How long does it take you to make a 1 Hour Live mix (For Soundcloud)?
Most of you are probably thinking “easy: an hour…duhh.” But I’m talking about from trying to figure out what genre you want to mix, making the tracklist, figuring out the transitions to each track, and retrying if you made an accident during the recorded mix.
I’m curious because I think I take way too long to make a 1 Hour set for soundcloud. It takes me about a 2 weeks to figure out the genre, tracklist, and transitions. Since I only use Traktor Pro 2 to record my mix, it takes me an additional 3-4 days (including school, studying, and work) to have it recorded to my satisfaction. Those last 3-4 days is when the frustration kicks in due to constant retrying if I screw up lol.
An hour, simple enough. Think it takes me longer to convert the mix to MP3, upload it and type out the tracklisting.
I never spend time “preparing” a mix, I just sit down, find a good tune to start with, hit record and press play.
My tunes are well organized and labelled, and with Traktor I can see if there’s any issues that are coming up ahead of time where I can figure out what to do if need be.
If you really need to spend two weeks to record an hour mix you really need to have a word with yourself. I think everyone should just hit play and record for an hour and see what they come up with. If it’s sloppy and boring then what makes you think you’ll do any different when gigging out?
@Nephew Yea you are right that 2 weeks is too long to make a 1 Hour Mix
But for the guys that has to sit and think about their tracklist: I think the people who label themselves as perfectionists need to make every minute detail right before they can proudly say that this is the best mix they can do before they upload it to the rest of the world.
I have only done a couple house party/bar gigs and I can say from the experience that mixing at a house/bar is somewhat easier because of the amount of alcohol and distractions that seem to improve my mixes
i’ll usually go about 2 weeks sifting through the tracks i want to use, what order, best possible transition points, what tracks work best harmonically mixing wise etc. I don’t have all that much music at this point as well which makes it that much more difficult.
Day 1 = pick out some songs I’m diggin at the moment and then the list to the ones that go best together. Takes about an hour while watching TV.
Day 2 = pick my transition points and mark them, about an hour watching TV
Day 3 = listen to the transitions (about 20 mintues), then record the full mix, run thru Izotope (learning how to).
Day 4 = redo if I didn’t like it.
Total time about 4-5 hours.
I think there is a HUGE difference between playing out and making a demo. Playing out your going with the vibe, people aren’t critical about your technical abilities, your graded on your ability to keep a certain vibe going. A demo is scrutinized, rewinded, etc. It’s supposed to be your BEST work.
still an hour, mess around/practice daily, so have combo’s and tranisitions that i’m currently using, when i record my monthly mix i just throw down in the same way, but take out some of the ‘experimental’ mixes that i’ve been testing, unless i’ve got them nailed.
basically when recording i take fewer risks than i do practicing or even when i’ve play live.
It varies. Sometimes I just sit down and play with no defined plan and hit record, other times I’ve spent a week off and on working things out to be just the way I want (although, inevitably, these sets tend to be overly complicated and I end up screwing up while recording anyways).
Let’s say a full day (usually spread over a few evenings), because my track selection and my mixing aren’t as fluid as I wish they’d be, so I can’t just jam, record, trim part of it and upload that.
So that’ll be a morning of prep to narrow down the tracklist a bit.
A bit of messing about with said tracklist, to figure out the mixes I haven’t already tried out, and usually for plain technical warmup.
Recording, eventually redoing a part - two hours.
Then it’s up to an extra hour working on the volume automation to even things out a bit, although I’ve gotten better at taking care of the levels in the first place, and fixing the mistakes in soundforge second.
