Playing your own music live

[Sibling]

i'm going to be entering the live scene here shortly, and i've been hard at work on my album, and i just want to live remix my songs from my album when i play, their is so many Original Artists, that produce their own music, i wana make a name for my self with Originality, but it seems like its gonna be a tuff road cuz every other Dj out their spins other peoples tracks, i like to think i make my own Tracks, and i'm more original then the next guy cuz he's just spinnin other peoples tunes, like guitar players a dime a dozen, i guess i'm going to have to push through these gigs, and at same time send stuff into labels....i so badly want to be an original act.....all My own produced tracks,

Does anyone play their own music live???, any Original Acts that can give me advice, i'm just gonna have to produce hella tracks up until June and when i start playing i will have a big collection of quality haymakers to remix with..

[midian]

I dont really play my own tunes (some remixes) but I play out my mates tunes and they fucking slay some floors even tho people dont know what they are they are heavy as fuck.

www.soundcloud.com/oliverluck

If the tunes are quality people wont care. Especially if you drop some known samples over top ;] Thats what I do. Dropped some Benga - Pleasure samples over that first track and damn. KO.

[cmcpress]

Advice

1. Pay someone to master them properly. If you're playing alongside / vinyl / pre-mastered tracks otherwise they wont have the right edge.
2. Put a white label out and hand it to DJ's with your contact details on rather than sending it to labels to get lost in a bin with 1,000's of others.
3. Get on all the right blogs.
4. Better still, form your own label and get it on places like Beatport, Juno Download etc.

[midian]

Advice

1. Pay someone to master them properly. If you're playing alongside / vinyl / pre-mastered tracks otherwise they wont have the right edge.
2. Put a white label out and hand it to DJ's with your contact details on rather than sending it to labels to get lost in a bin with 1,000's of others.
3. Get on all the right blogs.
4. Better still, form your own label and get it on places like Beatport, Juno Download etc.

All damn good advice.. and things I'm planning on doing over the next 8-12 months ;D

Listen to this man he knows his shit. Especially idea of putting out well mastered white labels and giving them to DJs.

[Sibling]

excellent advice, i will live up to them as best i can, about mastering, i've been hard at work figuring ways to get good sound out of my music, and i've accomplished it, i dont need to pay some one to master my tracks,i have a good ear for sound and often compare my tracks to upper echelon tracks, and go back and mix untill they are top notch, my tracks are heavy and well produced, beatport is somthing i will try aswell, i have allready purchased tracks from them, hopefully soon i will put tracks up, Midian i will check out the song, glad to hear u are playing ur friends tracks and getting good response, And Thanks cmcpress, all things i've thought about, now they have been confirmed

[midian]

Sorry, but not to bad mouth you or anything, but no I don't agree, you should definately get your tracks mastered professionally if you intend them for any form of release. Unless you are of course a professional mastering technician then I take my words back....

All the top artists have all had their tracks mastered professionally before release, its not a matter of honor or anything like that its just that its a very specialist field where people focus in doing JUST that, mastering, not producing or being musicians, just tuning a track for final output so that it will sound good across all systems & formats no matter where you play it. Especially for release onto vinyl as its got some shit you have to take into account.

[cmcpress]

All the top artists have all had their tracks mastered professionally before release, its not a matter of honor or anything like that its just that its a very specialist field where people focus in doing JUST that, mastering, not producing or being musicians, just tuning a track for final output so that it will sound good across all systems & formats no matter where you play it. Especially for release onto vinyl as its got some shit you have to take into account.

Yeah i wouldn't discount paying someone to master everything yourself. There's a lot of technical issues that go with mastering rather than just putting it through a brick wall limiter with some EQ. Rob Acid for example will EQ, then use 3 different kinds of super-expensive vintage hardware compressors to get his sound. He swears down that each of the compressors introduces elements that give the mix a certain quality you cannot get with digital mastering plugins.

For Vinyl for example you need to have a perfectly in phase bass signal otherwise the needle will jump in the groove - in fact the stereo field needs to be spot on generally. I don't know if you check the phase / spectogram of your tracks, but a mastering engineer will.

If you're hoping to put Vinyl out you will need to have it mastered professionally.

Interested to hear some of your stuff.

[BentoSan]

The thing about mastering is that after you have listened to the song a hundred billions of times though the creation of the song that means that your basicly the personal least qualified to master the song. A good mastering engineer will only listen to a song once or twice over then makes then takes the necissary steps on the song. A pair of fresh ears is really imporant when it comes to the mastering process.

This brings up an interesting dilema though! If you are mixing your music live(not just playing your tracks in a dj style fashion) then a mastering engineer isnt going to be of much use to you because you will be mixing different channels and mixing different parts of tracks into other tracks - in which case a having a mastered copy of your song isnt going to be of any use to you in a live situation. This is a problem with purely live music, the mixdown and final quality of the track isnt going to compare to something thats been laboured over for hours and hours in the studio then sent off to a mastering engineer! However these on the fly live elements are really important too performing music live - so i personally see a good performance utilising parts of both worlds, djing and "live" performance to try form a balance between the advantages of both domains.

[DvlsAdvct]

See, the thing is that YOU might be able to make it sound great when you're spinning, but if you want others to spin it you'd be better off giving them a quality track that they can then tweak to their heart's content. You can use Ableton with individual layers running through powerful VSTs for the cleanest sound ever, but don't assume that every other DJ is going to that, cause at this point we all are working on (sometimes) vastly different equipment.

Now, if you are going to be the only one spinning this stuff, and don't plan on releasing it, then rock out with whatever you want to use

[Slackman25]

I agree with pretty much everything that has been said. When i was putting out vinyl releases i spent the lions share of the money for each release on Mastering and was amazed each time the tracks came back as these mastering engineers seem to sprinkle some magic dust over your productions. Also it is worth remembering that the compessors, desks, finallisers and monitoring used are well out of the price range of most people with stuff made by companies such as Weiss, Masalec, TC etc. The best bit of advice i was given was pick an artist you really like, find out who does there mastering and go there. I used Heathmans in London who at the time were mastering bands like the Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy. But no matter how good you think you are i can guarantee you won't get as good a result as a mastering studio. Good Luck