How do you mix into someone else’s tracks… I can’t get my head round it. Reckon I’m having a dime bar moment!
You receive a 20min sample you load it into a deck in traktor? You then play it and mix into the end. How do you carry on the recording though so at the end you have, say, a 40 min file with your bit added on?
I presume you just load up the bit you recieved… Press record…hit play… Wait till the last couple bars.. Do your mix… Add a bit for next person to mix in and press stop… Send it on to next person and repeat
That’s how it usually works but you can end up with degraded quality on the previous parts as the train moves forward.
Someone records really hot with the gain turned down in traktor => everyone’s parts suffer
Someone in the chain can’t upload a lossless file => the next guy gets a big mp3 of a bunch of mp3s and things start being degraded
If one of the DJs records through a poor soundcard, has a shabby mixer which seriously colours the sound or poor audio interconnects (or all of the above) => you get the idea.
As a general rule of thumb, make an A/B comparison of the previous DJ’s part before and after it’s gone through you. If it sounds worse, fix your setup !
Whenever possible it’s probably a better idea to cut the file you were given, mix out of a trimmed sub-section and join the files back together.
There is always some kind of issue with gain staging though so you may find you need to adjust the levels only over the part you’re using, or thereabouts, so as not to mess up everything else.
Snip the previous parts into two bits : a main segment which I’ll leave alone, and a #2 segment I’ll be mixing out of which will be imported into TSP. The cut typically occurs at a quite obvious structural point of the ending track.
#2 gets analyzed, beatgridded and eventually if it’s long enough, it’ll receive a couple hotcues to remind me of where I want to start doing things.
Hit record, play, hit stop
Import the recording into sound editor, trim so it starts at the appropriate cutting point.
Adjust levels on my part with some volume automation to make things more even.
This may require adjusting levels near the end of the previous part if it’s needed. I use autogain, so there’s a chance I’ve altered the previous part’s level : it could be painfully obvious to just slap it on and call it a day at this point. Hello +6db jump for no reason
Render to flac, upload, post tracklist
When you’re recording a set alone, but in several sections, you don’t really have issues with gain staging like this.
I cut just the last track off the mix I receive using protools or some other audio editor. Load the last track into Traktor, start recording, mix in my part and then take that recording and splice it back on to the original recording. I always record in Wav anyway and then convert to whatever the others want, ie. Flac or some such.
Think about how that would end up … last person waiting for 45+ mins just to get to the part they want to record into, and they nip out whilst waiting and miss there point and have to do it all over again hahaha
