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!