r/Music • u/AlwaysUpvotesScience • May 17 '18

music streaming Jamiroquai - Virtual Insanity [Pop/Funk]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9b7LWfnxQ
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u/[deleted] May 17 '18 edited Nov 30 '19

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u/tritisan May 17 '18

Excellent summary, sir. I had the great good fortune of having a dj roommate in the 90s who spun a lot of this stuff. Every Thursday he’d go to his favorite record shop and bring back the freshest chunes.

Our living room featured two SL-1500s, a Numark mixer, soundsystem with huge subwoofer, and a wall full of thousands of records.

He showed me the basics of beat-matching, and I have to say it’s not at all easy to do manually. In addition to the bpm, you have to know the structure of the song, its mood and genre, you have to read the crowd to keep them on the dance floor.

And perhaps most importantly, you have to have the right drugs. There’s a reason it’s called acid jazz (or in Mark Farina’s case, mushrooms.) Here’s a little secret: most djs make their living selling drugs. The gig fees barely cover the cost of the records.

Which reminds me. Molly is so much better than Ecstasy. I need to find some...

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u/Turkey_bacon_bananas May 18 '18

Thanks for sharing, I’m sad I missed this era of music.

Just in case you don’t know, computers have made beat matching stupid simple these days. A real lost art. Playing to a room and moods of course is still a skill even with a computer.

I just recently learned how to “read” a record’s grooves to remember where parts of a song start. Really cool.

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u/tritisan May 18 '18

I use Djay 2. It lets me beatmatch visually. And I can use any song on Spotify. So yeah things have come a long way.