Around 8, I was thinking of going to elements at the Phoenix Landing to see Crook and Lenore (the residents) spin.  I started messing with a drum & bass setlist to sort of get myself in the mood for that.  Shortly before 9, I started trying to make a mix out of the setlist, and finished up that attempt around 10 (when elements gets rolling).

I stuck around here and listened to the mix, appalled at how bad the first few transitions were, but noticing some promising bits and thinking of ways to make it better.  By around midnight I had a new setlist figured out, and thought again about going out to catch the second half of elements.  Then I thought about going to bed, or having something to eat.

Instead, I rubbed my eyes a bit, and went back to the turntables to attempt a second mix.

And…I’m not ashamed.  Link to 80MB mp3 after the break.

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My once and future digital production partner/sensei writes:

so explain to me the ideology governing the move to use vinyl to control digital audio files - on one hand, i feel minorly poserish ’spinning’ without a set of turntables in front of me, but on the other hand, i would feel minorly poserish getting out a bunch of hardware just for the sake of looking hard in the booth.  are you rocking a hybrid setup, e.g. half vinyl half digital?  do you just like the feel of vinyl?  or what’s the deal?

The more I think about it, my answers become more accurate, more numerous, and less cohesive.  Join me, will you, for a bit of light philosophizing.

The Technics 1200 interface has some awesome objective qualities:

• It’s big as hell.
• None of the controls look like any of the other controls.
• The controls that light up each light up with a different color.
• When spinning, the edges of the platter convey pitch information in an intuitive visual format.
• It has a lot of angular momentum in it, so clumsy human-scale forces can be applied in ways that result in very non-clumsy changes to its behavior.

Having said that, it’s possible to imagine a software control interface with equally well-labeled controls, more features, and zero danger of derailing the show by accidentally bumping the large, very lightweight, fragile object splayed over half of the work surface.  [[[The best available software]]] is far from ideal, but it’s highly configurable, comes with a great integrated mixer with effects and sampler, and doesn’t have any tonearms.  Instead of an external mixer, you could use a midi controller built to look like a mixer (which exist), or you could use a real mixer that also outputs midi control signals (which also exist).

On top of that, [[[Beatport]]] exists, so it’s now entirely feasible to audition lots of potential source material, find the <1% that you actually want to play, then acquire it a) instantly, b) affordably, c) with rights to play it out, and d) in an archival-quality lossless format.

It’s worth contrasting that state of affairs with the world of even 3-4 years ago (to say nothing of pre-2000, to say nothing of pre-internet boom), where the whole dance music economy was based on barriers to entry: a) limited availability, b) high prices, c) singles were generally vinyl only, CD releases were generally mixes (and thus unsuitable for DJ use).

So maybe this isn’t so complicated after all:

1. Past states of affairs, few of which had anything to do with UI design, led me to invest in a set of mixing interfaces.  That’s not just a financial investment of course, but an investment of time, experience, hope, activation potential, etc.
2. The vinyl interface has clear theoretical weaknesses relative to interfaces using software with external midi control, but it also has strengths that go well beyond familiarity.
3. Although my mix output doesn’t heavily feature “vinyl tricks” (scratching, tears, backspins, live braking), I do make light use of them, and I find the idea of backspinning on an oversized midi knob unsatisfying.  To be clear, that’s my problem…not the knob’s problem.  The knobs work; they sound great.
4. More than the feel, per se, I’m more tuned to the sounds of mixing vinyl than I am with the discrete digital alternatives.  For example, wiping a beat back and forth under the needle in preparation to release it into another, nudging a track forward and hearing the whole thing pitch-up momentarily, scraping my fingers lightly against the side of the platter to gently pull a track closer to one following just “behind” it in beat space, etc.
5. Controlling digital sources from vinyl timecode takes the best things about vinyl (the interface, the familiarity, and indeed some cool factor) and divorces them from the ungodly bullshit involved with actually acquiring and maintaining a collection of record singles.

At the end of the day, it’s not really about having the best possible tools.  It’s not even about having the best possible tools for what you personally want to do.  It’s about having whatever tools inspire you to actually do shit instead of just talking about doing shit.  This [[[vinyl timecode shizzle]]] rigged up to [[[Ableton]]] on the recording end got me spending more time at the decks over the past few days than I’d spent in the previous couple of years.

under the spotlight/
neither black nor white/
it doesn’t matter.
as drunk as you might/
working day and night/
whatever happens.

If one starts Ableton before one starts Torq, Torq will enter “ReWire Slave Mode” and disable external vinyl control (rendering it useless).  But if Torq is started first, it’s totally feasible to control it from turntable timecode while simultaneously (ie - on the same machine, but using a separate hardware audio i/o) record the output of one’s outboard mixer in Ableton.  (80kb PNG diagram and link to 31.7MB mp3 after the break)

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Native Instruments is currently running a special on their “Komplete” bundle of products.  If you own a qualifying DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) product, they’re taking $300 off the price of the bundle (which works out to about 30% off).

Upon hearing this “news,” my wife suggested I “use what [I] have.”  Good advice.

So out of the basement came:
1 - turntable stand
2- turntables
1- M-Audio Connectiv audio i/o

Problem the capitalists want you to have: After those pieces were all wired together, along with a 4-channel Pioneer mixer borrowed from a CD mixing rig, the USB cable from the audio i/o wouldn’t reach my home computer.  So I installed the Connectiv/Torq software on my work computer, transferred some (legally licensed!) music to the work machine, and turned everything on.

Over the next hour or so, I practiced mixing (first some dnb, then some new disco / ed banger stuff).  It’d be interesting to try to use one computer to both drive the virtual vinyl process AND record the results (coming from the outboard analog mixer) through a separate interface.  I’m sure the Mac Pro has the processor horsepower to handle that, but I’d be a little worried about doing all of that i/o against the same hard disk.

Other options for recording are (of course):
1. record using a second computer
2. record onto a non-computer (like a MicroTrack II…or a tape cassette)

I happened to be in Guitar Center this week, looking for guitar stands and keyboard stands and things like that. But to get to the keyboard stands (you see) I had to walk through the Pro Audio section, where they were having a rare sale on KRK Rokit 5 powered studio monitors.

So I called the missus, informed her of my fortunate predicament per our “no purchases over $x without prior notification” arrangement, and fed the monkey.

Last night I got both speakers hooked up and tried them out. The left speaker was loud and clear, but the right speaker (while somewhat clear) was not loud at all. I tried switching the cables on the audio i/o side, but the right speaker was still much quieter, so it definitely wasn’t a problem with the audio interface.

What I didn’t do was try to switch the cables on the speaker side, which would have been a decent way to diagnose a bad cable.

So I packed up the right speaker last night, and brought it over to GC this morning. Homepiece hooked it up to a system there, and the speaker sounded fine to him, and I had to admit it sounded a bit louder than it had the night before. We agreed that the cable was the most likely culprit, so I resolved to test that when I got home tonight.

I just tested the speaker using the other cable. It’s working great.

But here’s the kicker: I just tested the left speaker (known good) with the suspected-bad cable, and…it also works great.

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Update: Hours later, the muted quality has returned to the right speaker. Changing channels or cables has no effect. My guess is that it has something to do with temperature…the speaker was far colder than room temperature when we tried it in the shop this morning (okay performance), and had been sitting in the back of my car for hours by the time I tried it at home earlier tonight (performance equal to the other speaker). I’ll exchange it tomorrow, hopefully without complaint.

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Update 2: Shared puzzled bemusement at the temperature theory with three guys at the GC pro audio department this afternoon, swapped out the speaker, let it warm up in the house for a couple hours while having beer and a couple games of darts at the People’s Republik, sounds great. Maybe it’s just been a really long time since I listened to music outside of headphones, but these are putting me through a remedial clinic with respect to “stereo imaging.” Not too much bass, highs aren’t splashing all over each other…just crisp, clean sound with remarkable sharpness. Anyway, good times. Dinner time.

The mix I failed (miserably) to complete last night is currently being has been uploaded to mediamaster (for streaming) and mediafire (for downloading). The streaming version allows for more instant gratification, but it’s a bit less gratification (lower bitrate, noticeable hit in audio quality).

Two thoughts:

• Don’t pirate use a crappy old not-for-resale version of Logic Express when GarageBand is free, easier to use, and well-supported on the newest hardware. In fact, the intro documentation for GarageBand explicitly calls out its “automatically make song longer to hold more incoming recorded audio” feature, so it’s almost like someone who matters got hit by the Logic 7 “stop recording for no good reason” bug. FWIW, I used a single stereo track, and added light compression (as in audio compression, not data compression) to the whole mix before rendering the project to disk.
• I’m actually a little shocked at how well this turned out. I’m hypercritical when I listen to other people’s mixing, and even worse when listening to my own, and I’m not totally ashamed to have produced this. It’s not without its moments of actual, honest-to-goodness peer-reviewable quality, and it gets better as it goes along.

So yeah, uh…Success!

[ click here for access to the 60MB, 192kHz, 45 minute mp3 hosted by MediaFire! (not a direct download link) ]

And here is MediaMaster’s totally garish embedded flash player for the 128kbps streaming version:

Something approximating the quality of a Navy flight simulator, but for performing a different task under pressure:

• the cd players are connected to the mixer
• the cd players and mixer are all plugged into power
• the booth output from the mixer is running to speakers
• the speakers work, despite their broken control module
• the balanced master outputs from the mixer are running to a firewire audio i/o
  the firewire i/o is plugged into power, and connected to the computer
• the computer has recording software, and working drivers for the firewire i/o
• after the input gain for cd 1 and 2, the master output gain from the mixer, and the input gain on inputs 1 and 2 of the firewire i/o, clean and non-clipping audio makes it into the software side

Resolved: By the end of this weekend, I will have recorded a halfway-decent mix from CD.

Update: Almost made it. On the first run through, the audio clipped a bit. On the second run through, for reasons unknown, my recording software felt compelled to stop recording after 300 measures, despite the fact that I’ve raised the number of active measures in the song to something like 1800, just to make sure that kind of bullshit wouldn’t happen, and there’s plenty of space left on the target drive. It’s worth noting that at times, my mixing also sucked, but at other times it was actually pretty decent. It’s getting late, and honestly I’m a little tired of this group of tunes, but I’ll try this again tomorrow and see if I can’t post something both a) complete, and b) containing zero trainwrecks.

That would be an accomplishment, given that today was my first time mixing from CD in like 5 years (and I wasn’t proficient then, either).

Update2: I don’t have a ton of music to choose from in this mix’s BPM range, so I was forced to throw some stuff in that isn’t exactly top notch. In fact, some of it is the kind of material a DJ should only use a) perhaps never, b) by explicit request of the person paying the bill, c) with a well developed sense of irony and an audience that’s in on the joke, or d) with a sense of irony and an audience whose opinion the DJ cares nothing about.

For example, you may hear some Haddaway - What Is Love. Like, right off the top. And that may be part of a mashup with Genesis - Land of Confusion.

That’s arguably not even the low point, but I’m not apologizing…this stuff got played into the ground for a reason, after all.

There are also a couple really excellent tracks you may not have heard before, and of course the mixing will be on point. *cough*

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