Once again I turned to the simplicity of Mixmeister Fusion, occasionally turning to mixing by chords but really having fun with the one-touch looping and channel knobs. One laptop and a pair of headphones was all this took. Hope you like the results…

Tracklisting

Cosmic Love (Short Club Remix)- Florence and The Machine
Superhero (Luke Solomon Dub Mix) – The Glass
Raw – DJ Donna Summer
Jungle MCs (Original Web Version) – MarkLam feat MCFreeFlow
Grande Torino – Agoria
Mingpark – Art Konik
My GOD (Tom Stephan Remix) – Laidback Luke
Let’s All Say Hey! (phantim mashup) – Dennis Ferrer vs. Laidback Luke & Diplo
The Kids (feat. Janelle Monae) – B.o.B/Janelle Monae
Dancemachine – Recast DJs
A War Zone (Club mix) – Maestro
Wakanapi (Original Mix) – Pryda
Jeffer (Modeselektor Remix) – Boys Noize
Lovelee Dae – Blaze
BRKLN CLLN – Joy Orbison
I Get Lifted – George McCrae

(BTW, this photo is from our first night in New Orleans wandering down verdant other-worldy Magazine Street. I tell you, you never quite know what to expect in this city. Oh, and the blog post title is a tentative nod towards July 4th… a holiday with mixed emotions for an English man in the US).

Take a deep breath and if you can’t make it to your local watering hole, slip on a pair of ear buds and take this mix around the block. I’ve thrown together a mix of new and old using the wonderfully, elegantly simple Mixmeister Fusion (thanks Natalie for the suggestion to bin Ableton – way too powerful for my humble needs).

It’s been a tough week, but be-bopping around Lake Merritt in Oakland to this selection helped me usher in the weekend with a fresh glow. Along the way I managed to catch this fabulous mural hanging out in an underpass.

Let me know how this mix works for you…

Tracklisting

Harry Flowers – William Orbit
Molten – Digital Mystikz
The LSD User – Stagga
Warrior (The xx REMIX) – Magic Wands
Anything’s Possible (Xrabit Remix) – Zero dB
Stories – Izit
Rock The Bells – LL Cool J
Makeout Stakeout – David Last
Let’s Start (Messengers Remix) – J.Period & K’NAAN
Rockit – Herbie Hancock
Acperience 1 – Hardfloor
Ondulation – Shonky
Justify (Will Saul And Mike Monday Remix) – Ramadanman And Appleblim
The Magician (Thomas Schumacher Remix) – Johannes Heil
By Your Side – CocoRosie

ok, a bit premature, but the yearly spirit of catharsis is in the air, whatever you want to call it. btw, santa, just in case you are passing by this way, here’s top of my wishlist (sorry, i appear to have slumped into gadget-geek mode).

so, moving on swiftly, let me follow the herd and offer my mix for 007. for me, it’s been a good one music-wise. haven’t been to too many gigs but i’ve dj’ed enough to keep things interesting. morocco was definitely a high-point, and there’s been many a fine night had at smarties, that marvel of old meets new (no, i’m not talking about the owners!).

house music has dominated my heart and mind – for which i can thank vitalic (live) and digitalism (recorded). dubstep is still bubbling under. could 2008 be the year where this musical magpie form once and for all leaves its croyden bedsit? i think i’ve missed out a lot on what’s been going on on the hip hop scene, but i feel there’s a whole world there to look forward to.

enough ramblings, here’s what me and mixmeister have boiled it down to:

nightmare b4 xmas – harry covert
Ves (Feat: Kumar) – Telmary
So Gaye Hain – A R Rahman (Ges-E Remix)
My CD Has A Scratch II feat. Salim – Wendel Patrick
Staring At The Sun (Bryan Hyde REdit) – TV On The Radio VS Bryan Hyde
Irst_te (Claude VonStroke Remix) – Worthy
Archangel (8-Bit Boy remix) – Burial
Long Train Runnin’ (Sure Is Pure 12″ Mix) – The Doobie Brothers
Arcadia (Shitkatapult) Short Version – Apparat
mythree – andrey kiritchenko
Saturn – Sebastian Leger
Your Name My Game – Herman Dune
flying lotus – tea leaf dancers
Hallelujah (Perfecto Mix) – Happy Mondays   
Cha Cha – Balkan Beat Box
Thank You America (Kevorkian Remix) – Cabaret Voltaire
C’est Le Bonheur – M

i feel like there should be a follow-up, showcasing, among other things, some of the delights beatport has brought me. having said that, most of these gems have already found their way onto this site through one mix or another. think nathan fake’s ”the sky was pink” or “the magician” by thomas schumacher. maybe i’ll save that one for early 08.

festive fun to one and all, and remember, chocolate in vast quantities can and will kill.

 

in this case, Mixmeister worked like a dream. there’s an itunes-like interface that helps organise and search through all songs. by the way, the songs are automatically bpm’ed and the key of the music located. as you drop songs onto the playlist, they’re automatically cued up to play on the timeline. the timeline will stretch and compress as you move songs around, so if you shorten the mix-in of a track, you don’t have to adjust all the future tracks to take into account the movement. ah, instantly hours are knocked off the time i’ve spent in the past with Acid trying to get the mix to lineup following an edit.

editing with mixmeister

the bpm counter and default measure markers worked like a charm for standard house music. i’ve yet to try and set these up manually for more complex rhythmic structures, although there are some cool tools to help with this, such as a metronome. there’s twiddly knobs for the volume and the 3 main eq channels, and any changes are reflected in the level indicators on the timeline. very handy for experimenting live, and going back and tidying up later.

saving your mix

once you’re done with your set (or at a suitable juncture to mix down, given that with digital mixing you can go on tweaking forever), you can burn to cd, create a wav or mp3 for web hosting, or save the playlist down so you can return to edit later.

overall, thumbs up!

all in all quite a package. the result here took about an hour to do. and that’s in the instance where i barely knew the music or software. i really was impressed to the degree Mixmeister have taken out the grudge of putting mixes together, allowing you more time to play around with fun stuff like track selection, eq mixing and playing with structures. i’ve also learnt that the fact 2 songs are in key only gives you a mild inclination that they may go together. you can’t do music by numbers. the only downpoint i found was that i couldn’t see an easy way to change the setting so that the master bpm doesn’t keep fluctuating to meet the bpm of the proceeding song.

Mixmeister Fusion sits somewhere between ableton and traktor, two products with a considerable reputation. to its credit, Fusion has managed to highlight shortcomings in both packages and show that there is ample room for the middle way. all this, and i haven’t even touched on the video editing capabilities. time to hit Youtube.