Second DJ Mix

Today I just finished my second DJ mix CD; the first was made a little over a month ago, when I first started DJing Platinum. To my surprise, I never made a post entirely dedicated to this subject (it was however included in my Platinum posts). Anyway, the way I initially approached making a mix CD was to record myself (using Cubase) doing a live one-hour set on my actual turntables, the goal being to perform as perfect of a set as possible live.

Realistically though, doing an hour's worth of music is pretty difficult to do perfectly, so instead I am now taking my recorded live set and recreating it in Ableton. In the sense that the computer is doing my beat matching for me, this IS cheating, but I'm actually pretty good at beat matching live, so I don't feel like having the computer help me for my official promotional CDs is such a bad thing. Besides, I have a strong feeling this is how the top DJs do their mix CDs as well, so no worries.

A couple things that doing a studio version of a mix CD on a computer has over doing it as a live take are that I can add more than two layers to any mix, and I can better plan out the whole set, both on macro and micro levels. It is due to maximizing these features that I believe makes my second mix WAY stronger than my first. While the first was clean and fine in most respects, it wasn't really orchestrated with a compositional eye for detail like this new mix. In other words, as when I compose art music, I continuously listen back to a particular track (or blend between two tracks), and if I can think of a better way to do it, I will, even if it means investing much more time. So, although using multiple loops via multitracking, fade-ins/outs, automation envelopes, and a variety of effects requires much more time than simply crossfading intelligently between two tracks, I think the time required went a LONG way to making a really solid mix.

Maybe I'll figure out how to put it online (it's just over an hour, so that might be difficult), but until then, I can just give you a hard copy if you're interested.