If you haven’t clicked the links on my homepage, you might not know that I have a soundcloud account. I have nine mixes on that account in a set entitled DJ Mixes that goes back several years. All are available for free download. That’s over 6 hours 33 minutes and 4 seconds of free sound.
With 1700 plays and nearly 350 downloads soundcloud has been very good to me. Except for the fact that it’s far too expensive to upgrade to pro. And that means whenever I have to delete an older mix I lose those play and download counts. But that’s just me complaining about the service.
In those nine mixes the genres are wide in range. Everything I love is represented. Dubstep, electro, minimal, witch house, nu-disco and Italo disco.
The music is selected by my obsessive music listening and editing. So I will explain it here for you simply in hopes that it might shed some light on how I work.
First, I have a 6 TB external drive that stores my music library. Everything I get is placed into a chronologically labeled playlist that is current. From there I wait till I get the 4.3 GB that is necessary to burn that playlist off. Before creating the new list, I place that 4.3 GB into a list entitled Unrated Listener. That list is synced to my iPhone.
I then proceed to listen and rate each of the songs in that list. Five stars for something I love, one star for things I don’t. When I get home I sync that list and move the five stars to a current five-star playlist and delete the one stars from the Unrated Listener. I continue till the five-star list completes at about 30 GB. It usually takes about 2 months. I probably listen to twice that amount to yield the 30 GB.
The backup discs are now up to 287 DVDs. I am on my nineteenth 5 Star Playlist. The bottom line is that I listen to a tremendous amount of music and that is how I create these mixes.
So back to the mixes themselves. Many of these are collaborations with Ernesto Repetto. They are marked in the information and on the cover.
When I say collaboration, I mean a lot of things. The February 16, 2010 mix was an attempt to fuse nu-disco with Stock, Aitken, Waterman production. So we carefully layered each of those bits. Re-editing each of the songs. Ernesto even playing sampled drums over the tracks via our Alesis ControlPad.
Some are more straightforward dj mixes. Others have four or five songs running at any given time. It depends on the genre and how intensely we approach the project.
Now all I need to do is put up the older ones, that I removed from soundcloud, on file sharing networks and offer those here too. Oh and maybe get on making a new mix.