Month: November 2017

I’ve mentioned in some previous posts that I’m taking a course on digital dj’ing with Traktor.  This is my first assignment: transition betweeen two tracks of the same genre 3 times.  I guess this isn’t really all that new for me since that’s pretty much what my mixes have been.  But the experience has been really fun!

To get started, I tried to mix using just my laptop on a flight back from MD.  It is definitely more difficult than with my Traktor Kontrol S2.  But I think the real problem was that the tracks didn’t flow that well together.  Yo Gotti’s track Oh Yeah uses Juvenile’s style of ending every line with ‘Ha?’.  So I tried to mix the two together, but it just never really flowed.

Back in my Studio, I did the final 3 mixes.  Mix B wasn’t really anything new; two R&B track.  Mix C was my first mix of Drum & Bass tracks.  I picked my two favorite artists from the genre; London Elektricity and High Contrast.  It turned out ok.  The entry of the 2nd track comes in a little too forceful (as opposed to smooth).

Mix E was the highlight.  It’s to electronic dance tracks; which I often mix.  But the twist was that I manually beat matched the two!  To do so, I turned off sync and BPM display.  While you don’t have 100% granularity, I ended up adjusting the 2nd track to 125.03 BPM to match track A’s 125 BPM.  That’s as good as I could get.

Enjoy!

 

Mix B

 

Mix C

 

Mix E

This week was a fairly quick mix.  A lot of good singing.  I had 7 finalists including 2 remixes of Toni Braxton’s ‘Coping’, but narrowed it down to 4.  Two things stood out to me with this mix.  In transitions, I’d line things up, but kinda get caught in a point where the outgoing song would drop elements of the beat before the incoming one would add new elements in.  Hence the name ‘Whitespace’ for this mix.

The 2nd is that this is the first mix that I actually used a loop.  I needed two more bars to line up ‘Coping’, so if you listen carefully, you’ll hear the first bar repeat 3 times.  This is week two of the course I am taking.  It mentioned loops in one of the tutorials, but we cover them next week.  That gave me enough to feel like testing it.  I think it turned out well.

Also, this was the first mix where I used a master tempo to set all tracks to 125 BPM.  Enjoy!

I’ve wanted to do this mix for a while 🙂

At the gym, I heard the track, ‘Work from Home vs. My House’, which is a mashup of the two songs.  So, I figured it’d be fun sometime to see if I could do it as well.

The two tracks that I chose were the first to come to mind and a natural fit.  I am a HUGE fan of The-Dream.  On his 2009 album, ‘Love vs. Money’ he release, ‘Rockin’ That Sh!t’ and I loved the song.  The next year on his album ‘Love King’, he released, ‘F.I.L.A’.  I immediately thought, ‘wow, this is the exact same song’, but as such, I loved this song too.

So, now in DJing, I got a chance to play them together and see how similar they are.  I was actually surprised that they weren’t the same BPM.  The lyrics of ‘F.I.L.A.’ are better, but the beat of ‘Rockin’ That Sh!t’ is better.  But when prepping the mix, it became tricky to remember which was which in setting cue points or remembering what aspects of which I wanted.  And, once you match BPMs, you can pretty much play them both at the same time and it will sound pretty good.  The challenge was that both songs were still pretty good, so how to add to them by mixing in what is essentially the same song proved challenging.  Overall, I’m happy with the results.

Oh, and it was my first time using key lock to get the vocal pitch the same when beat matching!

Enjoy!

So, obviously, the title is an homage to A Tribe Called Quest.  That said, none of their tracks are in the mix.  It’s more that the three concepts have been my day.  I started the day attending a seminar on behavior change as part of another one of my hobbies, physical fitness.  As such, I spent most of the rest of my day evaluating my approach to life in all aspects (relationships, career, hobbies, etc.).  I ended the day putting together this mix.  I had the usual fun of putting it together, but I think this was the first truly hip hop mix.  So, rhymes 🙂

I let the tracks go a little longer this time around, so this is a little longer than my last couple of mixes.  The transitions are decent, but not perfect.  The last one (between Swang and Mask Off) flows pretty well, but I should have faded out the vocals of Swang.  Oh well, with more practices comes better results.

This may be my last mix for a little while.  Not because I am stopping; quite the opposite.  I am taking an 8 week course on DJing with Traktor.  So, while I’ll be working on getting better, the work product may not make it to the web.

Enjoy!