Blackdown said:
mixing as the sole musical focus is so tediously anal "i... must... fit... this... drum ... beat... over... this... remarkably similar... drum beat....... lookatmeveryonei'mspecial!!!!!"
most of all dance music mixing is ridiculous because its an artform devoted to an event when achieved you can't even notice it. is it two tracks or one? is it a drum machine beat or a 'perfect mix?'
arrrgh!
This is reductionist and silly to the extreme. A 'perfect' mix isnt one you dont notice, in general they're the ones you notice the most! All mixes boil down to either 'complementary' or 'contrasting' mixes. Your tune either has a simlar beat and/or melody which roll under the tune youre mixing with, or they have a totally different beat and/or melody which 'bounce' off each other... either way, (outside of the purely 4/4 genres ) if the mix is done properly, the tune that comes in should always punctuate the one going out at some point, and create something new during the segue between tracks. Plus - theres always the chance that some of your audience might actually
know the tunes that youre playing.
Point taken for house and pure 4x4 music, but once you get into breakbeats (which make up a huge amount of dance music), its a very different story.
...and aren't the only people overly concerned about spotting the switch from one track to the next the trainspotters, rather than the people locked into the beat and dancing (i.e. the reason the dj's playing music in the first place)?
Not at all! Ive seen dancefloors go mad when the first millisecond of the strings from the intro of babylon drop into the mix.... and In my experience (as a raver and a DJ) its the people locked into the beat on the dancefloor who really know whats going on... the trainspotter might be able to tell you all the track names, but a decent crowd will feel every drop in, quick-fade and chop... Thats why Soundclashes work - because the crowd knows all the tunes so well they can react to them, even though some of them are only on the decks for a few seconds...
another negative 90s dance music point is that DJs and DJing has a constrictive effect on arrangement. All tracks must be fixed tempo, have a sparse drum intro etc etc. Grime, which evolved mostly on pirate radio ie free from the constrictions of making people dance, brought new structures, or at least ones with a nod from dancehall and hip hop (not forgetting the influence of Fruity Loops, which forced early producers to use 'switches' ie 8 bars not elongated arrangements).
The form of all music is constricted in some way by its function, and all of those criticisms can be just as easily directed at grime and (especially post-2000) Dancehall, which simply replace one constriction with another. 95% of Dancehall tunes have a fixed 8 bar 'sparse drum'/chat//melody intro that slots neatly into the second half of the typical fixed 16 bar Dancehall chorus. This encourages faster mixes and quick chopping between tunes. Grime is similar with 8/16 bar intros, plus the majority of Grime and dubstep hovers around a 'fixed tempo' of 138bpm. It may vary a little, ala D+B and Techno, but it usually remains within the +/-8 range of a set of decks..
BTW, I find the contention that Seamless/technically good mixing = bad, and 'ruffcut'/technically sloppy mixing = good quite irksome. IMO a Dj can, and should play whatever they want to play, from the ruffest dancehall and crack jungle down to the most coffee table of house - but they should always strive to be technically 'good'. Sure - a few dropped beats here and there arent going to kill anyone, but technical skills are only the means to an end, and not the end itself.
The reason I mention the dancehall style of "selecting" a lot, is because it is generally ignored by people looking at the music and considering it "dance" music. And while the exact style of selecting in Dancehall is not really applicable to grime, I think it has a big role to play.
I don't see anyone wanting to hear mixes longer than 32 bars in Grime, unlike house and drum n bass.
Though I havent done a lot of grime mixing, Id basically agree here. Dancehall, especially the slightly older stuff, has a real looseness to its production that can make long mixes (even with two versions) extremely difficult. This is partly due to badly quantized beats and partly due to the fact that there is often a wide range of notes in the melodic hook and the bassline that can make it difficult to prevent dischord when the second tune stays in for any length of time.
Grime seems to have a lot of similar qualities. It demands punctuation, faster mixes, and short sharp mixes dropped at an exact position in the track. Its as much about selecting as it is mixing. Keith P's 'Stateside Connection' mix that was up here a few months ago was a pretty example of this kind of mixing...
