I did tonight a radio mix of a track for a project I can’t talk about yet, but if it pans out it will be really cool.

Radio mixes are actually tough to make, not that it didn’t take that long, but there’s another mind set when putting together a max four-minute track from an original dance track. It was easy with Ableton to just cut out four-bar time slots here and there to scale down the track, no need for a long intro and exit.

Also, I spent some time to make a big bang from the first four bars played, as the first eight bars or so are critical, if you don’t get the listened hooked, its over.

I also had to think about the intro-chorus-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-verse thing, been a while since I last had that mindset.

I need to make more radio edits of existing tracks long-term, anyway, as if I ever put out a compilation CD of PlanetoidPark material, the tracks can’t go over five-six minutes, anyway. Maybe it would be even best to render out radio mixes, anyway, as they are easier to sell.

There’s even an option to really make a radio mix first with an original track, and then extend it to dance remixes, hmm… Wonder who many are thinking like this, or is it old-fashioned producer thinking?

OK, uploade the deep funk + more funk remix, the main web page is here.

Forgot to mention, tried to invent new music forms, much to my wife’s annoyance. There’s epic trance funk (the remix with the Collette song + Steve Porter song), and later there’s trance funk (the last 10 minutes of the mix, starting with the remix of Rithma’s The Funk is Still Alive.

I tried to get my son doing an animation with plasma-centric chickens, but even he thought it was too strange. Anyway, the animation has to do with plasma.

What about The Chicken eating the Plasma TV? Well it has to do with a TV that’s been constantly back-ordered for a while. Meanwhile our old TV seems to hang on…

What have I’ve been doing the last three days (or actually 1.5)? Well, I’ve been working on an electro-funk remix called Funky Chicken Ate My Plasma TV, with lots of music purchased from Stompy.com.

I just wanted to check out this genre and do remixing work learning more how electro-funk, deep funk, and similar styles of dance music are put together.

If the car-test passes, it should be available tomorrow or so.

See the web page for the details and download.

It is kind of focusing on dreaming, and machine-made dreams, or something similar.

My son did the artwork in ten minutes using Photoshop and Flash.

I also used LAME for the MP3 encoding, really liked the output quality of the LAME encoder (compared with the iTunes MP3 encoder).

Had 16 tracks suddenly in my folder with interesting music, so I put it together, kind of melted into a dreamy remix, a lot of hypnotic dreaming progressive house, or something similar.

After 30 minute I just had to add in music related to how machines dream, so it’s a dream theme. Just need to figure out a good title related to dreaming, now.

Actually, after finishing this first take, I did a google search to find more about colors, music and machines, and found this interesting article, so the name of this mix is most likely The Dream of Color Music.

Also need to sleep (and dream), and then get back tomorrow and do a new pass with fresh ears and clean up anything that supposedly sounds good just now.

Something I worked on for a couple of days, Download from here. Note it will be gone soon, so hurry downloading it.

There’s remixed music by a many interesting new Brazilian and Latin-American artists, Zuco 103, Cyz, Electro Coco, a real techno mix of the Bebel Gilberto song Winter that was already a wild mix - Nuspirit Helsinki Reinterpretation). The ending is more commercial, sorry, had to sneak such parts in as it will be used for aerobics instructions. But the last song I really like, Yoa Ye Ye by Snowboy.

Spending this night trying to find 130-135bpm songs for a world music remix I promised some time ago, and I wanted to focus on Brazilian-themed dance tracks. To my great surprise there is such a movement, I found many Bebel Gilberto remixes, as well as bands such as Zuco103, Uma Batida Diferente, and others. iTunes is very handy when browsing and trying to find music for remixes, even odd cases such as Brazilian techno.

Ok, the remix is done, see this page for the track listing and the download.

I asked my son Riker to have fun with Mondrian animations, so he did an interesting Flash cover for the page.

Just did some last tweaks and changes, but at some point it’s best to stop and just publish the material.

The tracks start with mystical sounds, move over to robots taking over the world, then into more intense trance and techno material, and at the end it’s just strange mayhem and final pop-trance song. We listened to it tonight, me and my wife, while doing the traditional Saturday movie trip, and it was Ok for finally publishing the remix.

I had this three-month old remix project that I started, but never finished as I didn’t like the final cut. Anyway, last night 1am I took another listening, and took a crazy approach to just do everything differently concerning remixing.

Usually, there’s a certain pattern with longer DJ remixes, you build up the tempo from let’s say 120 up to 126 along a timeline of 50 minutes or so, and the style of the songs blend into each other, so the outcome is like this long ’same’ song.

Anyway, hey, I like shift-stick cars rather than automatic cars. So the tempo is going up, but there are all kinds of dramatic changes in the drum styles along the remix. I also mixed in all kinds of funny effects, chopped parts inside out, used the Live plugins to stutter samples around, and just had fun.

Sometimes rules have to be broken. If everyone did same kind of remixes, the world would be a boring place. And how could each remix artist even be noticed, if they copycat the style others use?

I just need to clean up the parts and then the remix will be uploaded to the web site, this weekend.

Another issue was that I used for this mix MP3 files, mostly from beatport. Argh, the sound quality, even with 320kps MP3 files are not there, the biggest problem being the high level of compression that causes strange overtone distortion in the losssy version.. So from now I will only get WAV and FLAC files, that’s for sure.