the way, the experiment with design was to go with Adobe Photoshop Elements for my album artwork. I usually use Paint.Net, want to master Photoshop, but want to graduate into it after a sufficient amount of use of the lighter version. For DJing, after reviewing a ton of past training material and doing a live session with a professional DJ, what I came away with was that I just need to practice what I know, experiment, watch it fail, and do it again. Over and over and over again. So, I spent some time doing that then took a breather to wrap up this mix.
This is not necessarily the most innovative mix, but I did manage to exercise a lot of techniques including 2 loops, 2 effects, a release effect, and beat jumping. The effects felt a little heavy and the cut down of the 2nd loop was a bit clumsy, but here’s to experimentation. I plan to do a ton of this between now and the next mix. It will be interesting to see where it lands.
One of the challenges I now face when mixing is a feeling that it should just come together easily. That if I have three tracks, they’ll sound perfect together. That I’ll easily be able to identify the best points to mix in; and the best way to do so via EQs or effects. I think part of that is life pressures of time. I hope that DJing will alway be a fun escape from reality, but forget that it is a skill that requires practice.
I found myself in that predicament today. I had the three tracks, but it wasn’t immediately coming together. So, I paused and decided to focus on the mix instead of trying to just rush through it. Doing so allowed me to accept that this was not going to be quick. So, I might as well try a few things. In doing so, I’m pretty excited about what I came up with. I beat jumped to skip a verse in When It Comes To You that I wasn’t exactly in love with. In transitioning into SeeSaw, I manually tapped in the beat vs. just lining up the bars. In transitioning in Let It Be Me, I found a vocal section I really like and played with a couple of ways to loop it. Then, I tried a few ways to blend it into SeeSaw. Heck, I even tried a few effects before setting on echoing out of the mix. In the process of doing this, I got to just enjoy the process rather than worry about the results. And, the result is something that I’m pretty fond of.
This mix is short and sweet. I had a busy Saturday and carved out about 2 hours to play. I opted to not try and improve anything. Use hot cues and use a couple of tracks that I really liked and knew were in key. It was a joy to mess around and see it come together. And, I guess the word ‘Joy’ goes with the festive feel of the Christmas season.
It was a bit of a challenge get a third track. But I’ve wanted to mix Drake’s In My Feelings for a while. It was in key and an echo effect and a drop mix is any easy way to transition between a massive bpm change, so I went with it. I’m satisfied with the results.
Yup. It’s been 2.5 months since my last mix. It’s been a looong time.
In that time, I had a couple of attempts that didn’t really work out. From there, I’ve just been busy with work stuff. So I took about a month of time away from it when it began to feel more like a chore than a hobby.
This mix is pretty simple. 3 tracks; two from Skrillex. I recorded it twice. After the first time, I felt the transitions sounded a little rushed, so I looped the intro of the incoming song. It’s been a while since I’ve made much use of loops, so good chance to mix it up a little there.
Getting back into the flow proved to be a bit of a challenge. What I learned in making this mix is that I find track preparation tedious. My approach to fixing it is to do less at a time (maybe just one track per session) and do it more often. The latter will hopefully help me become more efficient as I build up muscle memory. Anywho, I’m excited to have a new mix.
This mix is truly me as a DJ. This would be what I would do if I performed live. I prepped 7 tracks and created a playlist. The next morning, I picked a track to play and started mixing. Beat Sync was off. Once I started playing a track, I’d have to cue the next track in my headphones. This was my first time using the ‘Traffic Light System’ to identify songs that were in key. I used that to help select which track to play next. This was also my first time using a DJ pool to find new tracks. The one I selected was BPM Supreme, hence the name of the mix.
Overall, it went well. The transition between Never Be Alone and Going Bad is kinda dull. I think if I had planned it, I could have used EQs or something to make it pop. The transition between Going Bad and Loco Contigo is clean. I find that funny because Loco Contigo was the one track that I thought of removing from the playlist when doing track prep.
I’m really proud of the transition between 2 Phones and Call Out My Name. It definitely doesn’t sound the best, but it sounds decent. The reason that I am proud of it is that I had to put it together in the moment and it was good enough to not ruin the mix. The two tracks are 12 BPM apart. So, I could beat match. I figured I’d just do a simple fade and it worked!
I was excited to used the record break effect to stop the mix. I was a bit harsh, but hey, there’s a reason I call this collection Rough Drafts of My Perfect Mix. Enjoy!
I’m just too big of a nerd to pass this up. This is Mix 42. As per The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Universe, 42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything. So, we are going with it.
This weekend also marks a couple of other things. Continuing with the nerd theme, it is also the date of PAX: West. So, I’m in a bit of a nerdy mood. But Labor Day 2017 was also the point when I went on Craigslist and found a Traktor Kontrol S2 and bought it. Labor Days are my anniversary of DJing. Labor Day 2019 marks my 2nd anniversary.
Recently, I’ve questioned if I really wanted to keep going. This whole year has been, ‘The Dip’ for me. I’ve perfected scripted mixes, but doing it live is much harder. My time has been limited due to work/life obligations, so I’ve approached a lot of sessions thinking, ‘what I will do won’t be perfect, but something is better than nothing’. So, I’d bang out another 3 track mix. I’d try to learn, but there are so many conflicting views on how to do it. I’d read one blog or YouTube video and think I’ve figured it out. But then I’d review a tutorial that told me that if I didn’t do it their way, I’d never progress. So, I’d just get lost.
Labor Day is a long weekend for me. It is one of the 6 that I get on my current job (New Years, Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas). So, it’s a great time to deep dive into something. Obviously, I’ve repeatedly used it to deep dive into DJing. This year is not different. I reviewed a lot of the material that I had access to on DJ with an eye towards getting passed ‘The Dip’. I can’t say that I’ve solved it. but I’ve set a set of achieve able improvements to my skill set and I’ll work toward addressing them by the end of the year.
What really got me motivated was my session today. I switched from using Hot Cues to Memory Cues to mark points in tracks. In Traktor, these really are the same thing. I also set RekordBox to do countdowns to these’s points. It freed up my performance pads to use for beat jumping while prepping tracks and effects while performing.
As such, in this mix, I had a series of tracks prepared with memory cues, not hot cues. From there, I performed live. I adjusted tempo of the next track during the mix. I used my headphones to figure out how it would sound in a transition. Then, when the time to transition occurred, I winged it. I did it real time. It’s not perfect, but it is truly a Rough Draft Of My Perfect Mix. So, I kept it.
The title of this mix is based of the term, ‘Manufactured Run’ in baseball. There, a team will get scrappy and try to piece together a run by singles, walks, stolen bases, or whatever else it takes.
This isn’t my greatest mix, but I appreciate how scrappy I was in manufacturing it. It prepping 6 tracks, I realized that I only really liked two of them. Just to get to my usual minimum of 3 tracks, I had to dig through past downloads and what I could find on my candidates list. Made For Now ended up having a decent mellow vibe, but I had to dance around some of its more upbeat reggaeton-esque sections. I struggled to turn off beat-sync while in the mix, so Say Hello starts a little slow and you can hear it pitch shift when I do manage to speed it up.
The upshot is that I did it in one take. I prepped the tracks with transition points and kinda knew what a good transition would sound like. But in the mix, I had to improvise. I nudge tracks, mucked with tempo, and guestimated eq timings. All considered, it sounds pretty good. And, it is representative of what I would like to do when working 100% live (beat sync off, adjusting tempo, nudging tracks, unscripted transitions). So, I see that as a big win.
In my personal life, I am setting new health, career, and hobby goals. I kinda feel like I have to manufacture the confidence to think that I can do them as I get started. The real confidence will come once they all get some traction. So, I think this mix is a good start.
This is the first mix I have named after a DJ. The mix is called Atendido Style after DJ Carlo Atendido; Youtube star and two time DJ champion. I did so because I am a fan, his video tutorials have been helpful in general, and and one in particular was the motivation of this mix.
In working to be less scripted and more in the moment, I have oscillated a lot between focusing on mixing by ear and perfecting the use of cue points. Recently, DJ Carlo Atendido posted this video where he broke down a simple way set cue points. The idea is to set one in the intro, end of chorus, and outro. His trick is to do it 8 bars from the end of that section as it is a consistently good amount of time to transition (I have used it a lot). So, I used the technique for this mix.
I made a pretty simple 3 track mix. And I deviated from the technique in the 2nd transition. Win Win used 32 bars for its chorus and outro. I found that a 16 bar transition from its outro to Don’t Give Up On Me‘s intro (and starting from the beginning of the latter) sounded best.
Moving forward, my cue pointing will incorporate this timing and color coding based on number of bars available for transitioning (4, 8 16) that I saw from a different video from another DJ. A key point in mixing the two DJs track preparation techniques is that there really isn’t a right way. So, my progression will be to figure out what works best for me.
