The Smooth DJ

J Dilla Tribute

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:52:26 -0800

From last Sunday's Shangri-LA, my J Dilla tribute set. It's not horrible, but I think I could have done a lot better.

Great Finish

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:56:42 -0800

Our Final Exam live in the field at Air Conditioned Santa Monica was a success! All your sets were amazing; you should be proud of what you accomplished in a short time. Max has his set posted here - excellent work. Danny, excellent work with the Gospel hip-hop. Dave, what can I say, magnificent. And big up to Sam and Kilo who packed the place and killed it for an hour straight. I didn't go on, but here's the set I had (I recorded on the plane with no controllers - just the mouse!).

Voice Cancellation Trick in Ableton

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 17:38:33 -0800

From the folks at Sonic Academy.

Last Minute Performance Tips

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 10:00:36 -0800

1. Turn Off (close) every application except Ableton so CPU doesn't chug; turn off Wi-fi 2. If you're having problems mashups, pre-record them so you don't worry about it 3. You will make mistakes so don't worry about it (no one will notice anyway) 4. If you miss a cue, then just wait until the next phrase, don't rush 5. Don't have high expectations of crowd energy, you will be disappointed 6. We will have cue audio available for monitoring 7. Intro is more important than outro. Outro doesn't really matter 8. If you're manipulating master tempo, put limits on the range so you don't go berzerk by mistake 9. Put a limiter on the output 10. If you use autofilter - if you activate a clip, know where your filter is.

Digital DJing Lecture 6 - Final Exam Details

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 23:40:56 -0800

Lecture 6 Wrap Up And Video

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It's On

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:08:01 -0800

The Final: Air Conditioned Santa Monica 3/28

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:31:13 -0800

Our final exam is at Air Conditioned in Santa Monica on Sunday, March 28th. Doors at 730. Please promote this with friends, family, myspace, facebook, wherever. We want to show AC that we can bring in business and rock the house too. We'll talk about how we're going to structure the night later in class, but shoot for a 20 minute set (a spectacular 20 minutes of course). I made a really quick and dirty flyer below. You can link to it as a standalone URL here. Or, there's a pdf version here. If there's enough interest, we can all chip in and print up a few glossy prints to give out and as mementos. 3/28, 2010 Air Conditioned Santa Monica Address: 2819 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica, CA

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.