so here's a new technique to help sharpening up everyone's skillsets. The goal of the exercise is to provide a mixset each week for people to dissect and see what techniques producers in other genres are using. Listen to the dj set at the following link. take note of what you liked, and what worked well for the producers of those tracks. If you can, break out the sp or other gear and try to use that technique.

The set this week is deep house and could be beneficial for those who say that they get locked into making loops and tracks don't go anywhere. Deep house is a style where the groove stays pretty similar, but uses contrast and minor changes to keep things interesting. Sound like this would be a beneficial thing to be able to add to your beats? yup...you bet it is.

Some things to listen for:
how is variety added?
how do songs go about transitioning from section to section?
What is the most important part and how to the other parts of the track push up to that?

http://oscarp-openbarmusic.podomatic.co ... -07_00.mp3

Feel free to provide your own observations and post any samples of ideas you got from this exercise. The goal isnt necessarily to complete full tracks, but to put new tools in your toolbelt that you can use in the future.

Enjoy and let me know if you learn anything, have any examples, or would like to see this idea continued

-Lodger

so here are a few ideas i've noted so far from this genere. hopefully this can get the ball rolling.

- use a combination of big and small loops. this helps keep a sense of variety small loops can be brought in and out of the mix and mixed up and down to add energy or faded out to make it chill a bit.

-chords are a bit more of a complicated affair with stuff being more than basic triads. 7th 9th chords or more complex chords are common. try writing a chord progression and adding in other notes of the scale along with it... sometimes something outside of the scale will work well too.

-If you're digging for samples, smooth jazz can be helpful, as can bossa nova, anything latin, etc. there are never ever limits to where your samples can come from, but some generes can be more likely than others to be productive.

-Note the instruments....lots of organ, bass, some guitar, synth, and some dub style effects.

-note also the bpm...at 130 or so, half of that would be just a bit slower than hiphop...

Here's a neat little tool for electro sounds... its a er-1 emulator that can export samples to wav.

http://www.threechords.com/hammerhead/er0.shtml

This can be helpful for drums, fx, etc/

Love the idea! Genres each have their own limitations and boundries and I find those help when stuck in a rut. I don't know much about deep house so are there a couple tracks you'd recommend that follow the "rules" nicely? I also didn't download your track b/c of the 2 hour estimated finish, could you up it on soundcloud or something?

I'll start picking up some samples for this though, hopefully post something by Sunday.

a good place to start could be just typing deep house into youtube or pandora. the link was to a dj set which is important because as producers the techniques djs use to mix can be helpful to make better transitions within our music and to make stuff fit better with other tracks. listen to a few tracks and see if you get any ideas you can transpose to your own genre or even try something new out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_house
a good quick overview of the genre, stressing correlations with tech house and proving a list of artists.

I'm considering doing this again, but have no idea if this was useful or just wankery on my part. please let me know if this was helpful and if there's a genre you all would like to dissect. thanks!

just to be pedantic for a sec... how is 65 bpm a bit slower than a typical hip-hop tempo? I think roughly 87-97 for most hip-hop so usually about 92-93 bpm...

back to the topic--maybe it would be more beneficial to examine a non-dance genre like classical or country. was is zappa who said talking about music is like dancing about architecture? well maybe we should be dancing about architecture, or in this case, branching farther out of the comfort zone for influences

Reply with quote
just to be pedantic for a sec... how is 65 bpm a bit slower than a typical hip-hop tempo? I think roughly 87-97 for most hip-hop so usually about 92-93 bpm...
//////
The bpm of hiphop can really vary according to the source material and subgenre, so while its true that most hiphop would be 87-97, you do occasionally see tracks around 75-85 bpm. The reason I highlighted the half tempo is because it can be used to good effect mixing genres (for a good example of something like techno mixed with a halftime bpm trip/hiphop track check youtube for a mix of underworld born slippy and groove armada at the river).
Regarding non dance centric genres, that would be interesting. I'm not sure if I'd be the right guy to teach or comment on those. anyone with experience in classical, country, etc?