Hi, all!

Good news for those lovers of trance and techno out there: I've updated my mixes page and uploaded and indexed all the mixes I've done since I last posted the Antipodean mix up. The Aleph Two mix is a visit to the land of the original Infinity Mix (only possibly more consistent) at three and a half hours, but the three others I've made to fit on CD.

If you burn the big file onto the CD you'll naturally get a CD with one track on it. However, MixMeister can put the track markers in to make a seamless mixed CD just like you'd buy at the store. I'm offering to burn CDs for people who make a small donation of $5 US (plus $2.50 shipping) to me via PayPal. For that I'll send you a CD to just about anywhere in the world, and I'll even do up a funky colour cover and CD label if enough people are interested!

As usual, I'd love to hear your opinions on the music and the mixing. It's what keeps me going, you know!

Find the mixes at http://paulway.d0gz.net

Have fun,

Paul

Christmas comes early!

/Michael

Woohoo, new stuff to toss into the Paulway playlist

Anyone seen issues with the Antipodean "Laidoutback" Mix? I have that on my empeg, and every time I play it, the length is claimed to be a bit over two hours, and it will continue to play beyond that end point. It almost sounds like it's playing part of the file again, but the transitions seem fine. How long is it supposed to be?

I'm downloading it again to see if some weird download glitch caused that.

Anyhow, thanks again Paul. Your mixes actually got me into techno in the first place, and now they are a huge source of my decision making when I go to the store to buy a new techno cd.

Nice one Paul - more techno/trance, bring it on!!

Paul.

WORD! Thank you Santa!!!

Nice PaulWay. I can't wait to check it out.

Now, how do you manage to post beatmixes of tracks which you did not originally create? Isn't there a legality issue there at all?

For any dance / club fans, I've created one beatmix of the East Coast USA popular dance tracks from Spring 02 and am currently almost finished with the second. Instead of being strict beatmixes, I try to tell a story with the lyrics or musical themes of the songs I choose. So far, it's been the story of what's going on in my life.

If anyone's interested, PM me (or post here) and I'll see if I can distro the mix (in per-track or single-beatmix (or wav) form).

Oh, and PaulWay, about your comment from your most recent liner notes: yes, it is hard to beat mix AND match pitch. I can't wait to hear how you've tackled that. I'd love your feedback on my mixes (if you can stand to listen to candy-ass dance) and how I managed to mix beat and pitch when the track order was dictated by lyrical content and neither pitch NOR beat.

Oh, and also, what kind of equipment are you using? Haha, I only used a copy of CoolEdit96 to mix completely flat mp3-converted wavs. Addition of any new material was out of the question, but since editing was my only option, I did some crazy things to some tracks. Ah, I'd love to share ideas with other beatmixers.

FireFox31, not sure if you've seen it, but there are programs and plugins that can change tempo without changing pitch, and vice versa. As long as you're only going up or down 3 or 4 steps, or +/- 10 or 15 beats per minute, you can get great results and not lose fidelity. Takes a LONG time to process and get good results, but it can be done.

Cool, if you find the progie, let me know. I use the functions in CoolEdit and I've made do with them. CoolEdit offers "gliding" versions of the picth shift and time shift. So, when I need to raise a half step or so, I can gradually do the pitch shift over the last 15 seconds before the transition. That way, I can maintain the integrity of the song while still getting my shift in. Breaking up the shift between tracks is also nice; shifting a half step in 15 seconds of one song and shifting another half step in the first 15 seconds of the second song to get that wholestep shift. Now, calculating all that by hand is the really fun part.

I'm psyched to get some feedback on my mixes from anyone who knows mixing or just likes dance music. If it's at all legal for me to distribute these things like PaulWay is doing, let me know.

The Antipodean Laidoutback mix does have issues - I static after about two hours thirty-five minutes. I'm going to get back to mixing the Laidoutback mix RSN, and will be replacing the whole bit that causes that problem.

Sorry.

I used to use Cool Edit Pro, but now I exclusively use MixMeister Pro. It does everything I want in a mixing program - catalogues and BPM-counts all my collection, does mixing and alignment graphically, allows you to set 'midpoints' that align to the beat, the speed-up and slow-down is acheived without pitch shifting and no audible quality loss, you can add DirectX effects to tracks and to the entire mix, it burns to CD and broadcasts via WMA... what's not to like? I can wholeheartedly recommend it. Try some today! :-)

The pitch matching is acheived mainly by choosing the right songs to mix together - if you're constrained to play certain songs then it's going to be much more difficult. In MixMeister I've had success with changing the playback speed of the master track, which does change pitch, and then using its non-pitch-altering speed adjustment to get the beats aligned. I used to use CEP's time stretching (didn't affect pitch but 'blurred' the music), and then went to pitch shifting, to make things aligned. MixMeister solves these problems, and as noted there are DirectX plugins (costing money) that do seamless, harmonically correct (i.e. no chipmunks) pitch shifting.

Keep in mind that the ear is very sensitive to pitch and to two beats being out of phase, but it's much less sensitive to actual speed of track. See if you can hear the BPM change in the track "Radio Jordan" by Josh Abrahams in the Laidoutback mix. It goes from 104BPM to 120BPM in a sliding pitch shift over about two minutes - it's almost impossible to tell that the track is that much faster, but it's easier to tell (e.g. by humming) that it's higher pitched... As you've discovered, spreading this around makes mixing a fair bit easier. (But keep in mind the logarithmic relationship between speed and pitch - two tracks 'glided' at the same rate may still have lots of problems synchronising.)

As for the legality, I don't know. I take the attitude that I am not trying to pass off work that is someone else's as my own, nor am I trying to make a profit off this - at least not much of one :-) (After all, you can still download the mix for free, it's really just my time and materials for the CD burning and printing that I'm covering). And most semi-pro DJs have mix tapes or CDs that they have at specialist music stores to promote themselves, so that people can get a feel for what the DJ does. I buy a fair bit of music (though I'd like to buy more :-) and I want to support the artists, which is why I buy from specialist CD stores or the labels directly. While I think that the recording industry is an example of capitalism gone horribly wrong - why does someone that has nothing to do with music and has little or no ability at creating it get most of the profit from the sale of music? - I'm not using my mixes in a fight against The Men.

Sorry about the long answer - does that answer the question thoroughly? :-)

Have fun,

Paul

P.S. Sure, send me a link to a mix; I'll give comments just as fairly as I receive them. (And I do have a wide taste in music... within certain happy limits.)

Good news for those lovers of trance and techno out there

sweeet, more techno to make a home on my empeg. Always looking for new stuff. I'll tackle those downloads when I'm iced in tomorrow.