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| Here are some of the DJ's from within the eJay community who regularly play to a live audience |
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| DJ Roy Wilson |
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| Roy's music style is melodic, progressive & banging trance / hard house, progressive house & tech-house. Infact, any genre of music which includes house. He also enjoys listening to a wide variety of music. from funky, chunky house through to some rap/hip hop, pop with a smattering of indie and alternative. The first disco Roy went to, got him instantly hooked on this new type of music. It was catchy, had amazing melodies and he just couldnt get enough of it.(before this he was listening to Poison, Guns n Roses and ...yes...Jive Bunny :>) ) From that day on Roy wanted Decks. He started buying vinyl when he was 13 and never got his first set of decks til his last year of school at the age of 17. It took him 6 months to be able to seperate the beats from the headphones and speakers. It just clicked one day, and he hasnt looked back since. He places his inspiration to get in to the world of DJing, to a guy called Malcolm Tudhope. Malcolm started doing discos in and around Kelloholm and Sanquhar in the early days of rave, when it was all new and fresh. Malcolm played nothing but hardcore music and was probably the main reason why hardcore music took Kelloholm by storm in the first half of the 90s. Roy has played various local establishments where he livess. At one point joining forces to DJ with Malcolm and give the dance heads at kelloholm something to do on a saturday night. One highlight was doing a back to back set with Malcolm, that not only worked him in to a frenzy, it nearly exhausted the audience because of the ferocity of the hard house played. Roy loves to DJ as a hobby and is currently working with some pals to promote their own night called ANIMATION. Bringing quality dance trance and house to Dumfries. Hopefully this is just the start of a long successful road in the DJ career of Roy Wilson. Lover of all things banging and melodic. |
| Roy's Top 10 Vinyl Dance Trax 1. Dub Be Good To Me - Beats International 2. Im Raving (oh say na) LA Style Theme - LA Style 3. Strange World (2000 remake)- Push 4. Cafe Del Mar - Cafe Del Mar 5. Now Is The Time - Scott Brown v Rab S 6. Bits n Pieces (original) - Artimesia 7. Technophobia - Bass Reaction 8. Power Of Love - Q-tex 9. Real Love - TTF 10. Live At London - DJ Charlie Lownoise & Mental Theo |
| Roy's Current Top 10 Vinyl 1. My Dance (Ferry Corsten mix) - Ransom 2. Trippy - Nick Sentience & Harry Diamond 3. Bangkok - Mauro Picotto 4. Memory (Lange Dub) - Dumonde vs lange 5. Whiplash - JFK 6. Awesome - Mauro Picotto 7. Wonderful Days 2001 - Charlie lownoise & Mental theo 8. Above the sky - DJ hinx 9. Universal Music (Jam x and de leon's Dumonde mix) 10. Clear blue water - Oceanlab |
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| DJ MuzikAL |
| MuzikAL has been a DJ since the early age of 14 when a freind of his was working at a local hospital radio station. From there he gained his initial experience in a studio and learnt some very handy basics of station broadcasting. Between the two of them they worked closely with the local radio station and worked on various outside broadcasts. This is where he also gained his initial grounding as a DJ. He' says, "I remember that job well! I loved it apart from the fact that I had to go around the wards getting record requests. When I got to the labour ward doors, I freaked out! For some reason, even though I knew the place would be full of women, I could never summon up the courage to go through them doors. Needless to say, we never got many requests from there! It's there at the station when I learned some vital differences from playing in a studio to playing out live. For instance in a radio station, you have no idea of who many people (if any) are actually listening to your broadcast cos the only persoon you can see is the sound enginneer! Your basic principle is to act as if you are playing and speaking to just one person. Also to my cost, I found out that there are certain records you just don't play in a hospital radio station. For instance, TERRY JACKS: SEASONS IN THE SUN. It got me the sack because it's all about dying! Well, I was only 15. What did I know?" AL's played at many venues around the UK and abroad and has run his own mobile 'mini nightclub' as he calls it, playing out around the south east every weekend. He's a pretty versatile DJ playing everything and anything but is known for his love of trance. He's been involved with eJay since February when he was asked to host this years first ever eJayberFest 2001 community party in Worthing. That posed a different challenge for him as a strictly vinyl DJ. Taking 150 community tunes all made on a pc then having to mix them via CD was a first for him, and a first worldwide. Before that, he had never heard about eJay other than comming across an eJay demo the year before. Currently AL is heading a project called eJay: The Community Mixes 1-4 and has just completed a demo for the eJay corporation that is hoped will get bundled with any new eJay software that comes along. He says, "I think this whole music making community is great. I've always imagined that one day I would create my own tunes, but equally imagined I'd need a few thousand quid to set up a studio. Now I can do it without all that! For me though, it's not even about making my own music. For years I've always been playing other peoples tunes. Now I get to take it a stage further and create some fine sets using the creative abilities of the eJay collective. If I can make their work shine, we all shine!" |
| MuzikAL's Top 10 eJay Tracks 1: Paradise Decay - 90 Degrees 2: ConKuss - Gradient: Chrome 3: Slippy T - The Sharp End (Blood Mix) 4: Spy DJ - Nu York City 5: Steve Brisco - Good Love 6: Sean X - s.e.x.s..l.a.v.e. 7: Jon Tyres - Shockwave 8: Wookster - Floor Thrilla (Somebody Scream) 9: Peppy: I've Slept Enough 10: Oxygen - Trancending The Laws Of Physics |
| MuzikAL's All Time Top 10 Vinyl 1: Freedom Of Sound - A Big Kiss (White Label) 2: Art Of Trance: Gloria 3: Divine Works: Ancient Person Of My Heart (Balleric Mix) 4: Cosmic Baby: Heaven's Tears 5: Army Of Lovers - Crucified 6: Groove Armada - At The River (Presence Mix) 7: Global Wave - Reality (Full Flavour Mix) 8: Moby: Thousand 9: Jayne Hanna: Lost Without You (Evolution's Main Mix) 10: Evoke: Runaway (TTF 12") |
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What I'm going to list is some of the stuff you can do. The way I do it The first is that it is important that you practice. Practise as much as you possibly can. Don't get disheartened if you make mistakes, in fact learn by them. Work out why the mix you just attempted didn't work out, then try to resolve it. To this it's really useful to stick a blank tape into a machine and record yourself when you're practising. Having something to listen back to will let you know if you're on the right path or not. Just play around, don't be analytical or anything, just have fun. Also listen to as many other Dj's as you can. Provided they are good, you should learn something from every one you hear. Secondly, you'll need to have confidence in your abilities. If you are dropping in say a bass drum from the next track over the breakdown of the first track, and you're not confident that you'll get it in time, you're gonna mess it up, and you're not going to progress very fast. Don't wimp out by fading in this bass drum, if the mix calls for a full on boom, boom, boom, then you're going to have to do it. If you're practicing at home, the only person you're cheating is yourself by taking the fade route! Breakdown Mixing: There's a few ways this is done, so I'll just mention a couple: Firstly, deck A is about to go into a breakdown. Tune B starts with a bass drum and not much else. The breakdown of A and the intro of B are the same length. Match the two tunes so they both run at the same tempo. Cue B to the opening Bass drum. As deck A hits the first beat of the breakdown, move the x fader to the middle, and let B go. Run them at the same time, and when A's breakdown finishes, the main part of B begins, all you have to do is move the x-fader over, and the mix is done. You'll get the hang of it after a while, even if it means putting the x-fader quarter of the way when you start, and almost immediately bringing it to the center. As the breakdown in A starts to finish, move the X-fader so that it now favours tune B. You can still hear A clearly, but B now has more clarity. This stops there being a sudden change in the music. The second is when the intro of B is quiet. It's almost a breakdown in itself. As the break in A begins, drop in the intro of B . Can take a while to get right (Even longer to find two records that match) but with skillful use of kill switches to EQ out the bass, (Explained later) it can work out good. With Bass Drum This is exactly the same as the above, except that the intro of B has a bass drum running through, it. Use the kills to stop any clashes, wait for A to end, put the bass back into B and you're away. Spinback. This can be great, but beware, use it too much and people will think the only reason you do it is because you can't mix! It can whip people into a frenzy though, and if things aren't going you're way in a mix, it can sometimes help you out of trouble. It goes like this: beat match two tunes, run them together so that both bars finish at the same time, then as A finishes the bar, and B is about to get into a pumping part of the tune, place your finger on the label of A, and pull the record back, reasonably sharply. I used to do it from the outer portion of the record, but soon realised why the needle kept on skipping across the record!! Anyway, as you spinback A, bring in B . With correct timing, A will stop spinning backwards as you bring the x-fader all the way across to the start of B. Power-offs and Dead-Stops . Kind of in the same family as the spin back I guess. I'll do the Dead-Stop one first. On most higher level decks (1210's for instance) which have a good braking system to the deck plate, if you hit the stop/start button during play, the deck will come to a halt within a second. The deal here is, on the final beat of a bar, hit the stop button on the deck that is playing out. Assuming the braking force on your deck is the correct length, the record will come to a complete halt in the space of one beat - meaning it's dead just in time for the next beat. Of course, the nest beat is the first beat of a new section (or phrase) so you whip the crossfader across to your other record, which of course was already running in time with the first record - sorted! You'll have to work out the best combinations yourself of when, where and what tunes to use for doing this. The power off is to turn off the power to the deck, as to make it gradually run slower and slower until it comes to a halt. Wait until you're at the point you want to do this, and turn off the power to the deck (using the proper switch that you use to switch off the deck at the end of the night). Then slam in the next tune. And I mean SLAM it in, it'll take everyone on the floor by surprise, and hopefully really jazz them up. EQ:- Most mixers have EQ units for each channel, and the good ones will have a section on each one saying 'cut' which effectively kills the bandwidth selected. I tend to use the Bass cut most, the treble one has its uses, and I hardly use the mid section for mixing purposes, more for adjusting the sound of the whole tune. Cutting The Treble. There's not many times you HAVE to cut the treble, but sometimes, a shrill hi-hat or voice can make a mix sound really fuzzy, or the two Hi-hats will key together, either cancelling each other out, or producing some (sometimes cool) phasing effects. So even killing the treble so that it's not quite as powerful as the out record - yet still present, can alter the state of a mix. A good trick is to cut the treble on the incoming tune for a couple of bars, then swap it over with the treble of the outgoing tune - it can really tidy up the mix. Just be careful not to take too much out - or you'll end up losing the dynamics of the outgoing tune. Cutting the Bass. This can have many uses and cutting the bass can help to introduce two tunes that are out of key. Kill the bass in tune B , then drop it in, have A and B running at the same time, then as the bar ends, crash in the Bass in tuneB , and crash out the Bass in tune A. This does work out better with tunes that are in key, in fact, if there is any melody or singing in the out of key tunes, even cutting the bass isn't going to help that much, the voice'll still sound out of tune. It can take a lot of practice, sometimes killing the bass altogether sounds horrific, but leaving a little bit of it in sounds Ok. Practice Practice Practice!!! Killing the bass also helps when plain beat mixing. You may sometimes find that when you mix B (which has a bass drum intro) into A (which has a bass drum outro) the drums clash with each other. This happens one of two ways, they either go into phase, doubling the intensity, or out of phase, effectively killing each other. Cutting the bass on the in record solves this, then by either re-introducing the bass on B while gradually taking out A, or by crashing them in and out respectively, the mix can sound seamless. Again, it depends on the tune involved. Don't whinge if it doesn't work, some records just have to be beaten into submission. Phasing:- Get the two records that you learnt how to mix with, match them both up and start them both up at the same time, so that they are identical. (It doesn't have to be identical, but it helps.) Move the x-fader to the middle, so that both tunes are blaring out at the same time. You may have to lower the level of one of them to get this effect or to stop any unwanted miss-match of noise. Gently place you finger on one of the decks, through time you'll know which one of the two works best and how much pressure to put on it , but for now, try the one that you've just brought in to the mix and put on very light pressure. What you are aiming for is the record to slow down a tiny amount, making it go out of phase with the original tune. I can't stress enough how tiny an amount is needed. The effect you'll hopefully achieve is one like a phaser effect pedal. How fast you crash in the x-fader can have a lot to do with the sound of your mixes. You'll be able to tell how you're gonna use the fader by really listening to your tunes before you slam them into a mix. Some tunes have a great crescendo (gradual uplift of power in the music) meaning that you can mix them low over the outgoing tune, with the crescendo happening in the background. As the crescendo comes to its pinnacle point, the x-fader gets moved to the middle position (or favouring the incoming channel just a little), all eq's and faders for that tune are set to their optimum position (making the tune more powerful than the outgoing), and as the final POW of the intro happens, the x - fader gets moved full to the incoming tune. Hi-hats: If the tune you are bringing in has, for example, a very simple bass and hi-hat intro, the best way to bring it into the mix is on the hi-hats. Again, it comes down to the tune you're mixing out of, how complicated it is, but it is less obvious when brought in on the hi-hat beats, increasing the amount you can hear on each strike. It goes the same for taking out a tune, once the incoming has become dominant. You don't have to go with each hi-hat strike, doing that may make the mix happen too fast, but using them as a guide really does help. Well there it is, I hope you get what Im talking about, which is just moving the fader over and back on the beat(bar?) of choice. |
| DJ MuzikAL's Mixing Techniques |