Month: February 2018

Motivational speaker, Eric Thomas is the motivation behind this week’s title (I even went with Detroit Lion’s colors for him).  On one of his mix tapes, he asks God, ‘when is it going to be my turn’ to have things go right.  God responds, ‘It’s been your turn’.  The message being that God has provided Eric a wealth of opportunities for success, but Eric didn’t grind hard enough to make them a reality.

I feel like I’m in a similar position.  As I am really getting into my goals for 2018, I look at the obstacles ahead of me, and I think that I am the biggest one.  Fear of failure.  Accepting, ‘good enough’.  Being lazy.  For everything that I want in life, there will be obstacles, but it is on me to put forward my best.  If I do, I think the results will be great.  I was thinking about that all weekend and while I made this mix.

The mix is far from perfect.  It’s short (3 tracks), I think the intro of ‘Body’ came in a little too soft, and there wasn’t a ton of new techniques.  But wanted to keep my mixing skills in practice and hope that just the repetition will inch me a little forward.

In transitioning between ’17’ and ‘Body’, I did use a loop.  I first fliped the lows after the first run then did a drop after the 2nd.  So, something a little different.  I also set a cue point for my ident.  It seems like it needs about 1 bar at 120 bpm.  Good to know for future reference.  All and all, a fun mix to put together.

Enjoy!

After two hectic weeks of life, I decided I wanted to dedicate a full day to getting back to mixing.  But, the usual life stuff caught up with me.  Undeterred, I decided to take a distributed approach.  In spare moments, I accumulated tracks.  On Friday, I selected and beat-grided the final tracks.  That evening and for about 1 hour on Saturday afternoon, I set up some cue points.  Saturday evening I made the final arrangement of tracks and recorded the mix.  So, I guess you could say that my usual ‘system’ of making mixes got ‘distributed’.  I think that’s a good thing in that forces me to adjust how I make a mix and gives me more flexibility in getting it done.

Not too much new on skills applications with this mix.  It is primarily a very heavy use of cue points and experimentation to get to the final result.  I did try to adjust how I mixed in tracks.  I’m starting to jokingly refer to my usual method as a ‘sharps drop’ where I leave the levels about the same, go for about 8 bars at the end of track A’s chorus to lead into track B’s verse.  So, I played around a decent amount with overlap length.  My instructor from the DJing course seemed to enjoy longer transitions.  It’s still a work in progress for me to make it sound good, but it felt GREAT to be back in ‘the studio’ 🙂

Enjoy!

 

Update 2018-02-04:

So, I listened to this a couple of times and felt that this was truly the worst mix I’ve ever made.  I listened again and felt that a lot of it was just letting transitions linger too long.  So, I decided to revisit the mix.  In the process, I ended up making a lot of changes.  Some transitions were shortened, but a lot of it became playing with the equalizer and volume levels.  I also ended up mixing a track over a track for the first time.  The last song, ‘Best of You’, gets a pretty cool in a tunnel sound when I played track over itself, but I found a nifty way to jump back on the 2nd version of the track playing and make it sound reasonably good.  It’s still not perfect, but I definitely feel it is an upgrade.  Give it a listen!

As an added bonus, I’m uploading my mixing plan.  The stuff in blue was my original plan.  The red writings are my revisions.