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just thinking
I posted a topic here a while ago, perhaps a year or so but i've been thinking about the same thing again.
I tried doing the whole DJing thing using decks, i suppose i never really gave it enough effort but i never excelled at it and my short lived fantasies about becoming a superstar DJ vanished.
When i bought my computer for university i decided to get some DJing software to mess around on. I found it a hell of a lot easier to beatmatch (even without auto beatmatching) and it wasn't long before i could pull off what technically a perfectly acceptable set, two hours without any faults audible. I understand that my track selection is not very good and that in a club circumstance selecting tracks is a whole different kettle of fish but otherwise nothing was wrong.
I find myself thinking why, if it can be learnt in a handful of months, and pulled off with far more presicion than more manual types of mixing, and allows far more flexibility and options without a tonne of expensive hardware, why is software mixing not taking over from hardware mixing?
Before the obvious and dogmatic responses such as 'I wouldn't pay to see someone mix on a computer' 'I would be very disappointed paying $/£blah for someone not using decks' 'Software mixing will never be as personal' 'decks are just better' etc etc etc just think about it.
With the very high amount of skill a professional DJ requires put to use, insteasd of mundain standard types of tasks such as betmatch and mixing, could be put to use in other areas. E.g. more expert track selection, sampling other tracks and live bootlegging (in effect), looping to create new remixes live in club. Isn't that a more personal and worthwhile use of a DJ's skills?
I've always admired true hip hop (such as DJ Yoda) for being much more spontaneous and imaginative. I (kind of) learnt to mix at the same time as someone in my art class who span hip hop. The kind of stuff he mixed in was amazing e.g. 'bedtime stories for rainy days' beatles tracks, reggae, all manner of urban music, as well as sampling soundbites from TV, movies and such. I found listening to his mix tapes (even though i'm not a huge fan of the genre) because of the spontinaity (thats spelt incorrectly) they possessed.
What if that could be effectively transferred into the genre of trance? I go to my local club (deniro's in Newmarket if anyone knows it) and they play the same shit constantly. You never know if the stuff they'll play will be good or not, but one thing you are sure of is that they'll play record after record, doing nothing i could recreate on a home stereo (well, not that bad, it is mixed). Is it so wrong to ask for something different each week? I'm sure their probably are things like this out there somewhere but the fact remains, no matter how good a DJ set is, its just a list of tracks beatmatched. With software mixing a DJ would be free to do this kind of thing, making each set, not a list but a work of art. Don't the paying public deserve the best a DJ can provide?
Well, thats my 2 cents, what do you guys think?
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if i had a hammer...
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