Flipping the Funk

Posted By: Shagz
Date:

Thanks to everybody who came out last night to the Methodology CD release party and thanks to the band for bringing me in to play with them! I had an excellent time and from the number of smiling faces, I could tell everybody else did to. :)

Thought that came to be yesterday: I'm a little more nervous these days before gigs, and I think I figured out why. Lately I've been doing a lot more sets that incorporate and juxtapose funky old tracks alongside fresh new beats. Before, when I was just dropping house/breaks/prog track after track, it was super easy 'cuz almost everything was within a few BPMs of each other and it was a snap to match things up.

With the new style, I'm dealing with an almost silly range of diverse BPMs. One funk track might be 110bpm and then that hip hop song I wanna play next can't be matched 'cuz it's at 95bpm, and the northern soul classic that would work so nicely right after it is 130+. I can't just pull something out of my crate and expect to know how to mix it in, even if I haven't listened to it months. Now I really have to start memorizing things!

But it's good, keeps me on my toes, and the classics need to be played, not just because they're good dance tracks but everything we have now has been built on them. Dancing to quantized beats that have the crap compressed out of them over and over is only so good for so long. :)

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