The evolution of mixing music
I'm not bad - I've got all the technical skills. Despite this, I've never played in front of a crowd.
So the skill that I am told is the most important - track selection (reading the crowd and picking the right music for them) - is something I've never practiced.
But that's fine - I just play the music I like.
4-track tape recorder
When I was at school, the music department had a 4-track cassette recorder which also had a speed control slider.I used to record a few bars of one track, and then change the pitch to match a second track, and record that, and so on. It worked fairly well, but wasn't "live", and took a long time.
I've posted about it before.
Technics SL1210 mk2
In the early 90s, I was living in the south coast of England, going clubbing a lot, and sharing a house with a guy called Ashley who owned some 1210s. Looking back on it, he didn't have a job, and disappeared off every now and then for a short while, and then came back with lots of cash. At the time, I was fairly naive, and didn't ask questions.He had lots of 90s jungle tracks, and he would let me spin tunes. I got good at beatmatching, and transitions.
I moved away, but as soon as I could afford them, I bought my own.
Back in the early days of the Internet, I would fire up a Real Audio server, and get people to listen to my 64 kb stream.
Vinyl is great. But it has a few disadvantages though.
It's very heavy.
It's fragile.
It's expensive.
It can get scratched.
And every time you play it, you scrape away a tiny bit of the vinyl, so it gets worse and worse the more you play it.
A friend of mine had a slot in a local club, and he told me about CD mixers.
Denon 2600F
I sold the 1210s and bought what the club was using - Denon 2600Fs.They were very basic by modern standards - pitch control, play, start, stop etc. But they had the advantage that you could burn tracks to recordable CDs, and could carry hours of music on just a few CDs.
I was happy with this for a good while, streaming via Shoutcast, recording to Minidisk, as I was sure that was the future.
CDJ 900nxs
I can't remember when I decided to get into CDJs, but I did. In 2014 I bought some industry standard not-quite-top-of-the-range CDJ 900nxs and a Pioneer DJM 800 mixer.The CDJs did quite a lot of stuff out of the box - play CDs, MP3s from USB sticks, stutter, loop, reverse - also they had a setting that stopped the pitch changing when you sped up or slowed down a track. Sheer magic.
But the real amazement came with the software that was needed to drive the CDJs - Rekordbox.
You would run it on a laptop, connect it with Ethernet cables to the CDJs. When you added tracks (WAV, MP3, etc) to the software, it would immediately analyse it. It would detect where all the beats were on the track, and analyse the key.
Knowing the keys of tracks meant that the software could recommend you only tracks that would sound harmonically good together, without needing to know music theory. Gone were the days of mixing two random tracks together and ending up with a discordant mess.
Also, knowing where the beats were on tracks meant that it could recommend tracks in similar BPMs, and loops, and cue points were now able to be easily set exactly on the beats.
But the main thing that a beatgrid gives you is the ability to synchronise the tracks automatically. Just pressing one button locks the two CDJs together, meaning that you don't have to devote attention to keeping them in sync manually.
Having grown up on 1210s, I found this a little too much assistance, so I never used it. I wanted to keep my beatsyncing skills alive.
Eventually, about 10 years later, the laptop I was using died. And the new version of Rekordbox was just annoying. So I didn't bother resurrecting this setup.
Traktor S3
I recently decided to move into the controller world.Up until now, all the equipment had generated the music in the devices themselves.
A controller however, just tells software running on a PC what to do - the software on the PC mixes the 1s and 0s, applies the effects, crossfader, etc.
This means that the controller is just a collection of knobs, buttons, faders and a soundcard that the PC sees as a USB device.
Because I'm an Open Source guy, I wanted software that ran on Linux (I don't want to have to run Windows just to mix music), and the software I now run is Mixxx.
While researching Mixxx, it appeared that Traktor had very good support it in, so I bought the not-quite-top-of-the-range Traktor S3.
It's taken quite a bit of tinkering and configuration to get it to how I want, but I can now mix 4 tracks simultaneously, loop, use effects.
Stems
But the development that has really blown my mind recently is stems.Because of computing power, and machine learning, it is now possible to take a normal audio file, and run it through some software that can split it pretty well into Drums, Bass, Vocals and the other stuff. Without a GPU to assist, it can take a while for each track, but the results are amazing.
So now, rather than using EQ or filters or effects to blend track A into track B, you can be playing track A, turn off the vocals for it, bring in the vocals of track B, then do the same for the bass, and then the rest. You can actually mix the individual stems of tracks, resulting in totally unheard versions.
You don't need Mixxx or Traktor to generate stems. You can run some software on an audio file on your machine right now and split it into the 4 stems. So I guess if this had been around when I had the CDJs, I could have played with stems then.
But Mixxx supports loading all the 4 stems in on one of the 4 tracks, thus leaving you the other 3 tracks to play with.
The stem software I use is called demucs. It was written by Facebook, and has been forked and maintained by someone else now.
Using it is as simple as
python3 -m pip install -U demucs demucs "my music/my favourite track.mp3" (There are obviously more options and parameters)
You can even use Mixxx without a controller just using mouse and/or keyboard.
Download and run it, add a few MP3s to it, click the sync buttons, and mix some tracks together. It's just essentially a music player with a few more bells and whistles.