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Elyot Grant - Dec 2010 Progressive Mix (2 hours, 47 tracks, mashups in key)
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| DJ_Elyot |
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Elyot Grant - Melodic Progressive Mix (2010-12-31).mp3
TLDR: This is a 2 hour mix containing 47 melodic progressive tracks of various flavours layered on top of one another. By far the most ambitious mix I've ever attempted. Made it over the holidays in Ableton by experimenting with a lot of chord progressions and ostinatos.
Tracklist:
01) Ormatie - Twisted Turns
02) Jay Lumen - Clear Memories [Ormatie Remix]
03) Bakke & Joni - Envision [Ilya Malyuev & Ormatie Remix]
04) Trim The Fat - Riding Rails
05) Michael Cassette - Kilimanjaro
06) Way Out West - Future Perfect
07) MOS - Kashmir
08) Boom Jinx & Jaytech - Milano
09) Shiloh - All That [Kassey Voorn Remix]
10) Eelke Klein - The Way That You Are
11) Karen Overton - Your Loving Arms
12) Robert Babicz - Dark Flower [Joris Voorn Remix]
13) 16 Bit Lolitas - Karmageddon
14) Matt Darey - Black Canyon [Andy Tau Remix]
15) Reflekt - Need To Feel Love [Adam K & Soha Remix]
16) Way Out West - Surrender
17) Cramp - Deadline
18) Max Graham - Does She Know Yet 2010
19) Dinka - Never Cheat on Strangers
20) DJ Observer - Sunrise Reloaded
21) Tritonal - Lights Over Austin
22) Tom Fall - Lotus
23) Beltek - Eclipse
24) Steve Kaetzel featuring Briana Holan - So Alone [George Acosta Edit]
25) Pryda - Evouh
26) Sgt Slick - Right in the Night
27) Adam Beyer - The Taxi Driver
28) John O'Callaghan featuring Audrey Gallagher - Take It All Away [Markus Schossow Nu Prog Remix]
29) Deadmau5 - Slip
30) Komytea - Professional Killers [Jerome Isma-Ae & Daniel Portman Remix]
31) Tatana - Autumn Sun
32) Mason - Syncrom
33) Firestorm presents Coll and Tolland - Redemption [Cressida Remix]
34) Daiquiri - Magnetica
35) Vojt Van Twistigen - Slow Slide [Gabriel Cazali Remix]
36) Pryda - Niton
37) Andy Moor - Halcyon
38) EDX - Party of Politics
39) Gai Barone - Lilith
40) Omnia - Stuck In Monday
41) The Blizzard & Omnia - Metanoia
42) Mr. Pit vs Jochen Miller - Perfect Chase
43) Vegaro - Miss You
44) Sensitize - If Only We Could Try
45) Dakota - Koolhaus [Moonbeam Remix]
46) Yuri Kane featuring Melissa Loretta - Daylight
47) Orkidea - Time
My original idea: I've been wanting to record some house/trance/progressive mixes for a while and had no time because of school. I also want to get better at Ableton, so sinking some time during the holidays into a solid Ableton mix seemed like a good idea. I thought I'd try progressive first and then do trance and house mixes later.
The full story: Wow. I had no idea it would turn out as it did. I probably spent well over 40 hours on this mix. Ableton is a unique and wonderful piece of software that lets you truly deconstruct music into its bits and pieces and reassemble them into something entirely new and wonderful. The ability to easily chop tracks up into samples and adjust their tempo and key independently introduces all kinds of new possibilities. I have no trouble seeing how people manage to fit 40+ tracks into an hour using Ableton.
The generic strategy for a successful mashup in electronic dance music is to simply take a popular instrumental track, find a popular vocal in the same key, and shove the vocal in during the breakdown. The chord progressions in dance music are so simple that it's almost guaranteed to work! Instant success! Instant play by Gareth Emery, Ashley Wallbridge, and Armin Van Buuren! But no lasting value.
Good electronic dance music is about subtle interactions between percussion, melodies, ostinatos, and textures. To find and construct new and exciting interactions among known ingredients is both challenging and incredibly time consuming, but ultimately is exponentially more rewarding. I wanted to do something beyond just mixing densely and throwing vocals over top of breakdowns; this mix is instead a rich collection of fine discoveries--classics sampled and reworked, new vibes created with old tracks, old melodies played in new modes, old ostinatos over new chord progressions, old conflicts and new resolutions.
There are places in this mix where 4 tracks are playing at the same time. There are places where I used 7 notch filters to remove harmonics from a sample so it would be consonant alongside a chord progression in a different key. There are places where individual notes' pitches have been adjusted. There are key changes at key moments. There are build-ups constructed from scratch. Ableton's warping algorithm has been pushed to its limit (but if I've done a good job, you won't notice!)
As for the music itself; I don't have much of an interest in popular tracks. This mix is full of gloomy and, at times, devastatingly sad and terrifying music. It's not candy store happy trance. However, like everything I play, these tunes are richly melodic. The mix more or less covers the melodic side of progressive trance, progressive house, deep progressive, and minimal progressive. Optimizing the flow of the set while maintaining consonant mixes and clustering tracks in the same key is quite an interesting combinatorial optimization problem. Rather than just hopping around a circle of fifths like Armin does, I prefer to make less obvious key changes in favour of better set flow.
I could have put more tracks in here, but I left some on the decks for longer deliberately because I wanted to let them play out. I don't think Armin-style yearmixes are optimally paced; sometimes you really just need to enjoy a quiet breakdown nice and slowly. ^_^ |
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| SYSTEM-J |
| Although we clearly have very different ideas of what constitutes gloomy and terrifying music, and although this flavour of prog is hardly my favourite... the level of artistry you say went into this makes me want to give it a listen anyway. If nothing else I want to know if that amount of technical skill and effort can audibly improve this kind of progressive set. |
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| david.michael |
| Curiosity is piqued... checking it out. |
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| DJ_Elyot |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
Although we clearly have very different ideas of what constitutes gloomy and terrifying music, and although this flavour of prog is hardly my favourite... the level of artistry you say went into this makes me want to give it a listen anyway. If nothing else I want to know if that amount of technical skill and effort can audibly improve this kind of progressive set. |
That would be the goal. Definitely interested to hear your thoughts, or even just if there were a few moments that you thought were particularly worthwhile.
I think 41:30 - 44:00 is my favourite "discovery". That and 70:45. Something about putting a new chord progression along with a familiar ostinato or vocal makes me irrationally happy. I'm curious as to whether other people are similarly effected.
There are also some interesting "theme and variations" type attempts where I steal the melody/hook from a track and try it against 2 or 3 different chord progressions. 55:07 / 57:36 / 59:28 is one example. 84:36 / 88:22 / 90:54 another. |
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| Yohan |
elyot, you know about my taste in trance so i won't comment on that lol
but i found this to be remarkably well programmed set. rarely i found any real noticeable clashes in mash ups and layering and whatnot. though some of the transitions aren't as smooth as it can be using ableton, but i guess you're still learning to use the program
certainly pretty cool set from technical point of view, even if some of the tunes make me want to throw up lol |
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| DJ_Elyot |
| quote: | Originally posted by Yohan
but i found this to be remarkably well programmed set. rarely i found any real noticeable clashes in mash ups and layering and whatnot. though some of the transitions aren't as smooth as it can be using ableton, but i guess you're still learning to use the program |
Could be that, but some of the transitions are also deliberately sudden. I actually prefer sudden transitions to slow ones when the tracks in question just don't sound that good when they're layered, and most trance these days seems to be following that style instead of the classic "blend for 1-3 minutes" type of mixing that's more-or-less mandatory with vinyl.
I'd be sorta sad if it goes to the other extreme and trance mixing turns into top40-style "flick the crossfader". I mostly just tried to minimize the boring parts include a variety of mixing styles, using really smooth transitions only when they sounded really good. |
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