How good is your Mixing?

Zascar

I've been mixing for quite a few years now. I started just messing about with with Virtual DJ and it went from there. After having a number of controllers I recently decided to get CDJ's. My mixing has got better at each stage, but I still feel I want to get a lot better. I go through stages where I'm mixing really really well for ages, but then later it seems like I'm going backwards. I suppose everyone has their moments...

How would you rate your mixing? Are you pretty tight most of the time or would you be fairly basic? Do you like to constantly experiment with new things technically and creativly, or are you more just into nice smooth sets.

I've heard a few of the mixes from you guys, and some of you are just impeccable. I'd love to get that good. I've never actually had anyone teach me Anything, it's All just what I've worked out myself. How did you learn and did you have help from more experienced friends/Dj's?

How have your style and taste changed with this?

Riesen_Meal

I got my 1st set of decks in 99, after playing guitar for years, mainly just bought records (didnt even have a proper mixer!) and fluted around til I got my 1210s in 01, then things fell into place....

I mainly learned myself, and I met a mate of mine Nick Corrigan who used to play Mono and he started teachin me to play a bit better, kinda honed what I had learned before that....

Until I met him I couldnt mix to save my life for about a year, I use to frustrate myself in my room for ages, then one morning I woke up and it "clicked" (around when I got the 1210s, id had a lend of a set for ages before) I think you learn to "feel it" and its just became 2nd nature after that...

When I first started djing I used to play trance, as it was just a phase I was at, thats what started me off buying records, doing yokes etc...

I then got into progressive and breakbeat after that and that in turn led to me getting into Techno mainly and I think my music is stuck somewhere in between House and Techno now, I havent been djing at all recently anymore, I have a real job now and sort of fell outta that whole scene, but after having a break for over a year im getting a goo on me to go and do something other than playin at sessions....

Id rate my mixing 8/10, I get my hiccups the very odd time, anyone who says they dont is lying through their teeth!

PeakOutput

right now my mixing is shocking as work is getting in the way but i plan on getting back on form in august in preperation for going back to college and trying to get a few gigs.

tman

I'm absolutely shocking!
Very little variation in my style of mixing, and even that is well rough around the edges. (I'd pull off maybe 1-2 in every 10 mixes that I'm proud of)
Started getting somewhat decent last year, but then it all just started falling to ****...:o

jonny68

Started playing decks around 1994, i wasn't too bad played across the spectrum from House to Hardcore to Techno to Jungle, rarely ever sticking to the one style which is boring IMO, i also was one of the very few people in Dublin to champion non cheesy late 93/94 Happy Hardcore which surprising to some went down well at some party's i played it at.

Around 1998/99 i wouldn't say id lost interest but id already sold my decks and a lot of my records (regret doing it now) but lets say i "owed a few people a few quid for some things" (if you get my drift) and anyway my ever increasing chemical intake at that time was unfortunately taking "centre stage":eek: but anyway now in the new apartment with mate and he has Technics 12,10,s Mixer, laptop and Serato scratch im making a comeback,ill probably be shocking for a while but practice makes perfect.

I still plan on playing across the board from Funky House and Garage to some Electro House which are my preferred styles of dance music thesedays and obviously ill be rinsing out old skool as well as loads of other types of dance music and beyond.

We may even invite one or two of you folks to our house warming to play a set.:D

jonny68

While on the subject of mixing what style do people think is the hardest to mix?

IMO it's Hardcore Techno/Gabber and Old Skool Hardcore and Jungle can be tricky to mix as well with those cluttering rough Breakbeats.

CelloPoint

As good as this anyone?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA1lZjFzgI8

coreilly1

CelloPoint wrote:

As good as this anyone?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA1lZjFzgI8

F**kin sa-vige.

One of my mates got me into mixing back in college.I had always played in bands when I was younger so my musical tastes came from a different background. Got bored quite quickly of mixing house and tech-house so loved it when the mash-up scene was goin on.

Right now i wouldn't have time for playing those pre-made mash ups of beyonce vs nirvana ****, but love to mix from track to track through different genres like from reggae to drum n bass,hip hop to indie etc. It really works your brain and requires alot of concentration when beat matching. Scratch Perverts and coldcut would be prime exampples of it.

This is all IMO ofcourse so each to themselves!

Piggy bank is nearly full enough to purchase finalscratch so fingers crossed

Tim Robbins

coreilly1 wrote:

F**kin sa-vige.

One of my mates got me into mixing back in college.I had always played in bands when I was younger so my musical tastes came from a different background. Got bored quite quickly of mixing house and tech-house so loved it when the mash-up scene was goin on.

Right now i wouldn't have time for playing those pre-made mash ups of beyonce vs nirvana ****, but love to mix from track to track through different genres like from reggae to drum n bass,hip hop to indie etc. It really works your brain and requires alot of concentration when beat matching. Scratch Perverts and coldcut would be prime exampples of it.

This is all IMO ofcourse so each to themselves!

Piggy bank is nearly full enough to purchase finalscratch so fingers crossed

Very few DJs are up to studio standard mixing. It's not just about alinging beats, it's about mixing the correct records at the correct time.
Warren Kiernan was easily the best mixer in Ireland. After that perhaps Billy Scurry, Brian Chamberlan. After that in my day, there were a bunch of people whose mixing was up to club standard alright but not studio standard.

If you listened very closely you would hear occasional hear mistakes or cop outs i.e. if the next record was tricky to mix in they would kill the bass, use a spin back or the stop button to end the mix.

Out of the new crop. Arveene is a very good mixer, but I don't think he's as good as Warren Kiernan.

It's a sad thing for Irish DJing that Warren Kiernan never made it internationally. He was far better in all respects than Jonny Moy, Mark Kavanagh or Mr. Spring.

BaZmO*

CelloPoint wrote:

As good as this anyone?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA1lZjFzgI8

As good as that is I wouldn't call it mixing. It's production than anything else.


I bought my first mixer back in '92. I hadn't a clue what I was doing tbh. Didn't even have proper decks with the mixer, I was just using an old record player to play what vinyl I could afford from Abbey Discs at the time. Quite embarrassing when I think about it now but I was so young and green at the time.

It wasn't until I went to visit some family over in London later that year that I actually found out the basic principles of mixing. My cousin was big into the scene and he had a little studio set up and gave me some basic pointers to get me started. I also got a couple of mix tapes off him which were just amazing mix wise. Just hearing 2 tracks mixed together to create a whole other sound just blew me away. Up until then the only mix tapes that I'd heard were real basic, ya know the type, song banging away on deck 1 then out of nowhere BANG! song on deck 2 playing!

That mix tape influenced my style of mixing so much down through the years and it still does to this day. Love trying to create long tight mixes.

As soon as I could afford it I went out and got myself a set of proper decks, well at lease I thought they were proper, they were a sh1tty set of belt driven Technics that were really meant for use on a stereo system. But they did have pitch control so at least I could start trying to mix. It wasn’t until I actually bit the bullet and bought a set of second hand 1210’s in ’93 (that I still have to this day) that my mixing started to come on leaps and bounds.

After a few years of putting in a lot of practice I’d say that I got to a fairly decent level but for a myriad of reasons I just stopped buying vinyl and everything just sat in the corner gathering dust up until about a year ago when I decided to get back into it.

I’m probably not as good as I used to be but it’s just like riding a bike, after a bit more practice I should be up to speed.

As for how good my mixing is? I’ll let you decide, there’s a recent mix of mine posted in the “Irish DJ and Liveacts Sets” thread. I’d say I’m still fairly decent enough. One thing though, there’s something in me that always seems to panic whenever the record is pressed when doing a mix. I’m always fine when playing a gig or just mucking about but when I try to record a mix at home I just get all tense for some reason. It’s silly but maybe I just need to do more recordings to stop it.

Anyway, enough waffle….

B.

Riesen_Meal

coreilly1 wrote:

Piggy bank is nearly full enough to purchase finalscratch so fingers crossed

I'd look at Serato Scratch or Torque before looking at final scratch, mind you final scratch has a lot of its older problems ironed out nowadays....



Serato is just bloody fantastic!

Paul-M

I got my First decks (1210's) in febuary of this year, I'd messed around with stuff like virtual dj and then Traktor for a year or so before this.

I'd still regard my mixing as quite basic, I play mostly minimal, techno and some deeper kinda stuff. I've played a few parties and couple of gig's in the last two months in Rogue and Spirit.
I think playing out is the best way to improve your mixing because you become more self critical. When you have a gig you really push yourself to get a proper set together.

I've totally taught myself as I dont really know many other people well who play. I've no idea if my mixing technique is the recommended one (if there is such a thing) but it's what I'm comfortable with.

I think alot can be learnt from listening to live sets and hearing other peoples mixing.

jonny68

No one really cared too much back in the early 1990's about mixing as long as the tunes were good,sometimes when i was madoutofit on yokes i would do my best mixing,im sure im not the only one who was like that:D

Paul-M

Granted, it probally sounded amazing to you cause you were on yokes, there's not much that doesnt sound amazing when you are "madoutofit"........

Executive Steve

i reckon a few yokes does wonders for my mixing, drinks make me sloppy, weed makes me not really mind if i mess up, cocaine is the one to avoid though - too much of that and you start to believe that you do is capable of being less than perfect so you don't notice your "mixing" sounds like crates full of cutlery bouncing down a metal staircases.

Executive Steve

jonny68 wrote:

While on the subject of mixing what style do people think is the hardest to mix?

IMO it's Hardcore Techno/Gabber and Old Skool Hardcore and Jungle can be tricky to mix as well with those cluttering rough Breakbeats.

i find that stuff much easier to mix than deep house or hip hop...

hip hop is a nightmare because if you want to PROPERLY do seamless mixes and not just "get it somewhere in the right ball park and whack the fader across" mixes... you don't get a lot of time in between verses and choruses to get a long mix going or to really line things up and cue them up, and you have to know your tunes very well and know exactly how and when they drop.

as a rule of thumb the slower the music you play the harder it is to mix, as there are less beats to listen to and gauge the tempo off in any given period of time.

having said that, some of the really deep and complex jungle / dnb that i'd be into playing is so non repetitive that all you really have to go on is the first kick and the first snare of every 32 bar sequence - and that's before you even start worrying about what key you're in - never something you really need to worry about with techno but with house and dnb it's always a worry.

slow, melodic deep house is pretty tricky, and apart from getting girls dancing it's the most unrewarding music to mix as well, all you can really do with it once you have your tunes in the mix is muck about with the eq's and anything else sounds silly (fader cuts, channel kills etc)

PeakOutput

if you can beatmatch half decently any sort of hardcore should be fairly easy

beatmatching is not the hard part of mixing, for me anyway, its mixing in key that wrecks my head as no matter how good the beatmatch if the keys are out its gonna sound odd anyway

Executive Steve

the really challenging bit about the old early nineties hardcore and old school is not so much the beatmatching, it's the blending...

90% of those tunes were made in basement flats by ex soccer hooligans who were completely off their tits and hadn't a clue about music and how to structure it to make it "dj friendly" - so you have all sorts of structural idiosyncracies where the producers added an extra bar or two before a breakdown, or randomly lost count of the drums halfway through a tune, or the tunes are split up into several sections with different keys in them - makes you really have to learn your tunes inside out.

BaZmO*

Tim Robbins wrote:

If you listened very closely you would hear occasional hear mistakes or cop outs i.e. if the next record was tricky to mix in they would kill the bass, use a spin back or the stop button to end the mix.

How is killing the bass a cop out when mixing a track? If anything I'd say it shows a higher level of skill knowing when to do it. I'd agree with using using spin backs, annoys the hell out of me.

PeakOutput

coreilly1 wrote:

Piggy bank is nearly full enough to purchase finalscratch so fingers crossed

sorry i missed this first time around

Do not buy final scratch when you could buy serato or torque.............firstly stantons customer support is shocking(although their turntables are amazing) secondly last i heard they were in recievership(bankruptcy) and the final reason is that it was a crap system 2 years ago its definitely a crap system now.

if you cant afford serato go for torq

Riesen_Meal

PeakOutput wrote:

its mixing in key that wrecks my head as no matter how good the beatmatch if the keys are out its gonna sound odd anyway

I think mixing in key is really boring tbh.....

Makes music sound more repetitive and mind-numbingly boring, it was a big thing for certain prog djs at one point circa 98ish

Dave Seaman used to always do it, and a few other big djs from back in the day seemed to aswell, never really into it tbh, even though I can do it....

PeakOutput

Fieldog wrote:

I think mixing in key is really boring tbh.....

Makes music sound more repetitive and mind-numbingly boring, it was a big thing for certain prog djs at one point circa 98ish

Dave Seaman used to always do it, and a few other big djs from back in the day seemed to aswell, never really into it tbh, even though I can do it....

musically the songs will clash is they are not compatible keys so i dont understand how you can disgard it

BaZmO*

PeakOutput wrote:

musically the songs will clash is they are not compatible keys so i dont understand how you can disgard it

Personally I don't think it's as big a deal as some people would have you believe.

Riesen_Meal

PeakOutput wrote:

musically the songs will clash is they are not compatible keys so i dont understand how you can disgard it

Sure you can even create new keys by having 2 or 3 tracks in the mix!!!


With anything with a 4/4 or even a breakbeat it isnt really noticable, when it comes to electronic music its pretty much all the same, Ive never had the key of any of my songs written on a vinyl or a cd, okay I knew people who did it but it makes for a boring pre-programmed set if you ask me, look at the likes of Nick Warren and Seaman, theyre first 1 or two global underground cds are completely mixed in Key and it makes for boring listening imo....

Generally 89% of dance tracks (in same genre) will mix together perfectly, regardless of key....

jonny68

[cm]tyranny wrote:

i find that stuff much easier to mix than deep house or hip hop...

hip hop is a nightmare because if you want to PROPERLY do seamless mixes and not just "get it somewhere in the right ball park and whack the fader across" mixes... you don't get a lot of time in between verses and choruses to get a long mix going or to really line things up and cue them up, and you have to know your tunes very well and know exactly how and when they drop.

as a rule of thumb the slower the music you play the harder it is to mix, as there are less beats to listen to and gauge the tempo off in any given period of time.

having said that, some of the really deep and complex jungle / dnb that i'd be into playing is so non repetitive that all you really have to go on is the first kick and the first snare of every 32 bar sequence - and that's before you even start worrying about what key you're in - never something you really need to worry about with techno but with house and dnb it's always a worry.

slow, melodic deep house is pretty tricky, and apart from getting girls dancing it's the most unrewarding music to mix as well, all you can really do with it once you have your tunes in the mix is muck about with the eq's and anything else sounds silly (fader cuts, channel kills etc)

Never really tried mixing Hip Hop but you can scratch your way around Hip Hop if your good at that.

Deep House i suppose can be tricky but with Hardcore from the early 1990's depending on the BPM it can be very tricky,anyway with super Serato has makes things a lot easier.;)

jonny68

[cm]tyranny wrote:

the really challenging bit about the old early nineties hardcore and old school is not so much the beatmatching, it's the blending...

90% of those tunes were made in basement flats by ex soccer hooligans who were completely off their tits and hadn't a clue about music and how to structure it to make it "dj friendly" - so you have all sorts of structural idiosyncracies where the producers added an extra bar or two before a breakdown, or randomly lost count of the drums halfway through a tune, or the tunes are split up into several sections with different keys in them - makes you really have to learn your tunes inside out.

Yeah your right it was all about the blending of the music back then,although as time went on DJ's did attempt to try and mix it together, dunno about ex soccer hooligans making all that music, only a small percentage id say, most ex soccer hooligans were promoting the underground Raves or supplying the Security/Chemicals.

I still maintain that Hardcore Techno is notoriously difficult to mix due to it's BPM/High Tempo.

Tim Robbins

BaZmO* wrote:

How is killing the bass a cop out when mixing a track? If anything I'd say it shows a higher level of skill knowing when to do it. I'd agree with using using spin backs, annoys the hell out of me.

Some DJs kill the bass when they bass drum on each track goes out of sync other use it appropriately.

BaZmO*

Tim Robbins wrote:

Some DJs kill the bass when they bass drum on each track goes out of sync other use it appropriately.

Can't see how that'd make any difference as the hi-hats and snares/claps would be out of sync too and it'd just sound messy regardless.

Tim Robbins

BaZmO* wrote:

Can't see how that'd make any difference as the hi-hats and snares/claps would be out of sync too and it'd just sound messy regardless.

It does sound messy but not as bad when the bass is out of sync.

BaZmO*

Tim Robbins wrote:

It does sound messy but not as bad when the bass is out of sync.

True, but I'd rather kill the mix totally rather than kill the bass.

Tim Robbins

BaZmO* wrote:

True, but I'd rather kill the mix totally rather than kill the bass.

Just listening to your 26.07.07 mix now, not bad. Did you mix it up on CD or vinyl or MP3?

BaZmO*

Tim Robbins wrote:

Just listening to your 26.07.07 mix now, not bad. Did you mix it up on CD or vinyl or MP3?

Cheers. It's all vinyl. There's a few little mistakes but as I've said in that thread it's been a while since I've done a mix.

fish fingers

jees lads i know a lot of djs. All of them kill the bass in the song that they are mixing out of , including myself.The only person that notices is the dj himself. Thats vinyl mixing too.

Zascar

There is nothing wrong with killing the bass of the song on the way out if it's done properly, like If you time it well with the bass from the new song kicking in... Otherwise you might get two baselines clashing slightly. Much better to "Layer" the two tunes...

iRate Soundsyst

We update our alternative mixes and mash-ups on our myspace page on a weekly bases and have residencies in both Mullingar and Dublin.

Hit us up at www.myspace.com/iratesoundsystem

Executive Steve

jonny68 wrote:

I still maintain that Hardcore Techno is notoriously difficult to mix due to it's BPM/High Tempo.

well you're wrong, it's the high tempo that makes it EASIER to mix, because you can tell if it's going out of synch quicker because more stuff is happening in any given moment in time...

if a 100 bpm tune repeats itself every Xth of a minute, then a 200 bpm tune will repeat itself roughly twice as often

the hardest thing about mixing hardcore techno / gabber / speedcore etc is financing your crack habit.

BaZmO*

[cm]tyranny wrote:

the hardest thing about mixing hardcore techno / gabber / speedcore etc is financing your crack habit.

LOL.

Zascar wrote:

There is nothing wrong with killing the bass of the song on the way out if it's done properly, like If you time it well with the bass from the new song kicking in... Otherwise you might get two baselines clashing slightly. Much better to "Layer" the two tunes...

Well that would one major reason why I'd killed the bass when mixing in a track. Another reason would be that not all kick drums are the same so if you don't kill some of the bass it sounds very obvious when you're mixing a track in and the other out. But anyway, we're all agreed now that killing the bass is ok as long as it's done properly? Yes? Grand!!

Executive Steve

how on earth people can say with a straight face that judicious use of EQ is "cheating" and yet be happy to use a software package that does all the beatmatching and analyses / corrects your keys etc is quite beyond me to be honest....

jonny68

[cm]tyranny wrote:

well you're wrong, it's the high tempo that makes it EASIER to mix, because you can tell if it's going out of synch quicker because more stuff is happening in any given moment in time...

if a 100 bpm tune repeats itself every Xth of a minute, then a 200 bpm tune will repeat itself roughly twice as often

the hardest thing about mixing hardcore techno / gabber / speedcore etc is financing your crack habit.

I'm not wrong at all actually, with the BPM on certain tunes (not all hardcore techno tunes have the same BPM and sound the same)even if you've got somethig to beatmatch it's still notoriously difficult to mix and sounds like the a load of horses clattering a fence at the grand national, whereas slower stuff like deep house IMO is a lot easier, im going on personal experience having mixed most styles (i recently mixed some deep house and garage and it wasn't too bad for someone just getting back into it)

PeakOutput

jonny68 wrote:

I'm not wrong at all actually, with the BPM on certain tunes (not all hardcore techno tunes have the same BPM and sound the same)even if you've got somethig to beatmatch it's still notoriously difficult to mix and sounds like the a load of horses clattering a fence at the grand national, whereas slower stuff like deep house IMO is a lot easier, im going on personal experience having mixed most styles (i recently mixed some deep house and garage and it wasn't too bad for someone just getting back into it)

it is your OPINION that it is harder to mix hardcore however hardcore is NOT notoriously difficult to mix so you are wrong on that point

scitpo

Mixing is for gimps. I like to let a song play out then put on another one. Its only for a certain style of music though.

Executive Steve

jonny68 wrote:

I'm not wrong at all actually, with the BPM on certain tunes (not all hardcore techno tunes have the same BPM and sound the same)even if you've got somethig to beatmatch it's still notoriously difficult to mix and sounds like the a load of horses clattering a fence at the grand national, whereas slower stuff like deep house IMO is a lot easier, im going on personal experience having mixed most styles (i recently mixed some deep house and garage and it wasn't too bad for someone just getting back into it)

the great thing about hardcore / speedcore etc of course is that you're not going to make it sound any more ****ed up or ugly than it already is even if you have a major trainwreck

i'd call myself a pretty bloody good dj and i have an awful time mixing house, (although i find trance is even harder because there's generally nothing to do for eight minutes at a time until it's time to mix in the next tune. )

cheesemaker

I've always found faster(or hardcore) stuff easier to mix,the beats closer together and that.

As for my mixing I think having your mixes tight will never be as importent as the tunes your playing,or the buzz your trying to create in the room.Its a party after all and if its a good one everyone will be fu<ked and forget in two minutes if you simpley just faded one into the other.As long as its the right tune your bringing in everyones happy.

Its only other djs that will really notice **** ups and its the worst djs who ones take themselves too seriously.

BaZmO*

cheesemaker wrote:

and forget in two minutes if you simpley just faded one into the other.As long as its the right tune your bringing in everyones happy.

Its only other djs that will really notice **** ups and its the worst djs who ones take themselves too seriously.

Actually, I've found that generally the average joe tends to only notice a bad mix rather than a good one. A particularly bad mix is quite difficult to ignore. But I do know what you're saying with regards to the music being played being more important than mixing, I just find that good mixing can make good music sound better.

Luke! Broughan

house.128 bpm/130 bpm.



nuff said.....

David Michael

I don't understandf how people can dismiss mixing "keys" as you call them. I prefer the term harmonics

I Started DJ'ing in England around 1993. That would be bedroom DJ'ing!
Beat mixing is easy when you get it. Joining two toons is not that hard, again...once you have it sussed! I have a set of 1210's and an original Citronic Predator which I wub. The harmonics are important to keep the direction of the mix right. I noticed some one mentioned David Seaman above and I think his original Rennasiance mix is a prime example of seriously good Dj'ing. Nick Warren back in the day was good also.

The only out of the norm thing that I do is a thing a friend of mine called Phasing. That is when you play two copies of the same toon over each other. Something like Blue Amazon "No Other" Or Chakara "I am". Any Progressive trance type.

Other than that those who scratch mix are easily the best. In fairness thats proper mixing!

Zascar

Check out this thread on djforums.com on Harmonic Mixing

and this one too that I put on here a while back and got some interesting replies.