I have a theory that it will take me about 100 mixes to get to a point where I think I’m good at this. As such, I’m excited to get a chance to do a 2nd mix this week. I heard ‘Don’t Wake Me Up’ this morning and got motivated to add throw it in a mix. I spent the rest of my work out thinking of what else to add to it.
Overall, I think I did a decent job on this one. The key things I worked on was counting bars and using that to find the right place to set up transitions. Basically, I’m deciding where I want to transition from one track to another, where there is a good start point for the new track (e.g. 8 bars before the transition) and matching up the cue points. I also played with starting to fade from 100% of one song to 100% of the other. Thus far, I’d start with 50/50 then go to 100% of the new song. I think this tweak will help my mixes sound a little smoother.
The transition between Heartbeat and Heartless is a little wonky. Since the beats don’t really match up, I did it based on time. Transitioning between two songs with dramatically different BPMs hard. I’ve heard that you can manually match beats (e.g. play a 122 bpm song at 120 beats then play two of its beats to one of a track that is 60 bpm), but I’m not there yet.
Anyway, I had a blast making this. Enjoy!
