Yummy mix here of ambient, IDM, house, and other electronic grooves. Moves from slow to fast to slow again.

Give it a listen and enjoy.

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Here’s a funk and house set I mixed for TorrenTech radio.  Funk can be a bit tough to mix with all the tempo changes. I think this turned out pretty solid though.

Give it a listen and enjoy.

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If you like alternative and rock, this set might work well for you. Slow night at Pulse. Found out that the first Friday in every month I’m packed, but the other nights are variable depending on what’s going down in the city. First track was a request for Shaft from some regulars. It cracked me up so I gave it a play.
Anyways give it a listen, and let me know if you like.

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So this is a mix laden with trainwrecks but it’s still an enjoyable listen. The trainwrecks are a result of trying to blend songs that really just don’t work well together. But that’s half the reason for doing this. Lack of preparation probably hurt this mix more than I like to admit too, but what the hell. You be the judge, there is definately some truly momentos deliciouso throughout this mix

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This was a great night at Pulse. Took quite a few requests. Can’t say I care for the Beyonce/Kanye Ego track. Crowd was easy on the eyes and not to difficult to work with. Way better than the sweet sixteen bday party I found myself accidentally agreeing to this past Sunday. All the kids wanted to hear at the bday party was Soulja Boy and Gucci Mane. Never thought they were bad but maybe my ears are getting old because I certainly don’t think they are at all talented.

Anyways, tune in to this mix from Friday and let me know if you like or not.

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Had a good night. Generous compliments from the customers. A few requests here and there, everyone was cool. Played a decent amount of hip hop, alternative, rock, and cleaned up with house tunes at the end to shut the night down.

Wondering how I recorded this mix? I use an XY pattern mic setup for crowd and then record with my line outs on my mixer. I setup my a compressor on the mics to limit them from overloading and cut frequencies below 100 Hz because they generally distort on mics. With the two recordings I then blend them with Audacity so that it limits the sound distortion with the mic only setup and puts the bass back into the live set.

To deal with requests that have violent beat discrepancies that could not be mixed. I use a few different methods. The easiest is to transition into a song with an ambient intro or use a song that has a lead out with no drums. The second is to pre-splice a track with Ableton to deal with sharp transitions that you normally have to deal with like 74-125, 74-100, 90-125, 105-125 and the opposites. The final way is to scratch it in and hope for the best XD which, usually sounds messy. I think scratching has it’s time and place and makes more sense with beatmatched transitions, not trying to making the scratch the beatmatching tool. If there is a place and time for it… it would be with the intro has a tremendous amount of impact like Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’.

Anyways, here is my mix and tracklist. Give it a listen, enjoy, and comment.

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This weekend I feared Detroit had finally met its demise. We had 30 customers throughout all of Friday night that actually walked through the door. Ten of which were my friends showed up right before close and hung out after hours. They said every bar they hit before mine was dead as well and that it looked like the economic slowdown has finally steamrolled Detroit. Fortunately, this tragedy did not repeat itself Saturday.

When the night started off Pulse was a bit slow. There were maybe five customers hanging out on the patio and another five inside. From that point on however the night picked up slowly until around midnight when finally we had a full house.

The crowd was a bit rowdy and I actually had to tell them to settle down a few times, as you might here throughout this mix. A couple guys on the dancefloor mad a ridiculous attempt at breakdancing. On top of that every time a girl walked by these guys tried to grind on them even if the girls we’re just walking to and from the bathroom. It made me wonder what’s wrong with people these days… I’d expect them to first attempt to converse with girls before trying to pelvic thrust into them.

I had to tell them to knock it off so many times that eventually I just grabbed the bouncer to babysit over the kids. Their attitude changed immediately when the bouncer came around. They acted like they were completely innocent gentlemen and the broken glasses and commotion had nothing to do with them. It did help me appreciate the value of being friends with the bouncer and also made sure that our guests continued to enjoy themselves without having to worry about feeling annoyed or harassed when they just came out to have a good time.

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I spun this mix a few hours ago. It transitions through Ambient, IDM, Downtempo, Funk, House and other genres. I hope you enjoy it.

Nice little mix featuring some extremely talented artists like Bluetech, Ulrich Schnauss, Sneaker Pimps, Bastards of Funk, and Funkagenda to name a few.

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Requirements for a DJ vehicle.
1. It’s not an embarrassment
2. It can haul a turntable coffin, a pair of 18″ subwoofers, a pair of speakers, a table and other lighting and sound equipment, with room for at least one or two passengers
3. It gets decent gas mileage
4. Less than $30,000 new
Why are those points important? #1 if your vehicle looks like garbage, you’re just a little less cool and your music is a little less reputable. #2 If you can’t haul all that gear, plus a crew, you won’t have at least a core group of friends with you at your gig, which are your best promoters. #3 If you have to drive 100 miles to a gig that pays you $400 you don’t want to be kissing a $100 bucks away to gas. #4 It’s a given the inside of the vehicle will get scuffed from transporting gear, so spending a fortune on the vehicle doesn’t make a ton of sense.
If you have a good/funny idea post it in the comment section and I’ll add it to the poll if it looks reasonable.

What’s with drunk people at the bar? Many of them talk to DJs like they’re 1. A piece of garbage, 2. A piece of meat, 3. A stripper, 4. A bitch, 5. A god, 6. A jukebox encyclopedia, 7. An sophisticated A.I. that should recognize any off key hummed tune amid of 60 db of earth shaking bass. Well I’d like to inform the masses that we are none of the above. We are human and we do aim to please, but we usually will reconsider if someone is spilling their martini all over our vinyl. Despite the idiots that we deal with on occasion, I do enjoy conversation with anyone that’s less than 4 drinks deep in the bar and can stand on their own two feet without my assistance while I’m trying to mix tunes together.

What’s my point?

I don’t have one. I just thought this would be a good way to start my story section of the blog, we’re we can rant about the stupid incidents that we DJs have had to deal with while spinning in clubs, bars, and lounges.

One incident that sticks out strongly in my mind is an idiot that requested that I play several Michael Jackson songs throughout the night. He was that guy that I don’t know, but was putting his arm around me and yelling into my ear from two inches away with beer breath. You’ve all met him a few times. Anyway, the end of the night came around and the bouncers were kicking people out of the bar and the d-bag comes up to me and starts yelling at me for not playing Thriller. I’m not trying to skew the objectivity of this story when I say I apologized and kept going about my business, but I was packing my things and that just what I do. The kid however doesn’t let up and comes onto the stage and starts touching my equipment and saying my technic turntable are ’shit’ and I must think I’m cool with a ‘macbook’ This flips my switch and I push the kid off the stage, which of course ignites a situation and the bouncers have to drag the idiot and his friends out a half hour after closing. I never got a call back from that bar, even though they had a blowout night, go figure… they probably thought that whole situation was my fault. I’d rather not play a venue with high percentage of idiots that ‘demand’ super played-out songs anyway.