Undoubtedly I love music. It's a kind of love that's different from what most people think. Almost everyone on Earth says they love music. Really, who doesn't?
Well I love it too, and like I said it's kind of different. For me it's more about actually playing music and composing it. Being a guitarist and having a bit of ear for scales, I find it quite easy to create new tunes. Recording them and building and improvising is another whole story which I somehow do not find time for. After picking up the guitar and getting really absorbed into Rock music, I started treating other genres with contempt. I felt that rock music was more about the process of inspiration, songwriting, composing, producing and having most importantly, the skill to create the individual pieces that make the song. Somehow it wasn't that interesting with Electronic music. The use of effects and buttons to create music wasn't very appealing to me. I felt that kind of "too easy". And I did demonstrate that to my friends.
It would take about a minute to create a drum and bass sequence and another couple of minutes to overlay a set of chords and a small tune on top (I still use some non-electronic terms with the lack of knowledge). From there, it was about adding some effects and controlling the individual instruments to create a 2-3 min demo track. Of course producing the track to it's final version would take a while but the actual process of creation didn't need too much effort. It definitely takes much longer for me even to create a 1-2 min long rock track.
But somehow, my view about music started changing. If it was more to do with crowd interaction rather than just self-satisfaction, then the other genres of music still manage to pull crazy numbers of people. I have friends who had been to the Ultra Music Festival in Florida and it's just crazy how many people turn up to dance to a 4/4 sequence with a bass line and progressing layers of instruments and vocals over it.
I still stuck to my roots of rock music and continued playing guitar live on stage at small events. But recently in Feb, I had people asking me to "DJ" for an event we had on-campus. "DJ"ing? That was an idea I didn't really like, being a traditional musician but since I already had an idea about terms like BPM and "beatmatching" (I never used the term beatmatching until recently) and phrasing of music, I decided to give it a shot. I was supposed to play only Bollywood dance music for the event and that was kind of tough because it was not just a new genre but a new playlist itself. I was asked to "play good songs". But what were good songs? I had no playlist, I had no idea what music to play.
But some help from friends, I made a short playlist to last me a couple of hours at the least. The next most important thing was getting some kind of controller to mix the music (yeah, I was in that bad a situation). I had never used any kind of DJ controller before this. With no time to research and not much money to spend, I decided to get a basic Midi Controller to do the mixing. I had a couple of days to practice with the controller and get to know the songs. I couldn't do much and turned up for the "gig" under prepared and low on confidence. I created some mappings on my keyboard so I could mix my songs up without sounding too bad. The "sync" option on software proved to be quite helpful for automatic beatmatching. Since, I already knew about waveforms and equalizers, I had no trouble giving smooth transitions between songs. And for songs where BPMs were too far apart, I used some backspin effects or timed drops (couple of more terms I didn't know what to call before I knew them) to change the music. I had a friend stand next to me who was helping me out with the progression of the tracklist. I had no idea what song to play next. But it worked out pretty well by the end of the night. I could tell from the faces and reactions, my first "gig" went well. Armed with nothing but a laptop and controller that would fit in my bag, I mixed music live for a small crowd.
Now that, I had done it without much knowledge, I actually started researching about the so-called "Electronic Dance Music" (EDM) scene. More than popular radio dance hits , I was attracted to house music. I didn't know the difference until very very recently, like a month ago.
I still know nothing much about this genre. I rarely heard tracks from Armin van Burren and the big list of European electronic artists/DJs/producers. I have heard about people getting offended when one can't distinguish between DJs and producers and whatever else they like to be called. Why can't we all be called musicians? You might twist knobs and press buttons and I might be palm muting and stomping away on the expression pedal, but we are all making/playing music. I used to laugh at that guy wearing the oversized head of a dead mouse and laugh more when my friends corrected me it was a mau5 head. I had no idea that those 140 bpm tracks that sound like they are playing at 70 bpm were called dubstep. Who knew people love this music so much? Where did Metallica, Iron Maiden, Alter Bridge, Joe Satriani, and the good old Pink Floyd go?
I am stuck in a pretty strange conflict right now. I don't know if other musicians have gone through this, but I can definitely feel it. I still love traditional music, but right now, EDM is kind of obsessive. I can't help but play around with the controller that I have and keep trying to learn new stuff with the controls.
I'm still discovering new artists and finding out about new sub-genres under the Electronic umbrella. Some of those progressive house tracks are so minimalistic and brilliant mood setters, I'm starting to appreciate this genre finally. But as I'm going deeper into this genre, I'm finding conflicts within lovers of the same kind of music. The countless debates between "real and fake" DJs. I don't really see the point and I don't even have enough knowledge to comment on this. But I've seen people dancing as enthusiastically as they would in any good club, even if the "DJ" was me using just a laptop and a basic midi controller. Even something as simple as a crossfade between two songs with the equalizer knobs had people dancing away with renewed excitement when they find the track changed! It's all about the situation and the crowd.
Yeah, maybe people would appreciate your talents if you had used vinyls and did manual beatmatching by ear and used some good scratching techniques. But when they are out there on the floor, most of the times, they cannot even see what you're equipment you're using and most people wouldn't even know the difference between vinyls and a midi controller. They would just see a big bunch of knobs and faders everywhere. Now when it comes to the quality of the music, there's a definite downside with compressed MP3 files. And again there's the upside of fitting all your equipment in a backpack and going out to "gig" and most importantly being able to afford to actually do it.
That being said, I find the art of beatmatching by ear quite intriguing. I noticed I was getting too used to the sync function on DJ software but I'm starting to find that a bit too automatic, a bit too boring. It's kind of a weird feeling to let the software do everything. You don't even have to press the play button at the right time, it will still sync your beats. Hmm. I need something more than that if I want to get a rush out of this genre of music. I can't just stand there and pretend like I'm doing cool stuff when all I'm doing is pressing the play button and using the equalizers and effects. And the techniques of scratching (I didn't know they had names until recently again, like babies, chirps, crabs, etc) also look interesting. From what I've seen, that needs a little skill and hand-hand coordination as well. While I can play a guitar with eyes closed, I definitely cannot scratch! Random motion of the touchwheel might still sound cool sometimes, but it's just too random to be called scratching.
At another recent "gig" where there were Punjabi families dancing to bhangra, I noticed a 5 year old kid whose eyes were gleaming at the sight of all the flashing LEDs and all the buttons. (Yeah, I kind of mapped my controller's LEDs to do a lot of flashy stuff). Since it wasn't really critical for me to nail every note bang on, I asked the kid to just play with the inactive deck's jogwheel up and down while I was cutting with the crossfader. Since my crossfader cutting was timed, it sounded pretty good and people had noticed. A KID was scratching! DJ 5-year-old-Kid-in-the-golf-club-bar is going to be his name.
So yeah, despite having all the auto stuff, I'm trying to create a challenge for myself. Is it hard to beatmatch manually? Definitely yes! The last few days, I've been trying to beatmatch without looking at the waveforms or the BPM indicators. Setting a cue point and manually matching it, all just by ear. It's kind of tough to concentrate on the two tracks separately. Sometimes we want them playing together, sometimes isolated. It becomes particularly challenging when the two tracks are very close and separated by a couple of decimal points. They eventually go out of sync but stay on for quite a while to fool you into thinking you matched them. We can probably still fix that by just pushing or pulling the track just a little bit to bring the beats back on. I'm thinking each person has a different way to find his quickest method of beatmatching. I've sometimes taken a few seconds (probably got lucky) and sometimes over 3-4 minutes. I still need to discover a kind of pattern that I like to follow.
Anyway, so that's the rant about me rediscovering the Music scene. One thing I've learned is to not stereotype any kind of music. When you enjoy something, just play/listen/compose/produce it. And while you enjoy that, it doesn't mean that the other genres or other "ways of learning" are tasteless or "fake". It's always good to take a diplomatic stance and look at the pros and cons of all the options. People will do what they find convenient financially and technically. By the way, I might have sounded a bit harsh in my previous post about photography. It's almost a similar situation with everything going Digital and auto, the actual art of photography is slowly disappearing except for those few people who still love doing things the traditional way. So maybe I need to take a more diplomatic stand in that too. Maybe..
Anyway, as a closing word, for any musician/dj/producer/whatever, the universal rule still applies, practice always makes perfect.
P.S : I was listening to an Alt Metal/Hard Rock/Post-Grunge playlist (Alter Bridge, Breaking Benjamin, Creed, Audioslave, Theory of a Deadman, Chevelle, Daughtry, Hinder, Saving Abel, My Darkest Days, Seether, Shinedown, etc.......) while typing this out.
Well I love it too, and like I said it's kind of different. For me it's more about actually playing music and composing it. Being a guitarist and having a bit of ear for scales, I find it quite easy to create new tunes. Recording them and building and improvising is another whole story which I somehow do not find time for. After picking up the guitar and getting really absorbed into Rock music, I started treating other genres with contempt. I felt that rock music was more about the process of inspiration, songwriting, composing, producing and having most importantly, the skill to create the individual pieces that make the song. Somehow it wasn't that interesting with Electronic music. The use of effects and buttons to create music wasn't very appealing to me. I felt that kind of "too easy". And I did demonstrate that to my friends.
It would take about a minute to create a drum and bass sequence and another couple of minutes to overlay a set of chords and a small tune on top (I still use some non-electronic terms with the lack of knowledge). From there, it was about adding some effects and controlling the individual instruments to create a 2-3 min demo track. Of course producing the track to it's final version would take a while but the actual process of creation didn't need too much effort. It definitely takes much longer for me even to create a 1-2 min long rock track.
But somehow, my view about music started changing. If it was more to do with crowd interaction rather than just self-satisfaction, then the other genres of music still manage to pull crazy numbers of people. I have friends who had been to the Ultra Music Festival in Florida and it's just crazy how many people turn up to dance to a 4/4 sequence with a bass line and progressing layers of instruments and vocals over it.
I still stuck to my roots of rock music and continued playing guitar live on stage at small events. But recently in Feb, I had people asking me to "DJ" for an event we had on-campus. "DJ"ing? That was an idea I didn't really like, being a traditional musician but since I already had an idea about terms like BPM and "beatmatching" (I never used the term beatmatching until recently) and phrasing of music, I decided to give it a shot. I was supposed to play only Bollywood dance music for the event and that was kind of tough because it was not just a new genre but a new playlist itself. I was asked to "play good songs". But what were good songs? I had no playlist, I had no idea what music to play.
But some help from friends, I made a short playlist to last me a couple of hours at the least. The next most important thing was getting some kind of controller to mix the music (yeah, I was in that bad a situation). I had never used any kind of DJ controller before this. With no time to research and not much money to spend, I decided to get a basic Midi Controller to do the mixing. I had a couple of days to practice with the controller and get to know the songs. I couldn't do much and turned up for the "gig" under prepared and low on confidence. I created some mappings on my keyboard so I could mix my songs up without sounding too bad. The "sync" option on software proved to be quite helpful for automatic beatmatching. Since, I already knew about waveforms and equalizers, I had no trouble giving smooth transitions between songs. And for songs where BPMs were too far apart, I used some backspin effects or timed drops (couple of more terms I didn't know what to call before I knew them) to change the music. I had a friend stand next to me who was helping me out with the progression of the tracklist. I had no idea what song to play next. But it worked out pretty well by the end of the night. I could tell from the faces and reactions, my first "gig" went well. Armed with nothing but a laptop and controller that would fit in my bag, I mixed music live for a small crowd.
Now that, I had done it without much knowledge, I actually started researching about the so-called "Electronic Dance Music" (EDM) scene. More than popular radio dance hits , I was attracted to house music. I didn't know the difference until very very recently, like a month ago.
I still know nothing much about this genre. I rarely heard tracks from Armin van Burren and the big list of European electronic artists/DJs/producers. I have heard about people getting offended when one can't distinguish between DJs and producers and whatever else they like to be called. Why can't we all be called musicians? You might twist knobs and press buttons and I might be palm muting and stomping away on the expression pedal, but we are all making/playing music. I used to laugh at that guy wearing the oversized head of a dead mouse and laugh more when my friends corrected me it was a mau5 head. I had no idea that those 140 bpm tracks that sound like they are playing at 70 bpm were called dubstep. Who knew people love this music so much? Where did Metallica, Iron Maiden, Alter Bridge, Joe Satriani, and the good old Pink Floyd go?
I am stuck in a pretty strange conflict right now. I don't know if other musicians have gone through this, but I can definitely feel it. I still love traditional music, but right now, EDM is kind of obsessive. I can't help but play around with the controller that I have and keep trying to learn new stuff with the controls.
I'm still discovering new artists and finding out about new sub-genres under the Electronic umbrella. Some of those progressive house tracks are so minimalistic and brilliant mood setters, I'm starting to appreciate this genre finally. But as I'm going deeper into this genre, I'm finding conflicts within lovers of the same kind of music. The countless debates between "real and fake" DJs. I don't really see the point and I don't even have enough knowledge to comment on this. But I've seen people dancing as enthusiastically as they would in any good club, even if the "DJ" was me using just a laptop and a basic midi controller. Even something as simple as a crossfade between two songs with the equalizer knobs had people dancing away with renewed excitement when they find the track changed! It's all about the situation and the crowd.
Yeah, maybe people would appreciate your talents if you had used vinyls and did manual beatmatching by ear and used some good scratching techniques. But when they are out there on the floor, most of the times, they cannot even see what you're equipment you're using and most people wouldn't even know the difference between vinyls and a midi controller. They would just see a big bunch of knobs and faders everywhere. Now when it comes to the quality of the music, there's a definite downside with compressed MP3 files. And again there's the upside of fitting all your equipment in a backpack and going out to "gig" and most importantly being able to afford to actually do it.
That being said, I find the art of beatmatching by ear quite intriguing. I noticed I was getting too used to the sync function on DJ software but I'm starting to find that a bit too automatic, a bit too boring. It's kind of a weird feeling to let the software do everything. You don't even have to press the play button at the right time, it will still sync your beats. Hmm. I need something more than that if I want to get a rush out of this genre of music. I can't just stand there and pretend like I'm doing cool stuff when all I'm doing is pressing the play button and using the equalizers and effects. And the techniques of scratching (I didn't know they had names until recently again, like babies, chirps, crabs, etc) also look interesting. From what I've seen, that needs a little skill and hand-hand coordination as well. While I can play a guitar with eyes closed, I definitely cannot scratch! Random motion of the touchwheel might still sound cool sometimes, but it's just too random to be called scratching.
At another recent "gig" where there were Punjabi families dancing to bhangra, I noticed a 5 year old kid whose eyes were gleaming at the sight of all the flashing LEDs and all the buttons. (Yeah, I kind of mapped my controller's LEDs to do a lot of flashy stuff). Since it wasn't really critical for me to nail every note bang on, I asked the kid to just play with the inactive deck's jogwheel up and down while I was cutting with the crossfader. Since my crossfader cutting was timed, it sounded pretty good and people had noticed. A KID was scratching! DJ 5-year-old-Kid-in-the-golf-club-bar is going to be his name.
So yeah, despite having all the auto stuff, I'm trying to create a challenge for myself. Is it hard to beatmatch manually? Definitely yes! The last few days, I've been trying to beatmatch without looking at the waveforms or the BPM indicators. Setting a cue point and manually matching it, all just by ear. It's kind of tough to concentrate on the two tracks separately. Sometimes we want them playing together, sometimes isolated. It becomes particularly challenging when the two tracks are very close and separated by a couple of decimal points. They eventually go out of sync but stay on for quite a while to fool you into thinking you matched them. We can probably still fix that by just pushing or pulling the track just a little bit to bring the beats back on. I'm thinking each person has a different way to find his quickest method of beatmatching. I've sometimes taken a few seconds (probably got lucky) and sometimes over 3-4 minutes. I still need to discover a kind of pattern that I like to follow.
Anyway, so that's the rant about me rediscovering the Music scene. One thing I've learned is to not stereotype any kind of music. When you enjoy something, just play/listen/compose/produce it. And while you enjoy that, it doesn't mean that the other genres or other "ways of learning" are tasteless or "fake". It's always good to take a diplomatic stance and look at the pros and cons of all the options. People will do what they find convenient financially and technically. By the way, I might have sounded a bit harsh in my previous post about photography. It's almost a similar situation with everything going Digital and auto, the actual art of photography is slowly disappearing except for those few people who still love doing things the traditional way. So maybe I need to take a more diplomatic stand in that too. Maybe..
Anyway, as a closing word, for any musician/dj/producer/whatever, the universal rule still applies, practice always makes perfect.
P.S : I was listening to an Alt Metal/Hard Rock/Post-Grunge playlist (Alter Bridge, Breaking Benjamin, Creed, Audioslave, Theory of a Deadman, Chevelle, Daughtry, Hinder, Saving Abel, My Darkest Days, Seether, Shinedown, etc.......) while typing this out.
