I know you are surrounded by the overpowering urge to buy your body-weight in consumer electronics this Holiday season, so don’t let me stop you. Buy, buy, buy to your hearts desire but you might want to just wait about 2 weeks. In fact get your parents and friends to also wait a few weeks before also buying more electronics no-one really needs. Why, you might ask? 4 little letters my friend, NAMM. There is going to be some crazy things that will show up in Anaheim on January 17th and you might just want to save your hard earned money until you know what they are going to be. Sure, the loving- always delivering products on time manufactures might make you wait until next Christmas to actually get some of the new products they show this year but trust me, you might want to wait 2 weeks before you buy anything else. There are several key manufactures that will be dropping some really cool stuff into the digital dj mix this year so stay close as we will keep you posted on the most important.
Some older djs seem to have a sixth sense about mixing tracks. They will often mix similar songs to other djs but for some reason the sequence and timing results in a completely different feel. Promoters and dancers are left happy as the dance floor consistently explodes on the big tracks and chugs along between without any energy drops. There is no secret to their formula, many guys have just developed a keen ear and sense of when to play the rights tracks. Take a closer look by examining the musical structure of their sets and you might find they are often mixing in key and don’t even realize it.
So how you reliably tap into that knowledge without waiting for those random perfect mixes to pop up in your sets? Figure out all the keys of your songs and then learn how to wield that information to create a powerful dance-floor.
Continue reading ‘Are you mixing “in key”?’
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When M-audio first introduced the Oxygen 8 25-key MIDI controller, few could have predicted how widespread and popular it would become. By all accounts, that early model looked like a toy keyboard aimed squarely at bedroom producers. The strange thing was, it worked well, lasted forever and seemed to creep into just about everyone’s collection. So when I heard that M-Audio would be releasing a full-size MIDI DJ controller, it did not surprise me that it also looked a tad bit toyish. The only question was if it would be as handy and reliable as my Oxygen 8, which ironically was recently retired to keyboard heaven after nearly three years of destructive use as a dedicated DJ controller. Although it will take a few years and a lot of gigs to really put an Xponent to the test of time, first impressions are good, and it appears that it is just the tool to have in your arsenal of DJ weaponry.
Read the entire review here
For the past year I have been harping on the team at Ableton to include dj style song nudging in their software. Finally, when Live 7 hits selfs at the end of 2007, you will be able to do just that. This means that you can gently massage tracks together with a midi controller instead of using the mouse to manually adjust warp markers in the middle of a gig.
Another common dj complaint about Live has been the quality of its sound especially when several tracks are pushed to the max. To adress this and other requests they have wisely included a new series of vintage style studio compressors. If these new compressors live up to the hype you should be able to get the loud warm sound out of Live that people expect in the club.
If these new tools are implemented effectively, don’t be surprised to see a large group of djs that are currently straddling the fence jump over to using Ableton Live full time.
Ean Golden
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