The blog has suffered lately, and for the two or three of you who read it, I apologize. But I've been busy! Work has ramped up, and my evenings have been spent buried inside a set of headphones.
As I've mentioned before, I used to be a DJ. I played in gay and straight clubs all over St. Louis with an occasional gig outside the area. House, Tech House and Tribal were my passions, but it took 12 years of DJing in St. Louis to realize that the audience for that type of music wasn't very large there. So, that reason paired with a new nine-to-five design job started to erode my desire to play records.
I'd always had a problem with focusing on one path in my life, so when a web design position presented itself, it seemed like a better life choice than stumbling out of an East St. Louis club at 7am after playing records all night. The design industry has it's share of bitchy queens, but I would only have to deal only with their hangovers versus their late night, drunken, meth-induced requests like "Ummm... could you, like, play something that I can dance to?"
My transition out of DJing wasn't quick though. It lasted about a year and included several periods of second thoughts, and offers that I couldn't pass up. I spent the majority of my career begging for gigs, but the moment I decide to end it, the club owners started coming to me. Irony can be a real bitch.
My passion had also start waining because my interests had shifted a bit. Over the years I had accumulated quite the collection of drum machines, samplers and synth modules and became really interested in electronic music production. I worked on a lot of stuff, made my own loops to use at the clubs, and acquired a lot of MIDI sequencing knowledge.
At that point, other than all of the bulky outboard equipment, sequencing with a computer made things really easy. But computers weren't quite fast enough to handle MIDI and audio loops at the same time. It was incredibly expensive though, and like a record junkie who is eventually forced to either purge himself of precious vinyl or store it somewhere, I packed up my equipment and decided to focus on web design for a while.
Then, Larry got a job offer in California. So, like aforementioned record junkie, I sold my turntables, mixing equipment and over 1200 pieces of vinyl and moved to SoCal. All of my drum machines and synths are still packed up in the garage, but I don't really need them anymore.
I always told myself that If I could ever create a track with one single computer instead of 20 pieces of bulky equipment, I would start thinking about DJing and producing again.
Well, that time is here... and that's what I've been doing for the past couple of weeks with Sony Acid on my tiny little laptop. I'll get into all the specifics in a later post, but basically, I've been working on a new mix with a couple of original tracks thrown in. So as a little preview, here is one of those originals. It's a 'rough draft', the file is kinda big and hasn't been fully EQ'd... but please let me know what you think:
Mind Lock
As I've mentioned before, I used to be a DJ. I played in gay and straight clubs all over St. Louis with an occasional gig outside the area. House, Tech House and Tribal were my passions, but it took 12 years of DJing in St. Louis to realize that the audience for that type of music wasn't very large there. So, that reason paired with a new nine-to-five design job started to erode my desire to play records.
I'd always had a problem with focusing on one path in my life, so when a web design position presented itself, it seemed like a better life choice than stumbling out of an East St. Louis club at 7am after playing records all night. The design industry has it's share of bitchy queens, but I would only have to deal only with their hangovers versus their late night, drunken, meth-induced requests like "Ummm... could you, like, play something that I can dance to?"
My transition out of DJing wasn't quick though. It lasted about a year and included several periods of second thoughts, and offers that I couldn't pass up. I spent the majority of my career begging for gigs, but the moment I decide to end it, the club owners started coming to me. Irony can be a real bitch.
My passion had also start waining because my interests had shifted a bit. Over the years I had accumulated quite the collection of drum machines, samplers and synth modules and became really interested in electronic music production. I worked on a lot of stuff, made my own loops to use at the clubs, and acquired a lot of MIDI sequencing knowledge.
At that point, other than all of the bulky outboard equipment, sequencing with a computer made things really easy. But computers weren't quite fast enough to handle MIDI and audio loops at the same time. It was incredibly expensive though, and like a record junkie who is eventually forced to either purge himself of precious vinyl or store it somewhere, I packed up my equipment and decided to focus on web design for a while.
Then, Larry got a job offer in California. So, like aforementioned record junkie, I sold my turntables, mixing equipment and over 1200 pieces of vinyl and moved to SoCal. All of my drum machines and synths are still packed up in the garage, but I don't really need them anymore.
I always told myself that If I could ever create a track with one single computer instead of 20 pieces of bulky equipment, I would start thinking about DJing and producing again.
Well, that time is here... and that's what I've been doing for the past couple of weeks with Sony Acid on my tiny little laptop. I'll get into all the specifics in a later post, but basically, I've been working on a new mix with a couple of original tracks thrown in. So as a little preview, here is one of those originals. It's a 'rough draft', the file is kinda big and hasn't been fully EQ'd... but please let me know what you think:
Mind Lock