On Wed, 19 Jul 1995, rbcIII wrote:
quoted 6 lines Almost every time I go out these days I hear a DJ mix together two tracks> Almost every time I go out these days I hear a DJ mix together two tracks
> that are off measure. House and techno tends to stay around 8 measure
> progressions and it sounds funky when a DJ isn't aware of this and drops
> in a track on the wrong measure. Just last weekend my partner and I
>
> Oh well. I'm not a classicly trained musician myself but that's rediculous!
Back in the old days, DJ magazines would print the BPM and the key of the
track. A good DJ knew how much a track would transpose when sped up or
down, and would try to keep things in key and sounding "right".
Nowadays, records are slapped on the wheels 'o steel at random (or so it
seems). Sometimes it's cool, most of the time it's shit.
There's a lot of wankers spinning records who ain't DJs in my book.
While we're slagging lack of skills, there's a major trend towards not
tuning the bassline to fit the rest of the song. For instance, the
bassline of Seefeel's "Spangle" on AI2 is a 1/4 step (1/2 a note) flat.
If you're going to do the rest of the song in the traditional Western 12
tone scale, for God's sake tune the bassline too.
In Rock and other genres of music, Producers are paid to listen & fix
stupid shit like this, but since Techno is all self-produced, some really
awful stuff slips by.
Granted, most people don't even notice this out of tune bassline stuff,
(humans have a harder time distinguishing pitch at lower frequencies)
at least consciously, but after talking to a lot of people about it, and
pointing it out to them, I've decided that many of them eventually decide
the track is fucked up, and quit listen to it.
Anyway, enough griping.
Tune your basses, please (transpose up two octaves - that makes it easier).
chill
che