Breakbeat addiction.

New answers please!

yes, most of them!

but i don't understand why one breakbeat off one song would be any help to a DJ. wouldn't you have to loop it for it to be useful (and then you wouldn't need the record anymore..?)

I was a bit confused by that too. Perhaps he was planning to loop the breakbeats on his forthcoming musical project.

I got the impression that every record he played in his d.j. set was chosen purely for its drum sound. His approach to music seemed very autistic. He also valued the obscurity of a record instead of praising its artistic qualities.

check out this thread too, Mark. started by dj twitch.

it's funny how it seems to go: musicians start out by being musicians. breaking strings, getting blisters, learning theory, chords, melody, rhythm, all that. djs start out doing something that is musical but not exactly making music and for whatever reason decide that they should 'make' their own. if the 'dj' is to be taken as a legitimate artist, why do so many of them completely rubbish the entire thing by turning into proper musicians? it's kind of like they've got as far as they can with 'the turntable as an instrument' thing and they're realizing ... "okay i actually have to know how to do something". i guess it's for that reason that i don't think anyone who starts out exclusively as a dj could really be called a 'musician' or 'artist' (but i guess making 'art using music' can be different from making 'music').

you're not really going to understand music if all you know about it is the heavy-sounding drum has to line up with the heavy-sounding drum on the other record and then you move the little switch from left to right, put on another record, and then you get lots of cocaine and cheap sex.

i'm not really talking about the scratch dj (which i see as a percussionist, really) ... they're fine by me.

isn't this how the abstract expressionists happened in art? clement greenberg to thread!!

I haven't really made any beats for about 3-4 years. but at the time when I was sampling a lot and making songs, I totally lost the ablilty to simply listen to music and enjoy it. Everything entering the ears was being dissected and broken apart (presumably in preparation for potential sampling). I have mostly regained my listening skills.

I may be incorrect, but I think that most SERIOUSLY AVID collectors of this sort don't really qualify as DJ's anyway. They're record collectors and have all the nerdy quirks as such. I'm not so sure the examples of records given are all that obscure. I consider Shadow to be the digger's digger. I'm sure he's got so much shit that nobody else has ever heard of. Maybe it's just his mystique, though.

I've also pretty much given up this kind of record buying. I don't really have that much interest in records that are only good for 30 seconds. But at the same time I can appreciate the fact that some people are into it. It's like building a sampling library, and the truth is that there are lots of records that you will only see once in your life. Lots you will never see. And if you let that start bothering you, you can end up being a total junkie, snatching up anything in front of your face.

you're not really going to understand music if all you know about it is the heavy-sounding drum has to line up with the heavy-sounding drum on the other record and then you move the little switch from left to right, put on another record...

This sort of behaviorist/reductionist model could easily be applied to rock, too. I don't see any use in creating some double-standard of evaluation.

clarke, i would say that making rock music (although it has its own set of insularities and problems) comprises more of the elements of making music than 'lining up the heavy drum on one record with the heavy drum on the other record'. even at its worst, rock music deals with melody, several different rhythmic accentuations, different time signatures (as opposed to four-on-the-floor 4/4), genuine songcraft (or attempts) and dozens of subgenres, styles, and methods.

moving a crossfader from left to right is still moving a crossfader from left to right.

I certainly went through a beat-digging phase, not because I wanted to make tunes, but just because it gets kind of addictive from the first time you pick up some dusty 7 and go - "hey, isn't that the beat from..."

And I'd agree with most of the above. It fucks your perceptions of music completely. I would put on absolutely dismal records and rave about them saying things like "yeah, the melody and the vocal are awful, but I love the percussion" or "that bit right there (rewind to 2 second snippet repeatedly) is really good". Which does display very little understanding of the fact that any music thrives from the combination of elements and not the elements themselves.

I think that this is why beat-digging isn't really djing - no one plays a live set of those records, so they don't get to hear them in the combination of the mix, or the context of the set. That one bar, or even one kick-drum sound exist in isolation.

Euch.

It's a virus, I think, and should not be encouraged.

"moving a cross-fader from left to right" whoooo hoo that's about as exciting as "rubbing finger on metal string" *yawn* i've seen it all before why bother

moving a crossfader from left to right (and subsequently from right to left) is a non-event. playing a three octave lydian scale in sixteenth notes at 160 bpm is an event. sixteenth note triplet double kick drum patterns are bloody hard. ten finger piano chords?

sure all that stuff has been done to death, but by now how can you claim that moving a crossfader from left to right hasn't either? how many boring trance djs does the world need?

Fields I think we are fields apart on this. Yngwie and Peanut Butter Wolf are NOT my kind of "event." Difficulty of execution may = personal pride and satisfaction for the performer but it has little bearing on my thing. I like different sorts of songs, and I like it when DJs play those songs cause I don't have to work the jukebox myself or whatever. I don't care how hard it is or not. I like some bands too (though almost none of them play songs I recognize DAMMIT!!)

holy shit will you listen to that guy play that three octave lydian scale in sixteenth notes at 160 bpm! whatta record! I gotta listen to this again RIGHT NOW