930 Media

I’ve mentioned in some previous posts that I’m taking a course on digital dj’ing with Traktor.  This is my first assignment: transition betweeen two tracks of the same genre 3 times.  I guess this isn’t really all that new for me since that’s pretty much what my mixes have been.  But the experience has been really fun!

To get started, I tried to mix using just my laptop on a flight back from MD.  It is definitely more difficult than with my Traktor Kontrol S2.  But I think the real problem was that the tracks didn’t flow that well together.  Yo Gotti’s track Oh Yeah uses Juvenile’s style of ending every line with ‘Ha?’.  So I tried to mix the two together, but it just never really flowed.

Back in my Studio, I did the final 3 mixes.  Mix B wasn’t really anything new; two R&B track.  Mix C was my first mix of Drum & Bass tracks.  I picked my two favorite artists from the genre; London Elektricity and High Contrast.  It turned out ok.  The entry of the 2nd track comes in a little too forceful (as opposed to smooth).

Mix E was the highlight.  It’s to electronic dance tracks; which I often mix.  But the twist was that I manually beat matched the two!  To do so, I turned off sync and BPM display.  While you don’t have 100% granularity, I ended up adjusting the 2nd track to 125.03 BPM to match track A’s 125 BPM.  That’s as good as I could get.

Enjoy!

 

Mix B

 

Mix C

 

Mix E

This week was a fairly quick mix.  A lot of good singing.  I had 7 finalists including 2 remixes of Toni Braxton’s ‘Coping’, but narrowed it down to 4.  Two things stood out to me with this mix.  In transitions, I’d line things up, but kinda get caught in a point where the outgoing song would drop elements of the beat before the incoming one would add new elements in.  Hence the name ‘Whitespace’ for this mix.

The 2nd is that this is the first mix that I actually used a loop.  I needed two more bars to line up ‘Coping’, so if you listen carefully, you’ll hear the first bar repeat 3 times.  This is week two of the course I am taking.  It mentioned loops in one of the tutorials, but we cover them next week.  That gave me enough to feel like testing it.  I think it turned out well.

Also, this was the first mix where I used a master tempo to set all tracks to 125 BPM.  Enjoy!

I’ve wanted to do this mix for a while 🙂

At the gym, I heard the track, ‘Work from Home vs. My House’, which is a mashup of the two songs.  So, I figured it’d be fun sometime to see if I could do it as well.

The two tracks that I chose were the first to come to mind and a natural fit.  I am a HUGE fan of The-Dream.  On his 2009 album, ‘Love vs. Money’ he release, ‘Rockin’ That Sh!t’ and I loved the song.  The next year on his album ‘Love King’, he released, ‘F.I.L.A’.  I immediately thought, ‘wow, this is the exact same song’, but as such, I loved this song too.

So, now in DJing, I got a chance to play them together and see how similar they are.  I was actually surprised that they weren’t the same BPM.  The lyrics of ‘F.I.L.A.’ are better, but the beat of ‘Rockin’ That Sh!t’ is better.  But when prepping the mix, it became tricky to remember which was which in setting cue points or remembering what aspects of which I wanted.  And, once you match BPMs, you can pretty much play them both at the same time and it will sound pretty good.  The challenge was that both songs were still pretty good, so how to add to them by mixing in what is essentially the same song proved challenging.  Overall, I’m happy with the results.

Oh, and it was my first time using key lock to get the vocal pitch the same when beat matching!

Enjoy!

So, obviously, the title is an homage to A Tribe Called Quest.  That said, none of their tracks are in the mix.  It’s more that the three concepts have been my day.  I started the day attending a seminar on behavior change as part of another one of my hobbies, physical fitness.  As such, I spent most of the rest of my day evaluating my approach to life in all aspects (relationships, career, hobbies, etc.).  I ended the day putting together this mix.  I had the usual fun of putting it together, but I think this was the first truly hip hop mix.  So, rhymes 🙂

I let the tracks go a little longer this time around, so this is a little longer than my last couple of mixes.  The transitions are decent, but not perfect.  The last one (between Swang and Mask Off) flows pretty well, but I should have faded out the vocals of Swang.  Oh well, with more practices comes better results.

This may be my last mix for a little while.  Not because I am stopping; quite the opposite.  I am taking an 8 week course on DJing with Traktor.  So, while I’ll be working on getting better, the work product may not make it to the web.

Enjoy!

In addition to DJing, in the last year or so, I’ve really gotten into sneakers as well. The two seem to be intersecting. When I got sick I named the mix ‘Flu Game’, referencing Michael Jordan’s amazing performance in the NBA finals with a flu, which is used as the nickname of the Air Jordan 12 black and red shoes he was wearing. I seem to keep making mixes that are under 5 minutes, which will MixCloud will reject from uploading out of fear of it just being a single that you are trying to share illegally. So one day, I’ll probably name one of these the ‘Banned’ mix referencing the black and red Air Jordan 1’s that were considered banned after Jordan/Nike got a letter from the NBA that the black and red shoes he was wearing (actually a pair of Nike Airships) violated the uniform code (I think the black and red colorway need to have some white in it). I told you I was into sneakers.

I wanted to make this mix a little more upbeat, or should I say, ‘More Uptempo’ 🙂

Ironically, the two ‘Most Uptempo’ tracks were a little too fast for the mix, so I cut them.  At a consistent 125 bpm, there is a good flow to it, but it is a bit loungey.

Enjoy!

Another quick mix tonight.  I tried to mix 4 songs, but I couldn’t get the 4th one to flow.  I also started looking into adding looped cue points into a mix, but that’s still a little advanced for me.  So this mix is just a fun one to keep the momentum going.

I was down in Portland for the weekend, but I wanted to keep my momentum going.  So I did a super quick mix this week.  Just 3 tracks.  No new techniques, but I think my transitions are getting smoother.

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!

I was a little under the weather last weekend, so I was bummed that I didn’t really feel up to mixing.  But over the course of the week, I had a discussion with my boss on why he didn’t value goals.  His belief was that it leads people down the path of short term wins as opposed to establish a winning culture.  This article captures the idea:  https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/06/habits-vs-goals/

So, I’m making this mix in that spirit.  I’ll keep experimenting and learning.  And maybe just one day, I’ll be good at this 🙂

I tried again to use an effect.  And twice I used a ‘slam’ transition where I instantly shift focus from one track to another (though I do let the new track fade in in the background).  The coolest things is that I range from 60 bpm to 135 bpm.  There is a definite shift in mood within the 10 minutes of the mix.

Enjoy!

I was pretty excited for this mix.  First, it came on Saturday, September 30th, or 930 day!  Second, this was the first time I used an effect to transition.  Hopefully this would help me be able to transition better from songs of a radically different bpm (beats per minute).  And third, I switched from EDM to R&B/Hip Hop.

Unfortunately, as far as final result, this is the mix that I feel turned out the worse.  I aimed to use the echo effect on J.Lo’s ‘Same Girl’ to end on a beat, but I clipped the first words from the next verse.  There is a moment where the beats of ‘My Shit’ and ‘XO Tour’ play together, but it is literally one beat.  And last, when I was prepping the mix, I slowed down Fetty Wap’s ‘Again’ to 80 bpm.  It definitely had the sound and effect of screw music; which I thought was pretty cool.  But when I did the recording, it ended up synced at ~77 bpm.  The impact pushed the track’s pace down just enough more that it loses it’s melody.  Overall, there aren’t really any good ‘moments’.  It just sort of sounds like I mashed a few songs together.

 

Update: So, the above is how I felt when I did my first listen to the track.  I’ve now had a chance to settle in on it and enjoy it.  I think it is inevitable in the creative process that you become extremely critical on yourself.  And I’ll continue to do that.  But this intended to be a hobby and a creative outlet.  So, it’s ok to me if not everything turns out great as long as I am learning and having fun along the way!