WMC week 2 - Wrap Up

For those of you who gathered in Miami for Ultra or the WMC, you might have herd a few select tracks being rotated more then any other song. Here are a few tracks I found to be play religiously by many great djs.

Zedd Ft Foxes - Clarity (Funkagenda Remix) HOTT HOTTT

The Clocktave - A Melody by scratching notes on Wax

 Really Cool fun new tool to make hands on music with your turntable.

checkout this great read from GearJunkie.com

 The Clocktave is a scratch tool to make music with. It is based on just one concept: the Clocktave. A Clocktave (Clock-Octave) is a note scale to scratch with, ranging from 1 to 4 octaves. The notes of the octaves are divided between exactly one rotation of the record. Every note of the scale appears at the same position over and over, regardless of which octave you are in.

After practicing, the Clocktave system allows you to find the right notes intuitively. This way, melodies can be played without having to bring your arm forth and back to reach the pitch-control and keeping the natural sound of the instruments in every single note. Great for scratching basslines, lead melodies, adlibs, chords, you name it.

Track 1 is a tuning tone, a perfect ‘C’ note. Before use, tune this tone using your pitch control to the root note of the music you want to Clocktave to. This is very important, so you  might want to practise this first. The root note C is the most important note of the entire record. Almost every Clocktave starts with the C note. Make sure that every Clocktave starts at exactly 12 o’clock. How? Put a marker on your record or scratching interface, move the marker to 12 o’ clock position, and then press the cue point of the Clocktave section that you want to use, for example: ‘Strings’ . Congratulations, your Clocktave record is now correctly configured and you are ready to go. With the C note at 12 o’ clock, you can now start to scratch melodies.

Now, the melodies won’t come out by it self, you’ll have to put all your melodic creativity and scratch technique into it. This time the melodies aren’t on the record but in your head. Try to get what’s in your head out of the speakers. Practice and experiment, and use your ears well.

FATTTTTT SYNTH OP-1

SFX Entertainment buys Electronic Dance Music online store Beatport

Check out this great news about how EDM will continue to take over pop culture. 

From http://www.livingelectro.com/blog/ :

SFX Entertainment, the company led by the media executive Robert F. X. Sillerman, has agreed to buy the music download site Beatport, part of the company’s plan to build a $1 billion empire centered on the electronic dance music craze.

Mr. Sillerman declined on Tuesday to reveal the price. But two people with direct knowledge of the transaction, who were not authorized to speak about it, said it was for a little more than $50 million.

Beatport, founded in Denver in 2004, has become the pre-eminent download store for electronic dance music, or E.D.M., with a catalog of more than one million tracks, many of them exclusive to the service. It says it has nearly 40 million users, and while the company does not disclose sales numbers, it is said to be profitable.

The site has also become an all-purpose online destination for dance music, with features like a news feed, remix contests and D.J. profiles. Those features, and its reach, could help in Mr. Sillerman’s plan to unite the disparate dance audience through media.

“Beatport gives us direct contact with the D.J.’s and lets us see what’s popular and what’s not,” Mr. Sillerman said in an interview. “Most important, it gives us a massive platform for everything related to E.D.M.”

Since the company was revived last year, SFX has focused mostly on live events, with the promoters Disco Donnie Presents and Life in Color; recently it also invested in a string of nightclubs in Miami and formed a joint venture with ID&T, the European company behind festivals like Sensation, to put on its events in North America.

In the 1990s, Mr. Sillerman spent $1.2 billion creating a nationwide network of concert promoters under the name SFX, which he sold to Clear Channel Entertainment in 2000 for $4.4 billion; those promoters are now the basis ofLive Nation’s concert division.

Matthew Adell, Beatport’s chief executive, said that being part of SFX could help the company extend its business into live events, and also into countries where the dance genre is exploding, like India and Brazil.

“We already are by far the largest online destination of qualified fans and talent in the market,” Mr. Adell said, “and we can continue to grow that.”

Attention Producers!!!

For those of you who would like great tips from a great dj check out this video! I found this vary helpful and I think those who read this blog could also benefit.