Just thought I would make a quick post about this past week at my night. Basically our group decided that we would play disco-inspired sets this week, which I thought was a cool idea. Retro is always coming back, it's a never-ending cycle really, and I listen to a lot of music with funky basslines and string sections whose roots are in the disco era.
For a couple days I did some research on what kinds of songs I'd like to play. Already I play lots of French touch so it made sense to expand on that. I started going through my Crydamoure stuff (Crydamoure is Guy-Man's label [Guy-Man from Daft Punk]). Check out this track which is one of my favorites off the label:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbRkQpjaBjU
Anyway, by the end of it I had about 3 hours worth of songs that I was happy with that were all very disco. None were actually from the disco era though :P
My problem was, I couldn't find a way to piece together a set as per usual. When I mix, I use four decks in Traktor and piece together compositions using parts of other songs, like the vocal from one, a synth loop from another, and then on the other two decks usually having two songs blending together as per usual.
With all these disco songs, it was extremely hard to find sections that I could isolate clear sections and loop in a similar fashion. There's always so much going on in each track, and they're not exactly DJ friendly sometimes as there's often no intro/outro with just the drums.
My set was pretty terrible by my standards but I'm more excited about DJing that I was last week, mostly because I do truly love all these new songs that I've gone through and I've discovered some new artists along the way. My goal is to understand these songs to the point where I can mix them more creatively than a simple A->B set, if that's at all possible.
I guess that's what I love about DJing, there's always always always room for improvement. So if you're ever feeling bored, try tackling a new genre to see how you fare, and hopefully you'll be able to appreciate music that you didn't appreciate so much before.
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