On Djing...

i need a little lol or ridiculousness in my dance music to get me smiling you know?

yeah, that's what i thought. i love it, but i have a sort of embarrassing love for Stephan Bodzin. weird bald baby-man making very trancey tech-house.

what's the song? it's showing as unavailable

oof. it's the Bodzin/Huntemann remix of "Everything Counts"

Sounds sick

My dj gig was canceled because 'the club double-booked', oh well. At least I have a fun set ready to go for next time, or if I need to do a radio mix.

I know it's not true, but I really want to believe we are talking about slipping all 4 sides of Miles Davis - Big Fun in the middle of an industrial set because that would be amazing
― Mr. Cacciatore (Moodles), Tuesday, 19 October 2021

not miles davis but Peter brotzmann and 20 different djs playing at once, mixed signals, 4 AM pirate radio signals blending into each other. Requires a dj set to be chopped up into 20 different pieces then sloppily mixed in and out of each other, but it's fun, maximum hooligan plunderphonics. https://soundcloud.com/confccrew/tusk-mix

like a good portion of my rave experiences involved sharing space with 'roided up assholes from shitty New England suburbs, and I think some aspect of that is permanently imprinted in my musical taste
― Mr. Cacciatore (Moodles), Tuesday, 19 October 2021

of course. Dance music without arseholes is just cultural kitsch, instead of deferring to the state orator (der mussolini) it's the freedom to keep banging away, away, and away at the same mediocrity for 30 years, please allow me to pretend I think, sir.

DJ update:

- Yesterday I hired a studio just so I could use their CDJs and get to grips with getting my tracks on a USB in some usable order. It took an hour to wrap my head around the latter, and then an hour of mixing. It's all quite different from the Serato controller I use at home. It was well worth it though and now my anxiety about using club CDJs is calmed.

- Been asked to do an hour long guest mix for a local digital station which is great cos I had a mix of ravey bangers I wanted to make anyway. I'm trying to get better at mixing to different tempos rather than just blithely going up the BPM column as I'm wont to do. It means I have to be a lot more dextrous and creative about what I do each time. Had a go at the mix yesterday and it's actually pretty good but I'm gonna have another crack at it today

I like the idea of testing out the CDJs. Were they Pioneer? What were some things you figured out about them?

I'm trying to get better at mixing to different tempos rather than just blithely going up the BPM column as I'm wont to do.

I'm curious about what you mean by this

i have literally never mixed on CDJs 😮

same

the nice thing about mixing poppy dance music is that you can cut to a different bpm track at the end of a riser/drop and sound good easily. don't know how you do it from one track-y dance thing into another without some clunkiness.

i think maybe i should have gone the vinyl direction sometimes but it is what it is. i sold it all off and don't have the budget for it.

still an uphill slog trying to get gigs but we're moving toward winter now, slc goes to sleep. next thing is another fundraiser 12/3 for a houseless support org. i asked a newish guy to dj, more indie dance, has a good grasp of what makes for fun music imo.

all the cool djs here are playing records. a long-time party-thrower here likes what i play but vinyl is a requirement for their nights.

I guess my position there would be "lossless is ok" but I have also encountered issues where club owners are (justifiably) wary of those 1/8" headphone jacks as laptop outputs into a large house system.

(even with e.g. a Dragonfly, which I have, it still uses a 1/8" stereo cable out)

oh I sorta missed the CDJ part of that, I assume they have their own dedicated outputs w/like RCA cables or similar, so not the same as coming in with a laptop and a hard drive (like I usually do, plus one turntable and a few crates)

iirc even though I had my own mixer, the issue was the 1/8" laptop output, so I ended up playing all vinyl. n.b. this was like 10 years ago but the club is still there

a friend of mine was teaching me to use cdjs in her studio the fall/winter before the pandemic. djed once a few days before nye 2020 at a friends night and it was super fun. really wanna get back at it now that bars are reopening but dancing is still illegal indoors in british columbia (there’s actually a law that you have to have both hands on the table at all times lol). still have 2 usbs on my keychain full of heaters

both hands on the table at all times

:O :O :O

both hands on the table at all times

crazy!

(even with e.g. a Dragonfly, which I have, it still uses a 1/8" stereo cable out

have you had any issues with your Dragonfly?

They are wonderful things but i have had a ridiculously high number of them fail on me. i am speculating that high levels of bass might be blowing out the analogue circuit.

i have literally never mixed on CDJs either. i think i should maybe learn how to use a CDJ-3000 as there are some wild things one can do on them.

high levels of bass as in the vibration the bass creates is blowing them out.

the nice thing about mixing poppy dance music is that you can cut to a different bpm track at the end of a riser/drop and sound good easily. don't know how you do it from one track-y dance thing into another without some clunkiness.

― Linda and Jodie Rocco (map), Saturday, 6 November 2021

hip hop style mixing, meine junge! wack the crossfader und scratch the bit you want to mix in, then spin back first track if you want to. Sasha style mixing is a CIA psyop.

My Pioneer controller has RCA outs, and I have RCA to XLR cables.

The few times I've had to use CDJs I've always been nervous and looked up the manual and dumb tutorial videos to make sure I remember the deal. I've also used a controller/laptop a couple times even when they were an option, but have resolved not to do that in the future. :)

Also you can still twerk with both hands on the table. Well, I can't, but some can.

stir I have not had any issues with my Dragonfly so far, and it's been maybe 4 years or more? fingers crossed I guess.

wow! i have got through 10+ in that time. expensive! i'm starting to think i may have a DAC curse on me.

that is insane, you should talk to the company!

i should.

Unless there's a good reason for it (like it's a vintage music night or whatever) I feel that "strictly vinyl only" is broadly a form of gatekeeping that I'm against. The price of buying decks and mixers to practice on is way out of reach for most people, let alone buying vinyl all the time. Plus a lot of the music I play out has never and will never get released on a hard format.

The other day though I did decide to purchase some needles (even those were mad pricey) as I really fancied playing records at a night I was putting on in a nice cocktail bar. Really enjoyed it. I cant say I'm seasoned enough to mix records together, so it was more about finding nice segues between eclectic styles. But yeah, really vinyl mixing is a very different beast to digital mixing.

The weird thing about some CDJs is they don't accept WAVs, and I don't think hardly any of them play FLACs which is super annoying.

I like the idea of testing out the CDJs. Were they Pioneer? What were some things you figured out about them?

I'm trying to get better at mixing to different tempos rather than just blithely going up the BPM column as I'm wont to do.

I'm curious about what you mean by this

It's not a million miles from the Serato controller/laptop set up I have at home, but the layout is different and there's a slightly different tactility to it. I almost exclusively use hot cues at home and rarely touch the Cue button. The CDJs I were using did have Hot Cues but it's a bit fiddly and so I was mostly getting used to how the Cue works.

The other main thing was really how to get my crates from Serato onto a USB so that the CDJs understand it. So, with a lot of trial and error, here's what I learnt:

- Make sure your USB is formatted to Fat32 - not MacOS or ExFat. It took me ages to work this out.
- you may want to retitle your tracks so the tempo/key information is in there, e.g. "114 4A - Talking Heads - Once In A Lifetime", that way the info will be there when it comes to CDJing. Not essential though.
- in Serato, in the File section, copy my crate(s) onto the USB
- use Rekordbuddy2 to analyse them so that my hot cue info is on there (there is a tutorial on YouTube)
- use Rekordbox to analyse the tracks. Can take a while.
- Organise the tracks in tempo order by using the column headers, then (and this is very important) right-click on the track number column header and select Renumber (I think that's right). So what this does is it makes sure your tracks appear in Tempo order when you plug in the stick.
- Now make sure you export the playlist(s) back onto the stick. If you don't do this, nothing will work.

That all took me an hour to work out and I really wish I'd known about it beforehand because for the life of me I couldn't find any sort of online guide to show me and it was all very upsetting.

As for the BPM thing: digital DJing is very handy because it lets you sort your tracks by tempo. This is wonderful, especially when you're starting, because it means you can start slow and gradually up the tempo each time you drop a track. If course tempo isn't everything though: you might have two complementary sounding tracks that are in totally different tempos, so you can't just beatmatch them and do a smooth blend. Also, this thing of just gradually going up the tempos can make for kind of samey transitions and I'm getting a bit bored of this. So I'm trying to teach myself ways to really think about how tunes might fit together well even if they're out of step, and come up with more creative ways to mix them together.

Sorry, maybe I should have split that long post up into three separate ones.

ugh, that's good to know about FLAC since a large portion of my tracks are in that format, looks like I may have to convert them over or re-download in a different format

Yeah. I don't know if it's the case across the board but I think even Rekordbox doesn't support Flac and it's really puzzling

Rekordbox definitely supports FLAC, which is why I'm surprised so many of their CDJs do not

Ah okay. I was sure it would warn me if I had FLACs in a playlist but maybe I'm wrong

It might warn you since they are compatible with other hardware

I feel that "strictly vinyl only" is broadly a form of gatekeeping that I'm against.

do you mean if a night is being promoted as "strictly vinyl only" or if someone happens to be playing just vinyl.

if the former i'm with you 100% but i don't think playing only vinyl is gatekeeping.

Yeah the former. No problem with vinyl DJs or people who want to play vinyl, that's cool. But there's a strain of DJ snobbery that looks down on digital DJing as "not proper DJing" and it sucks. Plus, you know, people are there to dance and hear good music and that's the point

yes, absolutely. i'm pretty sure 99.999999% of people on a dancefloor couldn't care less whether it was vinyl or digital.

It's sometimes fun to have a formal constraint - like I've heard radio shows that are '45s only!' or whatever and it's can be a simple way to nudge people into dusty back alleys of their collections they might have otherwise forgotten about. Though I agree in general, certainly if served up with a side helping of snobbery/elitism. Maybe there should be a 'sourced from Limewire only!!' show or two.

Haha I was joking only the other day that I want to put on a night which is strictly 128kbps and below. Preferably RealAudio rips

There are definitely exceptions to the vinyl rule and I know a few fantastic vinyl only nights. But man, if it's a night of new electronic dance music, don't force everyone to play on vinyl

A couple of times when I was DJ-ing a weekly disco set on vinyl, problems with one of the decks meant that I had to "mix" (hmmm...) between the one good vinyl deck and the emergency backup offline Spotify playlist on my iPhone. I left the same 12" on the malfunctioning deck for the rest of the night, because I thought it looked better. On both occasions, NOBODY noticed or commented - so much for purism!

lmao

ha - i had that exact experience at a club that was very uptight about vinyl/"no computers!", nobody cared. people are too busy dancing to give a shit.

As for the BPM thing: digital DJing is very handy because it lets you sort your tracks by tempo. This is wonderful, especially when you're starting, because it means you can start slow and gradually up the tempo each time you drop a track. If course tempo isn't everything though: you might have two complementary sounding tracks that are in totally different tempos, so you can't just beatmatch them and do a smooth blend. Also, this thing of just gradually going up the tempos can make for kind of samey transitions and I'm getting a bit bored of this. So I'm trying to teach myself ways to really think about how tunes might fit together well even if they're out of step, and come up with more creative ways to mix them together.

― Urbandn hope all ye who enter here (dog latin), Sunday, November 7, 2021 10:57 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think my next mix has to be title Carry On Up The BPMs

unpopular opinion time. I have heard so many amazing mixes in a variety of styles (long blends, quick cuts, scratching, bpm defying genre-hopping, etc) that mixing skills no longer impresses me or interests me if they're done on a machine. What excites me is the depth of knowledge of the DJ (are they playing one genre, all current songs, or mixing styles and eras), and admittedly this is superficial and pointless, but I actually care more if the DJ has the music they are playing on vinyl. I'd rather be in a small room with a dj mixing across genres, tempos, and years, with physical copies of the music they're playing. I'm not going out to lose myself in the rhythm and dance for 8hrs anymore. I just want to hear some good tunes, and envy the record collection of the DJ selecting and mixing the music. Yes my opinion is superficial and dumb. Anybody can amass an amazing collection of music on mp3 and mix it brilliantly with a USB controller, and at this point, i don't give a shit about any of those mixes / DJs.

i hear that. i will admit to being one of those "vinyl sounds better" guys, even though i decided to go digital instead for practical purposes. i feel like i've never had the reaction of "cool track but why does it sound like shit" when someone is playing all vinyl. it can be scratchy or have surface noise or whatever but the range is friendly, it never has that piercing mid-high end that echoes on concrete walls and hurts your ears. i still get that from time to time when it's digital. i used to be gung-ho about compression being the source of the problem but i think it's a number of factors, including the room. there's something about the limited range from top to bottom of vinyl that's just friendlier to most spaces imo.

vinyl also makes sense when your city has a decent record store presence. not just new stuff but big stores of old stuff. that becomes part of the fabric, this whole wealth of material access that record stores bring. my city is shit with no real record stores and you're always ordering all of your records online anyway, which is such a slog imo compared to having a good or at least decent record store to go to.

I'm also envious of a nice record collection, but it's simply not financially viable for me to go down that path right now. Being able to do this all digitally opens up so many possibilities for me. I'm able to make the mixes I always dreamed about. Is it easier? Absolutely. But I think simplifying some of the more tedious or expensive aspects is an open invitation to get more creative and do things I wouldn't be able to do on vinyl.

the utter lack of a solid record store is a big issue here as well

xp

I do think there must be tons of unearthed vinyl from the past 30+ years still waiting to be discovered, but I have no idea how to find it