April 21, 2010

J Dilla Tribute

From last Sunday's Shangri-LA, my J Dilla tribute set. It's not horrible, but I think I could have done a lot better.

April 8, 2010

Great Finish

Our Final Exam live in the field at Air Conditioned Santa Monica was a success! All your sets were amazing; you should be proud of what you accomplished in a short time.

Max has his set posted here - excellent work.

Danny, excellent work with the Gospel hip-hop. Dave, what can I say, magnificent. And big up to Sam and Kilo who packed the place and killed it for an hour straight.

I didn't go on, but here's the set I had (I recorded on the plane with no controllers - just the mouse!).







April 6, 2010

Voice Cancellation Trick in Ableton


From the folks at Sonic Academy.

March 27, 2010

Last Minute Performance Tips

1. Turn Off (close) every application except Ableton so CPU doesn't chug; turn off Wi-fi
2. If you're having problems mashups, pre-record them so you don't worry about it
3. You will make mistakes so don't worry about it (no one will notice anyway)
4. If you miss a cue, then just wait until the next phrase, don't rush
5. Don't have high expectations of crowd energy, you will be disappointed
6. We will have cue audio available for monitoring
7. Intro is more important than outro. Outro doesn't really matter
8. If you're manipulating master tempo, put limits on the range so you don't go berzerk by mistake
9. Put a limiter on the output
10. If you use autofilter - if you activate a clip, know where your filter is.

March 21, 2010

Digital DJing Lecture 6 - Final Exam Details

March 19, 2010

It's On

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March 17, 2010

The Final: Air Conditioned Santa Monica 3/28

Picture%202.png Our final exam is at Air Conditioned in Santa Monica on Sunday, March 28th. Doors at 730. Please promote this with friends, family, myspace, facebook, wherever. We want to show AC that we can bring in business and rock the house too.

We'll talk about how we're going to structure the night later in class, but shoot for a 20 minute set (a spectacular 20 minutes of course). I made a really quick and dirty flyer below. You can link to it as a standalone URL here. Or, there's a pdf version here. If there's enough interest, we can all chip in and print up a few glossy prints to give out and as mementos.

3/28, 2010
Air Conditioned
Santa Monica Address:
2819 Pico Blvd.,
Santa Monica, CA


February 27, 2010

Hologram Hip-Hop

Neurosonics Live from Chris Cairns on Vimeo.

(Via LikeCool)

February 22, 2010

RiP! A Remix Manifesto

Another film that explores copyright in the age of the mashup. Via Sam. This is free and on Hulu.

February 21, 2010

Digital DJing Lecture 4: Using non-MIDI controllers and designing your own Instruments

Another great class - we covered a lot of new stuff today - DJing with Wii Drums, game controllers and iPhones. The tools and techniques covered were very technical and we don't expect you to master them right away. We just scratched the surface and it will take some time for you to get comfortable with it. For now, work through the tutorials posted on the download sites (TouchOSC and junXion). If you have a Mac, you already have Quartz Composer (QC) on your machine. Here is the QC user guide from Apple - remember, it's built for video (which we'll cover later), but you can also output MIDI signals.

And keep working on those mashups! They are sounding really good.

February 19, 2010

Copyright Criminals

Max alerted us to this excellent looking documentary about the history of sampling, copyright, and hip-hop culture. More here. Good lookin out, Max.


February 7, 2010

Digital DJing Lecture 3: Mashups, The Arbiters, DJ Hapa(!) and Mr. Choc(!)

Great class, everyone! It was truly an honor having Thomas Golubić and Josh Marcy of The Arbiters in to explain the art and science of making beautiful mash-ups.


IMG_4046.JPGAnd wow, who woulda guessed that DJ Hapa and Mr. Choc of the World Famous Beat Junkies would stop by and see you all perform! Totally unexpected! Well now you have a story to tell - your first time DJing with Ableton was in a room with 3 of LA's best DJs. w00t!


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