The Smooth DJ

Hologram Hip-Hop

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:59:41 -0800

Neurosonics Live from Chris Cairns on Vimeo.

(Via LikeCool)

RiP! A Remix Manifesto

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:26:50 -0800

Another film that explores copyright in the age of the mashup. Via Sam. This is free and on Hulu.

Digital DJing Lecture 4: Using non-MIDI controllers and designing your own Instruments

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 15:17:04 -0800

Another great class - we covered a lot of new stuff today - DJing with Wii Drums, game controllers and iPhones. The tools and techniques covered were very technical and we don't expect you to master them right away. We just scratched the surface and it will take some time for you to get comfortable with it. For now, work through the tutorials posted on the download sites (TouchOSC and junXion). If you have a Mac, you already have Quartz Composer (QC) on your machine. Here is the QC user guide from Apple - remember, it's built for video (which we'll cover later), but you can also output MIDI signals. And keep working on those mashups! They are sounding really good.

UCLA Extension Digital DJing Lecture 4

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Copyright Criminals

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:37:25 -0800

Max alerted us to this excellent looking documentary about the history of sampling, copyright, and hip-hop culture. More here. Good lookin out, Max.

Digital DJing Lecture 3: Mashups, The Arbiters, DJ Hapa(!) and Mr. Choc(!)

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:25:34 -0800

Great class, everyone! It was truly an honor having Thomas Golubić and Josh Marcy of The Arbiters in to explain the art and science of making beautiful mash-ups.

UCLA Extension Digital DJing Lecture 3

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And wow, who woulda guessed that DJ Hapa and Mr. Choc of the World Famous Beat Junkies would stop by and see you all perform! Totally unexpected! Well now you have a story to tell - your first time DJing with Ableton was in a room with 3 of LA's best DJs. w00t! More after the jump:

Twiistup 007 Mix

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:45:38 -0800

I DJ'd twiistup 007 last thursday at the Skirball and here's my live set, all done in Ableton. No one was responding to hip-hop so I switched to dancey stuff ("play lady gaga!" were my orders). Now, I don't have a ton of dance music so you can hear I was pressing - some disco here, contemporary club bangers there, so, ya, set could have been better. My first time using the APC-40 controller - woot! The event was called "007" and themed as Casino Royale, hence the drops you hear in the mix (thanks to @biskeeee and Nikki for recording those!). Check us out on Facebook.

Digital DJing Lecture 2

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 15:41:24 -0800

Here are the slides from today's class. Ask questions in the comments. You guys did really well today.

Uclax Dj Course Lecture 2 Jan 23 2010

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More on Warping + How I Warp Acappellas

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:31:06 -0800

Here are some tips that came out of our Tutorial session - 1) You can delete warp markers by double-clicking them. This comes in handy if you insert a "1" somewhere in the middle of a song, and you want to warp what comes before it. 2) You can set your "1" at any 1 in the song. If you're having trouble finding a "1" near the beginning of a song, just lay it down where ever you feel comfortable. Sometimes it's easier to hear a "1" in a drum break or outro with no vocals. Another tip for finding a one, move your body /bob your head to the beat and count out loud. 3) For acoustic songs (no drum machine), find a one and use "Warp from here" instead of "Warp from here straight). this will cause Ableton to put yellow markers in areas that deviate a lot. Ableton is getting better at this and this method works often enough that you should try it before warping by hand. 4) For real stubborn songs, you don't have to warp the whole song. Use sections of 2 to 16 bars that you care about - like a drum loop, chorus, intro/outro - just warp those sections and loop it. That's more than good enough for DJing in many cases, and all you need for mashups. 5) You can use looping to help with warping. So if a song is particularly stubborn, you can try fixing the warp markers by hand for 8-16 bars. Then loop that section. When you've set your loop, click the loop bar so that it changes color. Then hold down shift + your up or down arrow. The loop bar now jumps forward or back in 8 or 16 bar chunks, depending how long your loop is. So when you jump ahead, all you have to do is check to see if the end of the loop is right and then adjust accordingly. And so on. If you haven't watched the tutorial I posted on warping in the previous post, please do so. That's basically what you will do 90% of the time. It will only take you about 10-20 seconds per song once you have it down. Now, for warping Acappellas, which we will do together in class, here is the methodology I use: 1) Warp the original song 2) Grab the BPM of that song after it's warped from the clip view (where it says "Seg. BPM") 3) Plug that BPM into the master tempo box in the top left 4) Take the acappella and listen for the chorus, which always starts on a "1". Be careful, sometimes the chorus comes in a half beat before a one. In that case, just not the syllable or word that does line up with the 1. 5) Plunk a warp marker in that spot on the chorus - right click the transient marker for that spot and select "Set 1.1.1 Here". If there isn't a transient marker in that spot, you can make one by double clicking in the wave on the spot you want. 6) Now, right click on that warp marker and select "Warp XX BPM from Here" - that XX BPM is the same number you plugged into the master tempo on the top left (that's why we did that). I use this method and it works for me pretty well. I also find it the fastest. You should still listen to the acapella after step 6 and make sure it works. play a drum loop to see how it sounds with the acapella (you can use the metronome too). If the song starts to go out of synch, it's cuz your "1" marker was off. But that's ok, you know where the chorus' should be, so just zoom to the next chorus and make sure it's starting on a bar. And now you should be good to go. And remember, you don't have to use an entire acappella. Sometimes we just want the chorus or particular verses. We'll practice this in class.

Digital DJing First Lecture Slides

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 16:58:31 -0800

Hi Guys, Here are the slides for the first class. It was great to meet you all and we look forward to a great quarter. If you have questions about anything we covered, please put them in the comments section. For the slides, don't worry about the blanks, those are just points where we switched to Live to demo something for you. So for now, play with importing songs and warping them. Do as many as you like. It's great practice. Your assignment is to import and warp 5 songs. Make sure you save your work - there's a "save" button in each clip's clip view that you have to hit after you're done warping. That's so Ableton remembers the warping if you choose to use that song again.

Digital DJing UCLA Extension Lecture 1 Jan 9 2010

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And here's that tutorial on warping which is pretty good (make sure you watch it in fullscreen so you can see what he's doing clearly):

UCLA Extension - The Art of Digital DJing Winter 2010

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 20:24:32 -0800

Our first class is this Saturday, Jan 9th, 2010. If you haven't signed up yet, you still can here. These are our meeting dates: Jan 9 & 23; Feb 6 & 20; March 6, 20 & 27. And we're in 1010 Westwood Center, room B06 - note that we were originally slated for B17, so if you signed up early, make sure you note that change. I'm going to post the syllabus here - but note that we may tweak some things based on how the class is going and whether or not we have guest lecturers, which we're still working on. See you in class.

RIP

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:49:08 -0800

Mahalo Mahalo

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:23:43 -0800

My Jay-Z V Cure mashup makes Mahalo's This Week in YouTube (3:30min in). Cool.

10 Mins

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:09:13 -0800

An excerpt from a set I did in December, put to video. Closer to 11 mins, actually.

A 10 minute Hip-hop mashup from Gautam Banerjee on Vimeo.

In the News....

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:24:10 -0800

Techies by day, DJs by night. Moi, on CIO.com.

Jay Z Vs The Cure

Mon, 04 May 2009 23:29:36 -0800

My latest smashup. Enjoy.
you're So Close to me, get that Dirt Off Your Shoulder