Relentless » Strictly House Music

house music by dattrax

dattrax: this mix was made w/ two technics 1200 vinyl turntables, pioneer djm-500 mixer, rane SL1 convertor box, and serato scratch live dj software, itunes playlists and sony soundforge for recording.
Borrowed a friend's serato/ rane set up and it is a blast. Had more fun making this mix than most of the last gigs w/ mixing w/ cds. Made about 1/2 a dozen mixes before this on serato. "Mainstay, MixTwo" was made w/ serato/ rane set up.
This is the best of the fusion of digital music files and the tactile control of vinyl turntables. What I did was loaded around 250 tracks into itunes library. Then made six playlists of mp3/ wave tracks titled: instrumental.mellow, ".medium, ".harder & vocal.mellow, ".medium, ".harder because the problem w/ digital tracks is that if you are not organised you can't create a good groove/ flow through a mix. It was a lot easier when it was vinyl because you picked 100 records for an hour gig (this gave you a choice of 3-4records to choose from for every track you played) and your brain remembered the colour of the sleeves, the sticker label on each side A or B, the name of the label or artists, you knew exactly where your favourite track was.
With digital, when you buy 20-30tracks per week and your collection accumulates fast, you don't know what is what because the names are just words. Even when you do what we do, and burn onto single cds, it gets difficult because it's our chicken scratch w/ black permanent marker on silver blank cds. W/ cds we organised vocals in different carrying folders than instrumentals. I've seen a lot of local DJs burn 12-15+ tracks on one disk w/ a paper list in the insert of the holder. It's too confusing to create a vibe- too much music.
It's faster using serato, then thumbing through folders for cds. Select the folder (playlist in itunes since serato syncs to itunes), then scroll to desired track, then click and drag into the serato software interface- left or right side turntable on screen. Now because of the rane SL1 box, the track is calibrated to the vinyl for instant response. It's the coolest thing. Playing digital tracks on vinyl is amazing! Nothing beats the tactile feel of vinyl for mixing. It's such a blast! Can't wait to try traxtor's system. From what I'm seeing on websites/ youtube etc, it looks like traxtor is more flexible. I'm sure there are tons of bells & whistles that I don't know about in serato, but my friend needs his stuff back soon, so I'll just keep to basics.
The djm500 mixer is still one of my favourite dj mixers to play on. Love how the buttons, knobs, crossfader feel. The efx are simple to use and lots of fun to play around with (hope i didn't do too many to make this mix annoying or anything).
Hope you enjoy this mix, please comment here if you do.
BTW... going to put our slogan 'strictly house music' in every title now because I realised when searching for mixes to listen to in podomatic that a lot of other DJs were smart and put 'house music' in the title, so that it shows up in the search results.
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