20 - Hyperdog mix 2

One fine sunday afternoon, on the anniversary of devastating bushfires in Canberra (but not because of this) I finally had enough spare time to put together a new ‘hyperdog’ live mix. This, as avid readers of my previous notes (i.e. those nearly bored enough to voluntarily learn Esperanto) will know, is my way of practicing for when I do live mixing for real. I just plug the headphones into the second sound card, choose a tune and start the ‘live’ mix playing back to a dead channel; then I put tracks in and do all the touching up and whatnot as if I’m mixing live. It’s good practice.

And two things have been massively improved since that last mix. The first is me – I can see I’ve become better at judging which tunes will work well together and where to crossfade them. But the real, massive, fundamental improvement is in MixMeister Pro 5. Automated key detection and the superior bar detection has made things very very much easier. I can discard a whole swathe of songs that I would have had to constantly test-mix in before, simply because they’re the wrong key. And once I’ve dragged the crossfade regions into shape, they rarely need any fine tuning. In contrast with my previous mix where I was usually only 3-6 minutes ahead, this time I had almost double that at all times. (That means I have a lot of time to get the mix right). I had time to answer the phone at one point, and put in a nice bit of extra flanger effect on the outro of a track at another. So really it’s made me much more confident.

Still, I fear that no-one wants a DJ who just sits there and anonymously twiddles his computer – they want the spinning vinyl and the manularity of it all. Which is a pity, since these days I’m critical of vinyl mixers as being addicted to a dozen hot new cuts and just putting them together any old how. The punters don’t know the difference, right?

Completed 18 Jan 2004

Styles

• Trance

Files

• 20 - Hyperdog mix 2004-01-18.mp3 - 160 kbps - 84.3 MB

Total play length: 01:19:06

Track listing

I welcome any suggestions, criticisms and recommendations for new music to listen to. I will consider doing specific mixes for people, but this is only a hobby. Hope to hear from you.