Flunked Mix

I had a bunch of fun playing at Flunked on Thursday night, so I thought I’d throw my set online. It’s been a really long time since I’ve put up a mix, and whilst this is a bit of a mash in places, there are some great tunes here that I’m feeling right now, and think they should be shot out into the soup of sound on the interweb.

This is the first time I have done a mix without headphones for cueing. It’s all beatmatched in Ableton and controlled with my padKontrol (hacked with the awesome farmpad), and it’s got a bit of a techno mixing style going on: the padKontrol has just a couple of knobs, so all the EQing is a kill-fest. I enjoyed digging out the controller though and I think with a bit more tweaking, I’ll get it set up nicely with Ableton.

Edit: My ladyfriend has politely informed me that the above paragraph makes no sense to those who are neither DJs, or nerdarsarus’ (nerdasaurii?). Despite my objections, she’s generally right, so I should probably explain myself to those that don’t understand, but for whatever reason, give a damn. If you don’t (and you shouldn’t), skip ahead to the mix…

Once upon a time I was a DJ of sorts, and prided myself on playing music that no one liked/understood. These days, it’s apparently cool to be playing dubstep, so obviously I couldn’t continue the charade, and gave it away. A couple of good-hearted people still believe that I can do it though, so in an effort to prove them wrong, I agreed and played silly records. But now that I’m a poverty stricken student, I can’t afford shelling out for a large wax platter which only holds two tunes (one of which is crap, the other will go out of date before I get it home), so I spend my smaller dollars on MP3s (yes, I pay for them. If you think you can play your 128K iPod files on a club system, I’ll leave you alone in there with them and your bleeding ears).

There are all manner of ways to DJ with MP3s these days, but seeing as I’ll likely be spending a lot of time with Ableton in the future, I decided I might as well just move in permanently. Ableton started its life as a piece of software for DJs, before it became a fully (over)blown production suite. What makes it stand apart is it’s ability to take any two tracks thrown at it and keep them playing in time. It’s really not much harder than that – whatever that “DJ friend” of yours says. So, instead of having to listen to the next record in my headphones to make sure it’s in time (or doesn’t sound crap/is the right song/I’d rather be listening to than the rubbish you guys are dancing to), I know that when I hit play in Ableton, it’ll be in time.

The padKontrol is simply a controller, in the style of the ubiquitous MPC, which… uh… controls the software. I pretty much tell it which button/knob/pad/whatever makes which song/volume/fully sick effect/whatever do its thing in Ableton. I can already hear your stunned responses of “what a deft understanding of amazing technological advances he must possess!”, but truthfully it’s really, really simple. You should do it. Then I would stop getting asked to pretend to be a DJ.

Kodama – Flunked Mix (June 09) // 45min

1. Anders Ilar – Rain In All Familiar Places
2. Seafeel – Climactic Phase #3
3. Thomas Fehlmann – Goldhaar
4. Pole – Winkelestreben (Ghislain Poirier Remix)
5. Thriller – Hubble
6. 2562 – Sleepwalk
7. STP – The Fall (T++ Mix)
8. F – Epilogue (Ramadanman Rerub)
9. Martyn – Far Away
10. Millie & Andrea – Black Hammer
11. 2562 – Enforcers
12. Jamie Vex’d – Saturn’s Reply
13. T++ – Audio 1995#8_2
14. Anatomist – Holding Up The Dance
15. John Beltram – Soul Sketching

Download away (128k MP3)…