Why did Sasha move away from Ableton and back to CDJ's?

[MiL0]

There's no conspiracy here, guys.

haha fair play

[mostapha]

Awesome weekend of tech/grip work for an indie film, and now I'm back at real work…so I'm back on forums.

well. we'll all be here waiting at the edge of our seats to hear your verdict.

I didn't hate it. By that, I mean that he didn't ruin anything that I loved, and I was much more impressed with him being restrained than I expected to be. He and I have a very different idea of what constitutes deep house, and if that's the music he likes, I understand where that quote came from. I disagree entirely, but that's because we listen to very different House.

I wouldn't listen to it again, and I still wouldn't pay to see him…but I accept that his DJ sets aren't just ruining music with effects and hot cues.

I'd have liked it to be recorded a bit better, and I think he could stand to ignore EQs for a while, because it was a little distracting. I also just didn't like the huge sections of pseudo-breakdowns that were obviously from him using an EQ or filter to cut the bass.

I was also comparing him to someone who's regarded as one of the best DJs in the world (Sasha), so it might not be fair. But, well, I wasn't having trouble staying away for Ean's set or anything, but I was poignantly aware of who and where I was. I played Sasha's set from Miami that I posted earlier right after it, lost myself, and missed a turn driving that I've made every other Friday for the last 2 months.

The set was okay. It wasn't good.

Every time I read posts by people who are so openly critical of others I am always very curious about their own skills and experience as a DJ.…

I'm no one special. I'm just opinionated and don't mind looking like a dick online if it sparks an interesting discussion.

I'm openly critical of Ean because of two reasons: one, I think it's funny how much people on DJTT seem to hold him up on pedestal that I dont think he deserves for DJing (for modding and building a community…totally deserved rep); second, he's a fairly big public figure, at least in this community. People flame Oakenfold, Tiesto, Deadmau5, SHM, Steve Aoki, and the rest of the top100 all the time, unabashedly, including myself (some of them). A lot of them don't deserve it either. It's a meta-troll designed to provoke responses like these and try to bring those criticisms into perspective. Thank you for calling me out on it instead of defending Ean. You're the first to do that that I recall.

As for what I have to offer, my mixcloud link has been in my sig for a while. It hasn't been updated in a long time for a number of reasons, but that should be changing shortly. IMHO, the best mix on there is the breaks mix from 2007, done in Ableton as an experiment in just how far I could push certain aspects of DJing in Ableton.

Personally I never understood Sasha's idea of having thousands of Live clips available for all kinds of mixes. Too many choices, the brain is limited.

I think having a lot of songs is fine but you do the choices for mixes based on loops on the fly rather than having things broken into small entities that is tough to keep track of, not to speak of maintaining and creating more of those. Or, suddenly DJ:ing becomes an engineering task...

It's all about organization and some degree of consistency. If all of your tracks are cut up basically the same way and labeled with differences, it doesn't take too much thought to know what you're doing. When I stopped spinning with Ableton, I had an Ableton Live set that opened and loaded about 150-200 songs spanning a few genres. Other than the small Trance section, most of them were cut up into sections with follow actions so that the tracks would play out if I just let them with the option to jump around or repeat sections at will. Some had different versions of the same song already re-arranged with follow actions. Some stock mashups were just there and available either encompassing multiple channels or just different sections of remixes/versions of the same song that I liked to jump between, sometimes processed so it didn't sound disjointed. And, I had a section of breakbeats and synth lines that I could just fire off, labeled by style and key so I knew what to expect. It was about 1000 clips, all-together, spread across in 6 audio channels, a handfull of midi channels, and a few hundred scenes.

I also used 6 audio channels not because I'd ever have more than 2 or at most 3 open but just so I could keep things organized in a way that made sense. Just glancing at it, it looked like a bunch of color-coded blocks with very little text. I got to know where certain songs were not by the titles but by where they were in my live set and what the color-coded clips around them looked like when I could barely see my screen out of the corner of my eye.

It was really hard to transition back to artist/title/remixer and cover art when I switched to Traktor.

A lot of thought and preparation went into building that live set, especially considering that each song took at least 10 minutes to process like that. But when I was actually spinning, all I thought about was where I wanted to go and how I wanted to get there.

Traktor takes away some of that, in that I have to think more about what I'm doing technically…but it takes a lot less time to process new tracks and leads me to do less, which I kind of enjoy.

It also doesn't use a persistent 20GB cache file…which is a huge pain in the ass when you're running a 64GB or 120GB SSD.

Miles Davis once fired a musician in his band when he caught him practicing solos for the event in the hotel room...

You learn the scales and so forth to a point -- and then you really start playing and don't think about scales and techniques.

I think the same is true of DJ:ing, as well. I just came home from a jam session, didn't exactly think of scales and stuff when improvising weird Hendrix stuff on-stage...

Were you actively not thinking about scales and just playing notes, or were you playing in-scale without thinking about it?

Were you thinking about boxes on the fretboard? 'cuz that's the same thing.

Were you thinking about the shapes your hands made when you were playing certain riffs? 'cuz that's the same thing too. Or the way they felt?

If Davis fired somebody for that, it was because they were trying to practice a solo note-for-note, which is dumb when it comes to jazz or blues. But practicing wanking around in a scale so that you can get closer to what you hear in your head the next time you're "just playing," that's just called being a musician. And if you don't do it, then either you're a savant or you suck.

I have found, in my own experience, that the more exciting (to me) or enjoyable the music, the less I care about performance or extras, such as effects, but the more mundane the music, the more I am concerned with "what else can I do?".

Agreed. I feel the same way. Fortunately, I don't do mobile DJing and I'm not a resident, so I don't have to worry about playing music that I don't want to hear. I don't know what it'd be like to spin that way, because I've never really done it.

I'll quote something off DJF from ScaryG's epic "how to DJ" post that got 5-figures worth of views and only positive feedback:

If you're not dancing, don't spin.

I think that's my problem with the way I see controllerism and–to bring it back to the beginning of this huge OT post–Ean's DJing. If you have to do anything to make yourself enjoy the music…you should either be ignoring it and letting your paycheck motivate you to let the punters have a good time (at a wedding or bar mitzvah or whatever) without ruining music just to keep yourself busy…or spinning different music.

Whatever it is, someone enjoys that music and can spin it better than you can, so either it's worth the money to sit there and take it or it's not and you should find somewhere else to spin.

That's not always the case for why other people get into controllerism (or turntablism, for that matter)…but if that's your only reason…I highly suggest you try spinning different music. If you genuinely like what you wind up with using those techniques and not how you got there, you're probably pretty good at it, and I'd probably enjoy watching/listening.

Back to the Maven discussion...

Agreed.

I still want one of those things. It's just enough "better" than the VCM, that I'd probably suck it up and go back to Ableton if it came out…mostly because it's really gorgeous. It looks like something "real," in a way that very little DJ gear other than Technics, A&H, and Rane ever have to me. I know that other people have different aesthetic sensibilities and that it just doesn't matter to some people…but half the reason I use what I use is because it looks right to be doing those things with it…gets me in the right mindset and then gets out of the way.

The Maven would do that–for DJing–better than any other Live controller I've seen. And I really wish that whoever made it would actually sell them, even though I know it wouldn't sell well.

[wrong chris]

I didn't hate it. By that, I mean that he didn't ruin anything that I loved, and I was much more impressed with him being restrained than I expected to be. He and I have a very different idea of what constitutes deep house, and if that's the music he likes, I understand where that quote came from. I disagree entirely, but that's because we listen to very different House.

I wouldn't listen to it again, and I still wouldn't pay to see him…but I accept that his DJ sets aren't just ruining music with effects and hot cues.

I'd have liked it to be recorded a bit better, and I think he could stand to ignore EQs for a while, because it was a little distracting. I also just didn't like the huge sections of pseudo-breakdowns that were obviously from him using an EQ or filter to cut the bass.

I was also comparing him to someone who's regarded as one of the best DJs in the world (Sasha), so it might not be fair. But, well, I wasn't having trouble staying away for Ean's set or anything, but I was poignantly aware of who and where I was. I played Sasha's set from Miami that I posted earlier right after it, lost myself, and missed a turn driving that I've made every other Friday for the last 2 months.

The set was okay. It wasn't good.

that's cool man, i wasn't trying to convince you that Ean is god's gift to dance music. i was only suggesting you atleast give him the benefit of the doubt by listening to his mixtapes before slagging him off on his own website.

[xtianw]

everyones entitled to an opinion. ean knows better than anyone, you cant do well in this business if you expect everyone to love you for everything you do.

someone liking some things you do, but not others, in the end is positive. i mean, its better than that person hating everything you do right?