Ultra Music Festival 2015: The Pre-mix. The shot heard around the world.
Now that the Ultra Music Festival 2015 in Miami is coming to a close there are a lot of talk right now about DJ/Producers who "Pre-mix" their sets for big shows like Ultra.
This was catapulted into the spotlight on the first day of Ultra Music Festival 2015 when a hiccup caused Tiesto's set to be interrupted by a few seconds of silence (and total darkness) to an audience of hundreds of thousands. After recuperating from the mishap, Tiesto picked up the mic and said:
“So as you guys can hear, I never do a premix. It’s all done live.”
You can watch Tiesto’s hiccup here...
Now don’t get me wrong here. Tiesto’s "live" set at the festival was good but there were many headlining acts (like Hardwell & David Guetta) that sounded better as a whole. Maybe better is not the best word to use here but others like Hardwell's sets seemed to generally "flow” better and seemed like the tracks where glued together in a way that created more excitement in the mix. These other sets seemed….well…more produced.
I hate to say it because Tiesto is a legend and he is the reason I started DJing in the first place but from a listening perspective I enjoyed the more "Produced" sets better. So love it or hate it the "Pre-mix" is a big part of EDM these days and its here to stay. So I think there needs to be some clarification on exactly what these top DJs are doing when preparing for festivals like Ultra.
What exactly is a Pre-mix?
What is the difference between a pre-edit & pre-mix?
What exactly are these guys doing when “preparing” their set for a festival like Ultra?
Are they using their DAW to make their own edits & mashups of each track they are going to use in their set & then mixing them live?
OR
Are they simply recording their set ahead of time in their studio so if they mess up they can start over for the perfect sounding mix?
OR
Are these guys using their DAW to make edits and/or mashups of their tracks ahead of time and then gluing some tracks together to create predetermined sections (segments) and then simply mixing these sections together during the show? Using these pre-edited & pre-mixed sections the DJ only has to physically mix on the decks say every 5-6 minutes as opposed to mixing every track change every minute or so to keep the pace up during their set . Using this method, the DJ has less chance messing up and will sound better overall. More importantly, the DJ has more time to interact with the crowd instead of them staring at the top of his head the whole time.
Which is it? Which method is used the most by top DJs?
Do you pre-mix your sets sometimes? How do you do it?
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