While doing the write up of Mix 18, it dawned on me that I could have cut one loop of the opening 8 bars of P!nk’s Beautiful Trama if I had the 2nd version loaded in a 3rd deck. Since I have a 2 track controller, I tend to think of the world as two track (plus a remix deck). But in the software, there are 4 decks and I can use those on your laptop while mixing.
That issue resurfaced while mixing 19. This time around, for the first time, I actually did use a 3rd track deck. Once I transition into Gold Dust, I use a 2nd copy to loop the beat. After about 16 bars, the beat drops out. I take the first 8 bars, loop it, and play it until the beat resumes in the first version of the track.
Other than that, this is just a simple three track mix. I call it Respeck Da Tracks because I really like both Spectrum and Gold Dust. So, where as usually I’m eager to mix in a new track, I repeck da tracks and let these two run for a while.
The title is a reference ShoeTuber Damn Dee. He yells the phrase when he buys two pairs of a sneaker he likes.
It’s kinda relevant to this mix because on two times I repeat the same song. The mix starts with the original mix of Feel The Rush by EDX. I use the intro from the club mix version of the track to mix between Beautiful Trama and Move You. Speaking of Beautiful Trama, it’s the 2nd track I repeat. The opening 8 bars are looped four times 1) mix out of Run The World 2) keep the mix going while I load the 2nd version of Beautiful Trama on the opposite deck of Traktor, and 3&4) give a beat to P!nk’s actual starting vocals on the track. Good times.
I love, Love, LOVE The-Dream. But I’ve found his music hard to mix. His latest album, ‘Genesis’ isn’t exactly great, but I really dig the track ‘Virtuous’. It definitely has the vibe of being tortured by love and desire; as do the rest of the track in this mix. The BPMs of the 3 tracks are similar as well at about 100, but jumping from eclectic pop/R&B to two fairly dissimilar House/EDM track proved challenging. Overall, I think the sound is fairly smooth, but there isn’t a lot of play between the tracks.
The title of this mix is based on another thing I’ve got going on. I’m going on a dietary, ‘cut’ next week. This is all in preparation for a vacation in about 6 weeks, but is an attempt to kickstart a generally more health pattern of eating. Hopefully my appetite won’t be tortured by the loss of processed carbs as these artists are with feelings for their respective significant others.
Not much to say here. It’s a weeknight and I’m excited to get enough time for a quick 3 track mix. Both transitions use a loop. It was nice to get in ‘Wasted’ which is a little more rock than my usual EDM/Pop selection; but get it to work relatively well with my usual EDM/Pop selections. The mix name is simply a reminder to, ‘KEEP GOING’. Hard work pays off.
The title Increments is something of a throwback for me. Back in my grad school/early career years, I made a series of quickmixes. These were just me putting on enough mp3s to fill a cd. Though, occasionally, I did do some fading and trimming of tracks. In any case, Mix #23 was titled Increments. Then and now, it was a reminder to appreciate the small steps I take towards goals.
Professionally, I see the challenge of being a manager and think if I can just put together the perfect system, everything would run smoothly. Realistically, it will take a lot of iteration to create it and constant refinement once it is in place. Musically, I wanted this mix to be big since I have not had a chance in a while. But I’m a little rusty, so I ultimately scaled it back. I’m happy with the results.
It’s not the longest mix in the world at 7:50 and I fell into the trap of basically just playing the first verse of each track. But I did manually sync the first two tracks before switching to a master tempo, do a drop mix to jump from 83 bpm to 122, and do an overall good job of blending tracks via volume and EQ play. I’m also proud of my use of Innerbloom.
The track has been one that I’ve looked to include in a mix for a while. It has a chill vibe and a good sound, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. I always figured it would be good to include for transitioning. And this time around I did just that. With the track before it and after it being relatively tricky to mix, I used it with the only intent being to make it a bridge between the two. It got a little dull, so I threw my ident over it to keep it lively. Also, in the process of recording the mix, I actually improved the mix in and out for a better overall sound than what I had initially planned. All good stuff!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Homework #2 is in the books. Fairly challenging, but filled with trying new things and learning new skills. Here’s what I did.
I wanted to start with Biggie’s verse from ‘The Benjamins’. Since his vocals are so close to Lil’ Kim’s, I had to turn of snap and quantize to set a cue point between beats. When he’s done, the beat goes back to the normal one. So, I flipped flopped between 16 bars at the end of the song and 8 at the beginning. Finally, I stuck with a loop of those 1st 8 bars of the track.
That set, I mixed in ‘Flava In Ya Ear Remix’. Continuing our Biggie appreciation, I only play his verse. The lead in use the Benjamins’ loop for a beat. Once The Notorious B.I.G. starts rhyming, I pan in and out the Benjamins’ beat for a little while before slow panning to ‘Flava In Ya Ear Remix’. I need to be all on that track for my next trick 🙂
To cut out of this track, I use a delay effect. It starts for a couple of beats, but on the 1 beat I start playing the original ‘Flava In Ya Ear’ in time with its remix. I let the remix play one beat from the new bar so I have Craig Mack’s ‘Word up’ covering the transition. At this point, I’m sitting on a loop of the original track.
The first time I tried to mix from the ‘Flava In Ya Ear’ loop to ‘So Sick Remix’, I accidentally hit the cue button instead of the play button. The effect was that I got a cool scratch sound. So I kept that as part of my mix. I do it twice then blend in the new track. This didn’t turn out perfectly. Once I blend in the track, I turn its volume down a little to make the blend a little smoother. Only problem is it sounds soft compared to the first two scratches. The rest of the transition is pretty smooth. I use grater as effect at the end to get out of the track at the end of the chorus. It feels a little rushed, but I didn’t know to make it sounds good longer with the effect in place. I think I’ll get better with practice.
