Month: January 2018

Ok, so it’s playoffs time in the world of American football, so it’s not too surprising that I’d have a football reference somewhere in my mix title nomenclature.  The end of this year’s college football championship game was amazing.  Alabama brought in a freshman quarterback, Tua Tagovailoa for the final game.  In overtime, he gets surrounded by defenders.  Instead of just taking a knee, he keeps running backwards in hopes of buying enough time to make a big play.  He doesn’t.  Instead, he takes a sack some 17 yards back.  The play was a disaster.

However, on 2nd down, he throws a 60 yard pass for a game ending touchdown.  Amazing!  In sports, they always say put the last play behind you.  I think that’s a pretty good metaphor for life.

Not that anything has gone dramatically wrong for me lately, but I do have my share of day in/day out challenges.  I need to do a better job of putting them behind me and continuing to persevere towards larger goals.  Hopefully that play and this mix will serve as reminders.

As for the mix, it’s pretty simple.  Something of a return to form.  After taking a DJing class for weeks and feeling like I was perpetually trying to exercise new skills.  This time around it’s just a fun little mix.

The anchor point of the mix is actually the last track.  Early last year I heard a commercial for Home Shopping Network with a pretty catchy beat.  I had it in my mind for a while but could never find the artist behind it (still can’t).  So, I added it to my mix and trying to find a bunch of pop tracks with a similar vibe.  A HSN commercial beat.  How’s that for digging in the crates!

I kept my ident from Homework #3.  I dealt with the massive tempo jump between Alone and Milky Way with an effect and manually looping my intro cue point.  And I used a loops on both US and the HSN beat to transition.  So, some use of new skills still at work.

Enjoy!

Homework #3 was definitely the most challenging. Where as the first two assignments asked us to use one or two techniques, this one asked us to use a little of everything that we learned. Here’s what I attempted to include

• Cue points
• Loops
• Effects
• Samples from a remix deck
• An Ident
• Harmonic mixing – two tracks with compatible keys

During my 1 on 1 with the instruct, he challenged me to be a little less prescriptive with my mix. Instead, pick a handful of tracks and see where it leads you. So, for that one, it didn’t quite work out. I did record a mix where I selected tracks based on what I felt would go best, but it felt like chaos for me. By the end of the ~8 minutes, I could even remember which tracks I had already played. So, there’s room to grow there. But for the mix I turned in, I minimized the prescripted elements to just the cue points where I’d start the transition; no info on duration, no info on levels, etc.

So, for this mix, I selected 8 tracks.  Bringing them into Traktor, I realized 2 were had pretty bad beat gridding and could not find an easy way to fix them.  One more ultimately didn’t feel like it would mix well, so I was down to 5 tracks.  So, I listened to them a couple time and dropped a bunch of cue points and a few loop points.  In the mix, I lead in Places with a loop, but was bummed that I messed up starting the loop in This Is What You Came For, so I just kept moving.

An ident is where a DJ puts a shout out to themselves in the mix.  The ‘Maybach Music’ you hear in all of Rick Ross’ tracks is a good example. I thought the idea of having my own ident would be pretty cool, but was surprisingly hard.  I wanted to have ‘930’ in an Optimus Prime voice and then have a female voice do the ‘Music’.  I looked into tools that would do the Optimus Prime voice, but didn’t find any.  I looked into using Fiverr, but the licensing fees were pretty high for someone this early in their DJing life.  I ultimately used a text to speech application then brought it into Audacity to add some effects.

This was also the first mix that I used F1 as a remix deck.  I did not load the free remix decks from Tracktor properly, so they ended up all being individual tracks.  So, I built my own remix deck from a few of the samples that I liked the most.  And, of course, my ident :).  I decided while mixing, I’d only use one sample per slot in the remix deck for simplicity.

I had a list of all the techniques I wanted to use in the mix.  In the process of doing so, I mixed up effects with samples, so I almost forgot to include effects.  I did a quick review of the ones available and really liked what I could add to the sound of my mix with Ice Reverb and Phaser.  Similar to the remix deck, I decided I’d just stick with these two for the mix and not try to change what I had on hand on the fly.  I did however adjust some of the settings during the mix to tweak the impact.

And last, but not least, harmonic mixing.  When Traktor analyzes tracks, it detects the key in open key notation.  I noticed Angel on My Shoulder and How Deep Is Your Love were using compatible keys (1m and 2m respectively) so I mixed between the two.

So, that’s what I did.  It was a lot for one mix.  After the class, I want so spend a lot of time learning and mastering individual techniques.  My mixes for some time will likely focus on one element, but try to keep building on what I know, so I can work my way towards really using multiple techniques well together.

Enjoy!