Archive for the ‘Mixes’ Category
Let’s take a topic such as DJ mixes. We are drowning in mixes available online. If I go up on the proton radio forum, I’m drowning in listings and listings of new mixes available from many, many DJs. It’s extremely hard to be heard and seen in such a crowded field of available material. It also shows this new world order where most consumers are producers, and like to produce material, to other producers who also like to produce material. So you want to do mixes and get others to listen to them? Ok — be different. Examples: make mixes that only have ancient tracks from the eighties with your own drum loop patterns everywhere. Scan for new material from net labels, spend a couple of weeks finding really interesting and totally unheard tracks, and release these. Make 2-minute cuts between every track. Make mixes where a large part of the instruments are real ones, sampled. Make theme-based mixes, such as sunset mixes, mixes about cars… Make AAC-enhanced files with images embedded, and chapter sections, similar to the extended podcast format. Invent a new kind of dance movement and make mixes around that one. Make a mix where 80% of the material is actually from your own music. Use tools like Ableton Live to the extreme, back to back mixing of tracks is boring, anyone could do that. And so on and so on. There are examples of similar mixes done by artists such as: Trentemoller, Steve Porter, James Holden, and so on.. There’s a reason these DJ/Mixer/Producers make mixes that people pay attention to. No more Les Djinns mixes :-).
It was just one opinion, but it might have some truth in it. A lot of electronic underground music produced today is really for the dance floor. Just the format of the intros an exit parts, with extended drum parts, are designed for DJs so they could easily mix in and out tracks. Hmm. Actually I would prefer to compose for listening purposes, too, where dancing is one element. One way is to release multiple remixes of the same track, but in the long term that’s also a drag. However, something that is more and more common with contemporary DJs is that they don’t really need the extended intros and exit parts. With CDJs, Ableton Live, Traktor, Torque et rest, it’s not so hard to set loop points and make your own intro and exit sections. It’s really for the vinyl and non-computer DJs where they need such parts. So in the long term there is really no need to make really extensive mixes. So what I will actually do with my productions from now is to just make them more listening-centric, and not worry so much about the remixing live, as more and more DJs know how to do it, and I should not worry about that part. So I think this compromise from now will work out just fine with my production work.
Anyway, one idea we came up with recently was to take tracks from the Tracks section where various producers are listing links to their new productions, and make this to a showcase mix. Here’s the link to the first showcase mix, ALDJ Mix Showcase 001. Actually mix showcase 002 is already in the works. Now, if you want to contribute material, check out the forum postings about the 002 showcase mix, here’s one of the threads. It was fun, but also a challenge, to mix this one, as the music is eclectic from slow chill up to drum and bass, in the same mix, or, from 118 BPM to 175. Also, there are many different kinds of styles. But that was also the fun part, to see what could be done with such widespread material. Anyway, check it out, for me it’s fun listening to a wide domain of electronic music. It was the first time I mixed drum & bass as well, and it’s not easy, I learned the hard way. The other thing that happened was that I got another interesting idea about working with new electronic music artists and net labels, more about those plans shortly!
Some additional notes. I really personally think that New Musik’s 24 Hours from Culture Part II is one of the first minimalist tracks, it has an 808 drum loop, as well as very simple melodies and atypical chord progressions. I remember listening to that track ages ago and thinking: hmm, good idea, but it would never fly for a whole album. Little did I know that minimalist music is so big today. So I started the mix with this track. New Musik is anyway one of my big influences since the early days of my music creation phase. Otherwise, the idea with the Pretty Gritty Strange Mix Collection is to try to achieve a balance of 1/3 pretty music, 1/3 gritty music, and 1/3 strange music. As in mathematics, it’s hard to get this balanced. This mix also has one of my own tracks at the end — many producers do mixes to promote their own material, so hey. I also added in podcast links now for easy subscribing to all the mixes I will export, I actually have a couple of others lined up, like one with minimalist music. Some might wonder, hey where’s all the free music you usually uploaded. This is what happened. But rest assured, something cool will show up soon. I tend to move between mix and track production modes — back and forth. Both are fun!
This mix is more of a collage of material, others and mine, trying to take existing material and just go beyond the normal mix tape format, own loops, cutting things into pieces and rearranging them, adding effects here and there, sometimes just plain wildly. Anyway, just wanted to take the art of mixing one step forward, or something like that. |
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Continuing how to market oneself, and be different. The first obvious angle is to take something that has been done over and over again, but this time do it differently.
While driving yesterday in the car, and I had a compilation of concurrent Berlin techno music playing, my wife said that this kind of music was designed for partying and going out, but not for listening purposes.
Maybe some of you know that I’m somewhat active on the 
Go this this link
New mix out: 
