Confessions of a Mad DJ

dj bakasan - March 22, 2007

Felt like a mostly jiggy set with a touch of old school. Craig Mack - Flava In Your Ear (Bad Boy Remix) Arrested Development - People Everyday Alkaholiks - Flute Song Game - Let’s Ride Bubba Sparxxx - Heat It Up MC Shan - The Bridge Masta Ace Incorporated - INC Ride Janet Jackson ft Nelly - Call On Me (NRC Hip Hop Mix) Jay Z - I Just Wanna Love You (Remix Mafia Break) 2 Pac - 2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted Akon ft Snoop Dogg - I Wanna Love You E-40 - U & Dat Sean Paul - Get Busy (Selectah Mix) 112 - Peachies and Cream 2 Pac - All About You Souls of Mischief - 93 til Infinity

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Thoughts Since this is more of a jiggy set, going to post up my thoughts and critiques from the perspective of grading the…. jigginess of the mix.

Craig Mack > Everyday people, probably should have did the cuts on the “ohhhhhh” and “Yeeeeeeah” faster. Sounded good live at the moment, but on play back, it feels slow. The song itself is slow, so the pacing of the cuts felt fine at the time, but the effect gets mired on playback because of the song’s intrinsic tempo.

Still love that Bubba Sparxxx beat. One of the most versatile beats in my crates. First few juggles were a little mis-timed. Oops.

Love The Bridge. Probably would have killed the floor though, going from a very southern beat and making a fairly wide diversion over to old school golden age hip hop. Mind quickly goes “quick, quick, grab a silver bullet from that same era! ” Hence the follow up over to Masta Ace after one verse of MC Shan, a 1/4 or 1/2 beat off, but was trying to quick mix it in. Another quick mix to Janet Jackson and Jay-Z to bring the crowd back into the 2000s.

I kinda dug the transition from the instrumental to vocal versions of Amerikaz Most Wanted. Followed with Akon ft Snoop. Perhaps a bit too “Snoopy”?

Akon to E-40 to Sean Paul. I feel like I’m at [insert your local top 40 hip hop joint here].

112 transition was fine from a technical perspective, but listening to it again after the back I question the song selection. Def would have lost some of the crowd. Good song w/ a vibe that fit in with where I was going, but the song takes so long to build up to it that I would have lost people. Oh, and crowd that can’t appreciate Souls of Mischief–well screw em, I already hate them.

All in all, decent mix, took a while to get warmed up and going. Recording session had started from a set of cold decks and just jumping in w/ the recorder on. First several mixes were minutely offbeat, typically a half beat or so. Probably easily missed in a loud environment, but on playback on headphones, easily picked upon if you’re looking for it. Lesson learned, warm up with a few mixes here and there before hit record.

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On New Ventures

I’ve always believed that DJing was an under appreciated artform. From my perspective, it’s not much different from what authors do–you’re communicating with an audience, telling them a story, taking them on a voyage if one may be so bold. For awhile now I’d been using my blog (over at LJ) effectively as a pseudo DJ blog. The problem was that text just isn’t the most appropriate medium for a DJ to talk his or her craft.

Which is why I’m here typing this away. I had started my blog as a way basically for me to rant and rave, but more importantly, as an avenue for me to practice my writing. Hell, in another life, I was once primarily known and employed for my ability to communicate in the written word (I now am employed primarily to sit in darkened rooms staring at lines of cryptic jargon, curly braces and semi colons). So the hopes is to finally create that “DJ blog” that I’d envisioned–to use it as an outlet for my creative expression–this time in the cuts and beats of a DJ rather than in the written word of the author.

So here’s the goals for this place:

• Post regularly–at least a mix a week
• Practice and improvement are the goals– I post what I create, even in its crudest forms, so that I have something to look back on and critique with. If folks dig it and get to bop their heads or shake their asses a bit, all the better. But that’s just a bonus, not the aim.
• Drop mixes from all your musical loves. Hip hop. R&B. Indy backpacker shit. 70s funk. Neosoul. 80s candy pop. New wave. Everything is open game.
• Enlist the aide of the network of DJ friends I’ve accumulated over the years to drop the occasional guest set.
• Try to teach a thing or two. Demystify the craft to the general population so that the appreciation for really good DJs is genuine. (Good DJs, not a scrub like me)

I’ll be publishing this as an episodic podcast. For the more Internet savvy of you that already know how to deal with podcasts, ’nuff said. For those of you new to podcasts this basically means one of two things. One, you can either just visit this webpage as you do any other blog and just click and download my mixes as you wish. Or, secondly, you can use specialized software to “subscribe” to my show and have it automatically download my episodes each time I post up a new mix.

Most of you probably already have a podcast capable application and may not recognize it–iTunes. Go to Advanced > Subscribe To Podcast and enter the URL of my RSS feed (http://bakasan.podbean.com/feed) and you’re good to go.  Whenever you open up iTunes you can force it to go check up on your podcast subscriptions and if it detects that I’ve posted anything new, it’ll go ahead and download it for you…  where you can then listen to it on your pc, synch it to your ipod, etc etc. Subscribe:

Viewing/Managing your playlist inside of iTunes If you’d prefer a more specialized app, I highly recommend Juicer, available for Windows, OS X, and Linux.

I hope you enjoy some of the stuff I toss out, even if they’re “gems” in the rough. Oh. Uh. Any talented graphics artists want to help me make this look less, uh… stark and ghetto?

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