DJs post your mixes for download

(35:17) 8. Seefeel - Charlotte’s Mouth - Too Pure
(40:44) 9. µ-Ziq - The Wheel - Rephlex

made me happy this morning on the way to work. so thanks for that.

I FEAR CHANGE

FWIW - all the mixes we put up on the blog are all good old fashioned live (mostly) vinyl mixing. Nuthin wrong with computers - but i do have my doubts about Acid though - the older versions used to do horrible things compression-wise...

frenchbloke - i'll give you one lesson for every 1000 records of mine you alphabetise.

but surely there's an advantage over vinyl anyway in practical terms. if it's as easy/easier to work that way why not do a live set in one style entirely without vinyl?

most ableton things i've heard sounded like a twitch wannabe (sorry stir) - whereas you can do allsorts in ableton, you can physically chop up the waveform onscreen and re-arrange it in acid 9and i daresay any similar program)( i re-jigged sxpress' hey music lover so that it played a slightly different tune for the xfm thing i did or you can go to extremes of chopping out every nth note and re-joining it to interesting results - turning 4/4 into 3/4 or 7/8 and what have you. takes bloody ages tho)

good god man...if Acid's no good for realtime mixing/cueing, how'd you manage?

And maybe (c) ableton mixes just sound different or a possible (d) the temptation to blend tunes together seamlessly in the awful Sasha Involver way is very strong when using Ableton, who's going to use it and go "ok I mixed these two records now I stop". Of course this is where the argument gets weird cos it's almost like I'm arguing that the limitations of human mixing on decks are a positive thing when they limit those of us that are not creative enough and would use the limitless possibilites of Ableton in a limited way! Myself included but that's why I've not got Ableton yet, I don't believe I can produce! (not yet anyhow)

Some of the above are reasons and some are just my reservations, of course!

x-post it's meant to be good for re-edits though, which seems a slightly more universal use and one I'd be into.

x post

and ronan, it is wonderful for re edits (which is what i mainly use it for). what used to take me a day to do on a hardware sampler now takes an hour.

sorry i thought that's what was meant re Albeton-only sets too - live mixing of uncompressed digital audio

fair point re 'too many cooks/over-egging' Ronan - the temptation is there for so many

what about just using a wav editor eg Sound Forge for making edits? what advantages would Abelton have over that?

*

but i guess it comes down to what you are familiar with. i know ableton inside out so that's all i use now.

I've been using Ableton in live settings, mainly for short sets, for about eight months. Recently I landed a couple of weekly residencies, one of which is geared towards more eclectic music programming. I decided to try Ableton for a full five hour night last Friday with disastrous results. About an hour into it, the program started randomly dropping out the sound. The dropouts ranged from microsecond glitches to 1 or 2 seconds of dead silence. Really embarrassing.

I bought Serato the next day, played at the club that night and had zero problems. knock. on. wood. Ableton has been relegated to the studio computer only.

I can speak from personal experience when I say that there's definitely a different energy with Ableton mixing in a live setting. The best way I can describe it is that the crowd > DJ feedback loop feels mediated by the computer. I don't get that feeling with Serato or Final Scratch though.

pretty much is the exact same as someone on the decks with real vinyl, as far as I could see.

that sounds like you need more ram. thankfully this has only happened to me once in recent memory and that was the other week in texas where there was so much bass vibration in the booth that my powerbook started freaking out. thankfully they were a very forgiving crowd.

there is a different energy from using ableton in a live setting which is why i use vinyl too but i think once you know your way round the software you learn little ways to make it sound, um, er, more jacking i guess is the best way to describe it.

cool! do you do this by manually cutting and pasting bits of the wav/data? does Ableton quantize the file so you know where to reposition snares or whatever by looking as well as hearing?

Someone posted this a while ago, I still had it in my history. It's sadly the only thing I know about mixing on ableton.

http://www.optimo.co.uk/hallelujah.jpg

it sounds tedious... but handy! I'm surprised they haven't worked out a way to use Recycle! technology to basically learn and do it for you.

most of the guys i know around here do entire sets in traktor. i tried it a few times but couldn't get used to "seeing" a track to cue it up as opposed to "hearing" it. abelton has hardware that you can do this with, right?

stir- when you were talking about "fixing" a track and replacing beats.. is this what i'm hearing during "kiss me again" on that mix of yours up at ourdisco? the way a dance beat lines up with it for 8 or 16 bars and then drops out... is that something you "fix" ahead of time, and not drop in live?

also- is that the hallelujah edit that was on beatsinspace over the summer?

rubbish, it's the most reliable software i've ever used.

stir- when you were talking about "fixing" a track and replacing beats.. is this what i'm hearing during "kiss me again" on that mix of yours up at ourdisco? the way a dance beat lines up with it for 8 or 16 bars and then drops out... is that something you "fix" ahead of time, and not drop in live?

no, no. i would have added that on top live. i never pre prepare actual mixes. i meant i 'fixed' it so it stayed rigidly in time and when i say replacing beats, i more mean putting an additional kik or some sub bass on it so it 'kicks' a bit more than the original. as i play a lot of old records and new records, i have to do this as the production on the old records is so different that alongside the new ones they would sound a little weak over a soundsytem.

also- is that the hallelujah edit that was on beatsinspace over the summer?

i'm not sure but very possibly.

jeffrey, i played in austin two weeks ago.

rubbish, it's the most reliable software i've ever used.
It was in reference to its automatic warp marker setting.

this may sound horribly ignorant of me... but how do i do this with headphones if my computer only has one headphone jack....? do i need some kind of external hardware?