progressive house podcasts :: adamcoates.com

Some pics from NYE are available. NYE was great, thanks to Dave, Libby, Ben and Mel who had the horrible task of cleaning up the mess from the hundreds of people who turned up over the course of the evening!

Was great fun and DJ’ing to a crowd of 200 or so was excellent! Heres a pic of me DJ’ing and then a couple of the party taken from the staircase.

I’m probably going to be taking a turn behind the decks at a friends house party this year. I’m quite looking forward to it but the main problem with playing outside of your ‘bedroom’ is that when using final scratch you run the risk of having to play around with phono/audio cabling between the decks and the mixer. This is not a problem if you’ve got some time to sort it out beforehand and there are enough channels on the mixer…. the big problem appears if you turn up half way through the party and then have to try and do this reconfiguration during someone’s set. As you can imagine you’re not going to be too popular if you mess something up and end up with a) silence or b) feedback from the speakers.
The one big advantage of final scratch however is that its so much easier to carry all your tunes around. My entire ‘record box’ fits on my laptop, I have to carry the scratchamp, a firewire card and a few power cables around. The only two records I ever need are the two timecoded bits of vinyl that you use to control the mp3′s via turntables. All my DJ setup fits in a single record bag – no carrying around 200kg of vinyl for me!

The other neat thing is that using Traktor as the interface between the turntables and the laptop is the ability to search and control your records so much easier. You’re playing at around 130 bpm, no problem just sort by bpm and pick a tune! Final scratch offers a great way to get all the advantages of digital DJ’ing coupled with the traditionalist approach of using decks. It so much nicer to use turntables than CDJ’s or a pure laptop solution, you get much better feedback via 1210′s than you do from other mediums and it still looks cool if you’re using decks

Of course the only downside is that you’re relying on a computer and if it crashes…….well enjoy the sound of silence!!

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I spent sometime looking around djdownload.com and beatport.com and found myself browsing through some of the breaks tunes that are around at the moment. Its a pretty different sound to the normal house that I tend to gravitate towards and it lets you mix in a very different style. You can kinda ‘chop’ parts of the tunes in over the top of the other, sometimes its even possible to switch between two tunes on the mixer every other bar. Anyway – i decided to have a go at recording a breaks mix this evening. I’m not really that familar with the tunes yet so its not as tight as it could be but I reckon its not a bad first effort – have a listen and see what you think. The tracklisting as ever is below:

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For your listening pleasure heres another mix recorded recently. This one has a bit of an electro / techno twist to it, a few older tunes thrown in for good measure. Apologies for one of the mixes which went a bit pete tong but I couldn’t be arsed to record it all again for the sake of one mistake.

For those who care the track listing I’ll update the post a bit later as I can’t be bothered to type it all in at the moment. Remember you can subscribe to this podcast with iTunes – just click the iTunes button over there on the right (you know you want to!)