Warsuit

Weird, I replied to this yesterday and that post is now gone…

Anyway, I liked it. I’m really really bad at giving any kind of constructive feedback on a mixtape, I either like them and leave them on or I don’t and I turn them off. I left this one on. Seriously you had me at Bumaye; I freaking love every version of that track I’ve ever heard. Maybe there’s mistakes or bits for improvement in your mixtape but I wouldn’t know because once a DJ “has me” those types of things are inaudible to me…too locked in. I’m normally put off by the current big room Tsunami sound, but you got me so locked in right away that I didn’t even notice that I was rocking out in my kitchen with my cat while cooking to the exact kind of music I don’t normally listen to.

So, good job then.

I’m just a DJ, I’m not production minded, so I can’t give you any advice on how to correct this small beef I have. The vocals don’t cut through the mix very well. They sound a bit “under water” when they come in at the 3min mark, across the break, and again at 4:36. If I’m going to play a mashup, it has to be sharp and crisp because it must be better than what i could reproduce live on the fly with 4 decks at my fingertips. Also, strictly speaking as a DJ here, I prefer mashups that have a concept and stick to it. Bringing in elements from too many songs waters down that concept in my opinion…but it’s just an opinion. My inbox gets tons of these big EDM mashups with long intricate names so someone somewhere must be loving and playing them…so keep it up then.

My criticism isn’t meant to sound harsh, so I hope that it didn’t. I have no filter and tend to sound more blunt than I mean to most of the time.

I’m a huge electro trash fan, so I didn’t find any particular “banging electro heaviness” in this mix. I suppose my context for “heavy” is skewed by my own tastes. I love electro though, and this was a good listen. It got my house cleaned this morning in style. Nice one.

I’ve gone through at least 5 copies of Soulslinger’s United DJs of America CD. Simply amazing. It was one of the first times that I actually “got” the difference between jungle and d&b (I was never really a jungle fan to begin with). Other pure gold CDs I rocked hard were Digweed’s first Bedrock disc and Danny Tenaglia’s first Global Underground joint. No one where I lived was playing that type of stuff. Adam X had a minimal techno disc I couldn’t get enough of either. I spent a lot of money on batteries back then. Mix CDs made up the majority of my casual music collection at one point.

I still think the format is relevant, just not the medium. I read the article and they mention podcasts and internet prevalence as the main reason for the “death” of the mix CD. In strictest terms they’re correct, but it hasn’t really killed off the mix as a method of discovery…perhaps the main culprit here isn’t the internet and podcasts but the fact that no one really rocks CD players anymore anyways. Chicken/egg.

The thing that gets me most is when I meet someone who is not a DJ screening tunes that has a bunch of electronic tracks on their iPod or whatever. I can’t imagine wanting to listen to this type of stuff on it’s own. Without a DJ playing it, it’s kind of a lame sound. I’ve been harrowed with argument from people over this opinion many times, but I just don’t think it is a viable form of casual listening, just to have a bunch of unmixed house tracks for example, and listen to them without them being used properly.

Most people I get into the argument with, especially the young and MOST especially the young DJs, really don’t like hearing me tell them that on its own it isn’t actually very good music. “Then why do you play it?” I get asked. “For the same reason you don’t live in a pile of rough lumber, loose nails, and random tools; you live in a finished house.”

To each their own. No accounting for taste. I don’t even try to explain it anymore.

So let me show the color of my roots here for a second; as long as we’re talking about mix CDs from back in the dayo…remember tpe packs? Oh man I had a serious collection of tape packs from UK d&b shows. It was the only way to see what was going on over there. Until WE started throwing them there just weren’t shows like that where I was at at the time. So not only were mix CDs essential to discovering new music, they were a way to discover whole new vibes, whole new kinds of energy, whole new cultures we didn’t know existed.

<wipes nostalgic tear from eye, thinks about mountain of white labels in the storage room>

And if you want to avoid using seperate tools like Start Is Back you can update Win8 to 8.1, which allows you to boot to the desktop instead of the start screen. The start button on the desktop is back in 8.1

Most probably know this but if no one says it out loud someone is going to have a really bad night: don’t make major changes like this to your gig laptop without rigorously stress testing the entire concept on another machine first if at all possible. You don’t need any surprises or in the middle of a jam. Even if you only have one machine, make sure you don’t make major (or even relatively minor) changes to its inner goings on if you don’t have a few days to put it right again before your next job.

1) Would you like to see such a competition? If yes, how often (monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, yearly, other)?
-Yes, monthly. Every quarter the monthly winners submit a new mix for the quarterly standoff. End of the year the 4 quarterly winners are likewise to submit a new mix to determine best of the year.

2) Would you participate if we had such competition? If yes, would you participate occassionally or every time?
-Yes, each and every time

3) Do you think there should be a senior/junior DJ competition or just one big one?
-Just one big one. I write as well, and in writing competition the “all in one comp” approach always made the juniors step their game way up because they knew who they had to compete with

4) What criteria do you think a mix should be judged on?
-I’m on board with there being a theme each month, so; adherence to theme (while judges still consider the context, after all my “poolside” mix would be drastically different from a house DJs) , skill (beatmatching, eq, structure, etc.), use of technology (find out what each DJ used to make their mix and ensure the judges are familiar with that gear so they know how well that DJ utilized its potential), bonus points for “jamability” (did the mix actually make you wanna get down within the context of the theme ie: did you actually *like* it independent of its technical merits.

5) What kind of reward do you think is suitable for the winner
-Props. Lots and lots of props. I also liked the idea above of a brief plug article for the winner.

You’ll find all sorts of good lists of things to turn off/disable in Windows 8 by searching the internet, and after running down all of them I was still having issues with my N4 doing the most bizarre things (like playing all 4 decks just fine, but lagging and stuttering more and more as I paused one deck at a time to the point where it would stall or freeze completely with only one deck playing) after I got a new Windows 8 laptop. I pulled most of my hair out trying to source the issue. I troubleshot everything three times. And then I finally got it sorted with something that was on NONE of the prep lists to make a Windows 8 laptop controller friendly:

Turn off live tiles.

Now it works like something from a dream.