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Why play live? Controllerism as a new live standard

28/10/2012 By 4 Comments

A lot of the tracks I produce are designed to also be performed live or recreated using my controller rig. So instead of pressing play and letting the tracks flow, I create controllerism routines out of them. The best example of this is my Live Dubstep Controllerism video, where I chopped the separate instruments and vocals of my track “Waking Up” into tiny bits and then practiced reassembling them into a song, with no quantization or other time adjustments.

One of the versions of my live rig. Lots of buttons, for lots of musical uses.

But why?

My resident artist sometimes asks me why I don’t use loops that I could just trigger and make my life easier. Or just play the full tracks altogether, since most of the audience won’t be able to tell whether or not I create completely new productions on the spot. I mean, that’s what deadmau5 used to insinuate that he did before his infamous “we all press play.” post, by bashing all DJs as a rule and other such comments.

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Deadmau5 fails hard.

28/06/2012 By 7 Comments

I don’t usually post rants, but THIS THING really got my blood boiling. The full rant is coming right away, but in case you want the contained and concise version of the thing, here is what I wrote on Controllerism.com about it:

In a recent post on his personal tumblr blog, Joel Zimmerman aka Deadmau5 writes a spell-check-free rant admitting that the best part of his live shows is sequenced beforehand and that all he does is to press play on his MacBook. He goes as far as to say that absolutely every electronic music performer does it and that nothing else exists. (*EDIT*: He’s also recently published this. See what I think at the end of original rant)

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MIDI Fighter 3D Review

07/05/2012 By 4 Comments

Although this is old news by now, I’m officially one of the first users of the MIDI Fighter 3D from DJTechTools, which I won off them in a contest they held back in March. The second I found out I’d won I decided to write the first complete review of the MF3D.

So after several days of rigorous testing (read: ‘playing with it and waving the thing around’) I finally think I’ve found out enough about its strong points and its kinks to write a useful article about it. Needless to say, the MIDI Fighter 3D is already a permanent part of my live setup. I find the arcade buttons a joy to play drums on, so it’s currently replacing one of my launchpads. I’ll talk more about the buttons a bit later.

The gist of what I’m about to write is this: although the hardware side of the controller is absolutely awesome and will definitely be a joy for any musical gear-head, at the time of this writing, the firmware still has some kinks and glitches. However, I’m sure DJTT will fix each and every one of them with future updates. Here’s the full version of it: [Read more...]

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Tagging Your Audio Stuff

10/04/2012 By Leave a Comment

I’ve had several requests over the last few weeks to write a post on how to tag tracks for the purpose of sharing on the internet and other such matters. The first thing I can say is that I’m no expert on the matter and I’m sure that my way of tagging is by far not the most efficient and not suited for all purposes. However, I’ve had a little bit of experience with sharing audio on social networks for listening and promotion purposes, as well as working with people over the internet and having to exchange files, so I can give a few tips.

Before doing the actual tagging, the most important thing to take into consideration is the format of the audio you’re going to upload, and this depends on what you’re planning to use it for.  Use .wav exports for work purposes, like submitting a podcast for a record label or sending the music score to the editor of a film and other such exploits. For sharing on SoundCloud, MySpace or any other site of similar listening purpose , for sending a demo to a blog or other such purposes, it’s a better idea to encode to mp3 .

Just as a side note, the mp3 bit rate you use when encoding is also quite important. I usually encode to 320kbps, but you can try different versions and see what works for you.

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