For those of you who are thirty-something like myself you will know precisely why a biro pen could come in handy for a cassette tape. You may have also spent your weekends listening to the charts on the radio whilst having your fingers ready to press record on your cassette deck.
I was one of those Music mad kids who would spend hours listening to the chart simply to record my favourite tracks and create a compilation of said songs which were often cut short by the radio presenter or worse adverts. Either way, I really enjoyed sitting and slicing Music from the radio waves to listen to at full blast on my Sony Walkman whilst on the lengthy bus journey to and from School.
Later in my teenage years I swapped my cassette decks for a mini disc player recording crisper, clearer tunes to play back and enjoy. I then practiced mixing Music using a set of CD decks, I loved flicking through the CDs finding tracks of my choice to link together using beat and pitch alteration.
Years down the line things have changed somewhat, Mini Discs are now extinct having lived an extremely short life span and whilst CDs are still in use I’m fairly sure that it wont be long before they are no longer.
Music is no longer a physical entity, we rely upon digital content and downloads which we play through a range of electronic devices including PCs, laptops, consoles, mobile phones, MP3 players, televisions and such like.
Whilst I’m rather adept at putting together and creating playlists which I listen to and play from my Macbook and IPhone I wouldn’t have the first idea how to mix together Music using a digital deck or whatever they call it these days. I have a good friend who knows how though and watching him mix a few weeks ago set me off with a Musical itch I feel I may need to scratch…
Following our holiday and all the other financial stuff we need to address I’m hoping to maybe look into buying a set of my own decks to relearn how to mix using an alternative, modern format. I’d love to be able create mixes much like the one which he produced earlier this week which just so happened to feature at least five of my all time favourites!
London Grammar as you may well have read numerous times throughout this blog are one of my all time favourite bands and given that this particular mix that my friend put together featured three of their songs along with two other songs which I rate highly it was instantly downloaded and added to both my Macbook and IPhone. Whilst I love the original version of London Grammars ‘Wasting My Young Years’ I have to say this mix beats the original by far!
This mix has been played over and over throughout the week and as I’ve listened each time I cannot help but to ponder how the hell these tracks are put together digitally. Not just the mixing of the tracks but the tracks themselves have been altered and changed through added sound effects, backing tracks and beat.
I’ve used such things as Garage Band, Cubase, Sibelius and such like but digital mixing using decks seems slightly different given that DJs are no longer sat at a computer dragging layers of sound together to create tracks.
Mixing looks like so much fun these days and if ‘God Was A DJ’ as Faithless once suggested I expect that he would no longer be a Disc Jockey, he would now be a ‘Digital Jockey’!