What do you think is the hardest music to mix?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kev
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I'm with Superflash and Dj Thy, to argue about equipment is one thing, as you would never turn round to somebody and say your decks are WA*K mate, as we are all on different budgets. But to call somebody's choice of music - that just SUCKS!! Play what you want to play and do it the best u can. If people don't like it, well u know what 2 say !!!!
 
You can mix anything you want.. if you have the skill it doesn't matter what you have to deal with.
 
country western with idm

yeah!!

its not hard to mix just hard to listen to
 
Trancecore's pretty hard to mix for two reasons: #1 is the speed, #2 is that it's not really a well defined genre. If you look at the stuff from the NU Energy label (the largest trancecore label), most of it's faster (170-180 ish) stuff, but then you'll find other people producing stuff in the 150-160 bpm range that also falls under trancecore.

To top that off, you have very few new releases to work with (HHC has the same problem... and a few others, but that's another story :D )

I'd imagine the more complicated D&B genres would be a nightmare to mix, but I have no experience with that. Same with weird, abstract noise-type stuff, venetian snares, etc.
 
house is like English - to speak it good enough you need to learn only say a 1000 words, but to become an expert you need to learn hundreds of thousands.
dnb is more like say Russian or other fluid language - you need to learn all the intricacies and twists and turns before you can even start going to the public.
l
god bless america and fridays and :cheers:
 
From experience i've always had difficulties with mixing
Jungle [no disrespect], thou there are some French
house trax that are purposly off-beat and therefore
always tricky.
 
i find jungel easier to mix(true true!!) cause the bits r realy tight and because of its speed u can quickly find if ur not doing it correctly. also a breakbeat is very structured, u can hear the end or start of it .
for the same ressons i think a more repetetive and slower pattern such as 4/4 is harder for me cause i cant find any point in the beat to compare it to another(was that going faster? is this lagging behind?)
what i really find hard is slower breakbeats such as 2step and hiphop, but also reeally fast hard house and all kinds of hardcore.

but that just my way

oh!!!
most difficult!!
older drumnbass that has a break that goes for 2 or even 4 bars before repeting itself.
 
i find that instrunmental hip hop is the hardest for me to mix. its slow and it tends to change up more then say hip hop instrumentals which are for the most part fairly loopish. dj shadow _ucks me up almost everytime. the few times i get it right, well thats what keeps me playing more.

expirmental is fairly difficult too(espically IDM). since the tempo tends to be changing so much beatmatching becomes an impossiblity and you have to be much more creative and on top of things. i like to mess with the eq's and do what ever. bogden rysinski is kinda sometimes impossible to get out of gracefully on the up side since no one else spins that kinda stuff here its hard for them to say if i'm doing it well or not. they just know it sounds weird.
 
Mixing or Beat Matchin - which one is it??!!

This is an interesting thread and I need to drop in a few comments!!

In my opinion, and others before me on this thread, it might be easy to beat match a house tune due to the simplicity of the beats but unless you know (and I mean KNOW!) the tunes you are mixing with you can end up sounding like a complete amature in seconds.

Discussions revolving around what type of music is easiest to mix always ends up being...well....not very well defined if ya get what Im sayin!?

Ive been mixin D&B for 4 years now and its really not as hard to 'Beat Match' than many other forms of music - if you have the tempo ticking along in your head and can hear the main constant part of the beat (usually a snare) then you have a reference there to mix in other D&B tunes quite easily no matter how complex the breaks are, as long as you can identify the begining of the phrases/bars then you are half way there.

but of course, more importantly - I know the tunes Im mixin with when it comes to break downs, chord structures etc and this is where the skill comes in. This applies to every form of music be it house/techno/trance etc.

I can also beat match house easily and consistantly but because I have no idea about the other elements of certain tracks i.e mentioned above, Im not able to 'mix' them well.

What Im really getting at is that each form of music has to be viewed on its own merits - equally Ive always got respect for DJ's who mix music well due to the fact that the 'knowledge' element of a good DJ and his/her music will at least meet, if not exceed, their practical capabilities.

In essence, there is far more to mixing than beat matching and I think the 2 can be easily confused.

I think I just about managed to get down what I was trying to say there and I apologise if Im way off the mark!

Anway, respect to all
Adam
 
without a doubt the hardest music to beatmatch i've come across is > old school and some new school Detroit techno! // electro also
 
im sure someone has alreday posted ....

Drum and Bass.

gotta phrase it right or it sounds like arse.
 
I'd have to agree with Len,when he said "

house is like English - to speak it good enough you need to learn only say a 1000 words, but to become an expert you need to learn hundreds of thousands.
dnb is more like say Russian or other fluid language - you need to learn all the intricacies and twists and turns before you can even start going to the public."

There is no better expanation

Respect to all DJ's regardless of what they play, as long as it's all good :-)
 
I don't really have that much to compare with, but I have quite a bit of minimal psytrance, psy-techno, and quite a bit of older goatrance. I'd have to say older style goatrance (Astral Projection, Transwave, Technossomy, Miranda, Hallucinogen, etc) is extremely difficult. It may be 4/4, but there's so much going on that its difficult to mix in another track without obvious clashes. Even if its the same bpm, 4/4 meter, there's so much subdivided its a pain in the ***, but worth it if you hit it just right. Another problem is the bpm, most of AP's Another World is 160+ bpm, with my favorites above 170, I don't even have anything else that fast!

The newer, more minimal psy trance/techno styles are relatively easy to beatmix, but like the previous posts, probably anyone could beatmatch a 140 bpm Shiva Chandra or MOS or the like, but long mixing and set progression is difficult.

Also, Mark Allen is a god. I originally heard his old goa mixes and was impressed with the skill then, and recently saw him live with Tim Healy. They did an hour as Quirk w/ Tim alternating tracks from an Akai sampler, G4, and keyboard w/ Mark on cd. Mark Allen followed it up with a 2 hour house set. It varied from hard to deep, soulful house, and it was just perfect. Every transition flawless, great buildups through mixes, breakdowns, everything. I normally get bored with house sets, but I and everyone else could not stop dancing. And the best part, he played a huge variety of tracks that were new to most of the crowd and kicked ***. I get tired of the same stuff over and over, I swear, more than half of most sets is the same stuff as the previous week with some of the local dj's. Again, its hard to mix house well ;)
 
Re: Junglism and Old Hardcore

djq said:
I think that the older hardcore and jungle breakbeat material (1987 - 1993) is harder to mix than anything produced now.
Most music now is already split up into its own genre's.
Click to expand...
ol school hardcores easy just feel the anger:bat:
 
I've not tried those styles but I'd say non-4/4 electro and wicked jungle/dnb. :eek:
 
In my experience, I definitely have to say that the old style goa/psy trance has been the most difficulty to mix.
But then again... that was the style that got me into DJ'ing, I had so much lying around and felt I needed to do something with it.
Bear in mind that back before 97 it was still perfectly acceptable to intro mix psy-trance, even now a lot of guy are still doing it with their DAT tapes.

I play mostly new psy trance now, and have to say that it's far easier to mix, but you have to be very careful with your set progression as with any other style its the journey thats important, not an individual track or mix.

I find D'n'B and faster styles (170BPM+) are actually easier for me to mix. I don't know why... but I just hear when something goes off faster.
Maybe its because you often have two very different breaks that only sound right in one particular way and the moment it varies even slightly you pick up on it.
I hear each break as an individual beat with a very complex texture so I just feel that I'm getting a lot more feedback on how the rhythms are mixing.

The idea that D'n'B is more complex or difficult to mix is absurd. It's all relative. D'n'B has a distinct type of rhythm that makes the music what it is and once you latch on to it, its not difficult to sort out the beats in your head. Besides, it is still a virtual 4/4 rhythm just like Trance or House.

The thing is that once you've gone past the basics, like beatmatching there's always deeper to dig. So even if you could say that one style was generally easier to mix for the whole DJ population it just means that the top Dj's would be that much better and use their energy on other aspects of the music to make it better.
 
Hogus: Right On!! I totally agree with you... any session with ANY type of music can be as mundane or complex as the DJ wants to make it. It's all about how hard do you WANT to make it... beatmatching ANY genre is not very difficult, BUT mixing ANY genre at the pro level is hard. Good to hear someone else on the same page.
 
I wouldn't isolate any one genre as harder than another. Unless the breakbeats are mentally complicated, I wouldn't say d+b is any harder than any other genre.

Just to dispel a few myths (IMHO) -
* breaks are not inherently harder to mix than 4-to-the-floor beats
* BPM makes very little difference, but if anything I'd say faster is easier, because you can spot speed differences slightly more quickly.

Some things that make mixing difficult are:
* tracks that don't have nice intros
* tracks that have irregular bar structures
* short tracks
* tracks that are very melodic (because you have to worry about key)

The hardest mix I did recently was a deep house mix, because many of the tracks clashed key-wise, and some of the percussion is "live" or pseudo-live, i.e. not exactly on the beat. Also a lot of my techno is a git to mix, because they have very short or no intros, and I try to mix from track to track quite swiftly.

I don't know why people go on about how hard d+b is to mix, I mix it exactly like I mix house. I wouldn't say any genre is implicitly harder to mix than any other. :)

What IS difficult is trying to excel, making your set progress, being different from the million and one would-be-DJs who spin a similar style to you, and being consistent.
 
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