So I have been reading for months and just started about a month ago to start my set-up. I’m runnning Traktor Pro with an Audio 2 to just start getting my feet wet. I am almost solely interested in spinning trance, but see now that it leaves very little room for personal manipulation because of its already many effects. I’m not interesed in dubstep or psytrance though, mainly uplifting. Sorry guys.
I’ve been spending my time when I’m not studying for school beatgridding all my tracks and reading more of the Traktor manual.
What I ideally would like to do, since I see I might run into some problems playing only uplifting trance, is to try and incorporate some Top 40 pop into the mix. Mainly what’s popular now and the kids go crazy for, even if I’m not into it.
My question is is this even possible and if so, are there any tips to do this, as the BPM are significantly different and I’m not sure where to start…
incorporate some Kid Cudi and Drake, and you’ll be just fine what I do is usually use the verse from a top 40 song, then for the chorus I put in main part of a trance song, seems to work out decent.
listen to this mix by steve aoki on Kid Cudi’s pursuit of happiness
Thank you, that’s basically what I’m wanting to do, I would just like to hear/see some more examples in order to get a better grasp on this…
It just seems like this will be a tough task though, as I would like to play most of the pop songs, but then going back and forth between the two genres may be too different. Any opinions?
Thanks again! Do you think another route that might not sound so bad would be to put some of the main lyrics to these pop songs in the outro of the trance songs (so the crowd knows whats coming), then play the trance tune almost to end, and then cut out with some sort of effect so that the BPM change isn’t so noticable and start playing the pop tune?
you could do that, but what i’ve found is that tends to piss alot of people off, because they get all excited that their favourite song is coming on, then bam it switches haha, then you have people who are like wtf?, i say if you’re gonna mix two songs, you gotta have some pretty noticeable elements from each track to make it work, you usually want to have more of the more popular track in a mix than the unknown track. My rule of thumb is to always let the pop tune sort of build up a bit then put in the trance, but yes I’ve seen it work before where you build up a pop tune with trance then play the pop song, mind you it is deffinitely much more difficult to achieve a good mix like this in my opinion. I think the pursuit of happiness remix by steve aoki, would probably be the gold standard for this in my opinion, if it was your first time listening to the track you would have sworn that’s the way it was originally meant to be played.
Thanks, you have some good points there! One thing I’m not quite understanding is this. I would like to do this on the fly, live (in my bedroom haha), and not prerecord or anything, so how do you incorporate a pop track with a noticabley slower BPM into a faster (130) or so trance song?
If I were to play the main elements of the pop song in the ending minute or so of the trance tune and then slowly fade out the backround trance song and start the pop tune from the beginning on a hard end bass note or effect of some sort, how would I adjust for this change in BPM is I guess what I’m asking.
Sorry if you answered this in your last post, I thought maybe I did a better job of explaining this time.
Personally, if I went out to hear trance and heard top 40, I’d leave.
Similarly, if I went out to hear top 40 and heard trance, I’d be annoyed too.
If you had a completely gonzo ‘I’ll play anything’ mentality and that was obvious, playing crazy acoustic-funk-folk-soul-breaks-d&b-trance business I’d find that intriguing…
…but I generally don’t get people that mix stuff like trance (which is based around a certain bpm, mood and vibe where you want to build a set) into other non-compatible genres. People either want to hear loads of trance, or practically none at all.
Trance pretty much stands apart from a lot of other music due to the tropes it employs (4/4, massive minor key chords, drum rolls etc). Plus it is pretty unfashionable at the moment (not necessarily a bad thing, if you love it, play it!).
Personally if I had to mix other genres with it I’d pick some complementary ones:
Nu-disco (trance for old people who don’t take drugs)
Deep-house (at it’s chicago-type overlap with nu-disco)
Tech-house (the more melodic rather than the twitchy stuff)
That 4/4 stuff that sounds like it was recorded by real actual indie bands that have just discovered nu-rave.
Just my rather overlong 0.02$
Oh and my maxim is: I don’t play anything I think is sh!t ever, unless it is some kind of attempt at irony.
Some top 40 can be pushed up to 130 without really throwing the song off, especially in a remix, or you can get the acappella tracks for top 40 songs and drop vocal samples into your trance mashup style.
All awesome point, thank you! I guess I will experiment a little with this and see what becomes of it. Maybe only using David Guetta tracks will be a lot easier given their higher BPM. I’m in the middle of making a keyboard controller until I get my Herc., so we’ll see how this goes.
what I do is usually use the verse from a top 40 song, then for the chorus I put in main part of a trance song, seems to work out decent.
