No Qualms Mixtape - Episode 4 (UK Vibe)

This mixtape is a mix of different UK genres, Jazz, Dub, Hip-Hop & Drum 'n' Bass.

No Qualms Mixtape - Episode 4 (UK Vibe) by No Qualms The Artist on Mixcloud

3D print your own dubplate!

The record is made with a system developed by an Instructables employee. Deep in Autodesk’s Pier 9 lair, I listened to a few of her printed and laser cut records.


What can you do with a 3D printer?

It’s a question I hear a lot, and there are many answers. But the most delightful application I’ve encountered so far came in the form of a thin, round disc–a record. This week, I slipped on a pair of headphones at Autodesk’s Pier 9 makerspace and early-’90s grunge eked out over a background of scratchy crackles: “Load up on guns, bring your friends/ It’s fun to lose and to pretend.” Nirvana. The band, I mean.

The record was printed by Amanda Ghassaei, a software engineer who works for online DIY-haven Instructables. Since she first posted her method for making the records on Instructables, it has garnered international attention. So much so that Bloc Party lead singer Kele Okereke announced he will use her method to 3D print records of a new song he is releasing next week.

Ghassaei decided to 3D print a record after a set of top-of-the-line Stratasys 3D printers arrived at Pier 9. The printers are very high resolution, so she decided to see just how high of a resolution she could coax out of them. Printing the tiny ridges that line records would be a great way to do so.

But first, she had to figure out how to use software to create a printable design. Records are so complex that it would be impossible to design one by hand. Ghassaei decided to write a script that would automatically turn a music file into a record design.

After a lot of trial and error, Ghassaei was ready to try her first 3D printed record (“Debaser” by Pixies). It worked.

“That was a pretty good moment,” she said.

She didn’t stop with 3D printed records. Using a laser cutter, she also made wood, vinyl and paper records. They sounded more scratchy than the 3D printed records, but that’s likely because heat from the laser cutter warped the records as it carved them. Radiohead’s “Idioteque” actually sounded pretty natural over heavy scratching.

Ghassaei said the instructions posted to Instructables are meant to be thorough enough for anyone to make a 3D printed record, but it still requires some serious work to go from song to plastic disc. She also said you need a high-resolution printer to make it work; a MakerBot isn’t enough.

Ghassaei said she isn’t sure that home 3D printers will ever be good enough to make printing records a common activity, but she could see bands following Okereke’s lead and using printed records for promotional records. They could print a unique record for each person that orders one, for example. In the end, she hopes that people who see the Instructables page are inspired or just learn something new. Even if people don’t have personal access to a high-end printer, they can use one of the multitude of online printer services to order their own record design.

Okereke recorded the song, “Down Boy,” with the help of singer Bobbie Gordon. It will be available as a 3D print December 13 and 14 in London and all proceeds will go to charity. Ghassaei actually never managed to fit an entire song onto a record on her own, so “Down Boy” is the first-ever full song to be 3D printed.

Gettin' shit done!

5 Tips for Getting Things Done and Self Motivation for Artists, Producers & DJ’s


Pro DJ and music blogger Phil Morse from Digital DJ Tips gives your productivity a kick in the pants with five reasons to stop procrastinating and get working on your art.

Creative professionals everywhere struggle with the challenges of getting things finished. Successful creative professionals beat those challenges. This is a sentiment that should resonate with the bedroom producer. With the rise of affordable music equipment there has been a flood of people trying to get into this field and the competition is fierce. But music production is just one of the more recent career fields to face these battles, as they join artists everywhere who must learn the skills of self-motivation to survive in these competitive fields.

To address this issue we have compiled five rules you can use to ensure you’re playing the game well enough to find some success. These tips are a good list to turn to when you need a kick in the butt to get started and feel serious about succeeding in music production.

1. Show up!
Mark Twain was once asked if he had to wait for inspiration to come before writing. “Yes, I do,” he replied, “but inspiration always comes at 9am sharp, every weekday!”

To succeed, you have to turn up. When you’re a solo producer, maybe doing it part time, it’s doubly important, because nobody else is making you do it and you’re busy anyway. But if you don’t put the hours in, the rest of it comes to nothing. Professionals do; wannabes just think about it.

The best way is simply to plan a certain number of hour for production into your days, weeks and months, and stick to it. Jobs have set hours, and this is a job. If you’re physically there, ready to start, you’ve already won half the battle.

2. Fight resistance
Novelist Steven Pressfield wrote a seminal book on creativity called The War of Art. In it, he identified the devil on your shoulder that stops you producing creative works, and gave it a name: Resistance.

Resistance is what makes you sort through your sample library recategorizing all of your loops and hits, instead of working on your tune. Resistance is what makes your hand move towards the Facebook bookmark to check your fan page, instead of working on your tune. Resistance is what makes you suddenly decide to rearrange your studio to put the speakers in a different place, instead of working on your tune…

In short, resistance is what makes you do something else that feels important but that actually isn’t, at the expense of doing what you’re really meant to be doing – creating. It’s particularly insidious because you feel like you’re working, but in fact you’re actively looking for anything but your important creative work to do!

A simple way to trap this creeping disease is to log exactly what you do for a few production sessions, and see how much time you actually spent producing. Once you’ve identified the apparently urgent but really unimportant stuff, the “instant gratification” tasks that you’ve been doing instead of the real, painful, worthwhile job of creating, you can start doing something about changing your habits – the kind of things outlined in our10 Tips to Fight Writer’s Block & Increase Studio Productivity post a few months back.

3. Finish what you start, then start again
How many times have you had somebody tell you excitedly about an amazing new tune they’ve made, right up until the point that you ask to hear it, at which point they shuffle uncomfortably, muttering something like “it’s not quite finished yet…” or “I need to master it first…”. How many wannabe producers do you know who never seem to finish anything at all?

Signed bands traditionally had little choice but to finish their records on time, with obligation-ridden advances, studio time booked, and record company execs breathing down their necks. Even then, there are legendary stories of albums taking years to finish (or never getting finished at all). If “real” bands sometimes never finish their work, what chance do effectively self-employed producers have?

You have every chance, as long as you set yourself deadlines and stick to them – come what may. Tasks tend to expand to fit the available time. Deadlines are your friend. Professionals produce, release, and move on. Wannabes procrastinate and spend more time coming up with excuses than delivering and getting going on the next project.

4. Accept failure as a necessary part of success
Let me make a few assumptions about you: Music is your life. Tunes express things for you that words can’t. You can say more about yourself in a musical production than you can find words to express. Bands, musicians and producers are your heroes.

So how can you possibly live up to the expectations these feelings impose on you? How can you possibly do something of worth in the arena you so admire? How will you deal with releasing something that doesn’t meet your own impossibly high expectations?

The answer is to accept that to get that success, you have to first miss the mark. You have to produce tracks that nobody ends up liking. Hell, you have to produce tracks that even you end up not liking!

Every time you miss the mark, treat it as training – or if you like, as “nudging your guided missile closer to its target”. We always learn more from our failures than our successes. Without the little “nudges” that each almost-success gives us, we simply can’t hit our final, successful goal.

With modern music distribution, there’s a real hidden bonus here. As you release track after track, piling them up on YouTube and cross-promoting them on Facebook and so on, you’re actually building up a back catalogue. And believe me, as soon as you have one success, a lot of people will want to know about that back catalogue. So treat your early efforts as banking stuff up for future success if you like.

5. Accept that it’s natural to lack confidence
We are each programmed to think than anyone, everyone, can do stuff better than us. That simply because we’re involved, anything we do is bound to fail.

Writers feel it when they face a blank page, artists with a blank canvas. DJs feel it as they warm up a night, scared out of their wits. Producers feel it in Ableton Live with a new, empty project and no ideas. All feel like they’re just not up to the task.

Let me give you an example. I have had a long, fulfilling career in dance music. But, even when I was five full years into DJing as a professional, I remember realising that I’d never lost the feeling that I wasn’t really a DJ, than I was a fraud, and that if anyone actually came up to me while I was playing – I mean, just one person out of a packed, happy dancefloor of hundreds – and told me so, I would crumple and never play again. Such was my lack of confidence. It’s better now, but it’s still there. And I’m very normal (I think!).

Here’s another thing: While it’s unlikely anyone will ever tell you you’re a fraud or no good at this, also nobody will ever come up and give you permission to be a producer. No-one will say “you’re good enough, welcome to the club”. You have to tell yourself it’s OK, and you have to do it daily.

How many producers do you hear saying they can’t stand to listen to their own work, or read their own reviews? Do you ever wonder why that is? It’s because they have that natural low confidence in their own abilities. Success and money don’t cure it, either. You just have to accept it’s part of the creative mind.

Finally…
A wonderful thing happens when you turn up, blindly believe in yourself and push on. They say “God loves a trier”, and it’s true – when you get going, the stars seem to move in your favor, synergies happen, your mind – having beaten resistance – slips into creative mode, stuff you can’t explain begins to go your way, and out of nothing – painfully, slowly and precariously – good stuff evolves. Good luck!

Phil Morse is a DJ and journalist originally from Manchester, England. He currently lives in Spain, from where he publishes Digital DJ Tips: How to DJ properly with portable digital DJ gear

Is music worse than it used to be?

Is Music Worse Than It Used To Be?

Has music hit a new low, or does today’s massive choice mean there’s more good music out there than ever?

Dance music’s recent mainstream acceptance as “EDM” has brought about a fury from certain elements in the artistic/underground scenes, which is nothing new in itself – it happens whenever anything “underground” finds love from the mainstream.

From articles like a recent one in SPIN Magazine to those carried by a plethora of blogs, many DJs, critics, and producers have been claiming that the music has hit a creative zero. That we’ve lost that innovative spark that can do things like make one sound explode into a plethora of ideas and genres, as has happened in the past. That it’s lost its soul.

The first sign of this dissention came in 2009 when blogger Mark Fisher wrote:

“The current decade… has been characterised by an abrupt sense of deceleration. A thought experiment makes the point. Imagine going back 15 years in time to play records from the latest dance genres – dubstep, or funky, for example – to a fan of jungle. One can only conclude that they would have been stunned – not by how much things had changed, but by how little things have moved on. Something like jungle was scarcely imaginable in 1989, but dubstep or funky, while by no means pastiches, sound like extrapolations from the matrix of sounds established a decade and a half ago.”

I sense a bit of truth as I listen to electro-house now, and feel like it’s only devolved from the tweaky ideology Benny Benassi started with Satisfaction back in 2003. I’ll admit while the newer sound pushes epic trance-like buildups and synths, it hasn’t changed much. I’d even agree with Fisher that most of the popular dubstep reminds me of the jungle I’d hear 10 years ago, only with a different beat.

I even gave Trap a listen recently and found myself asking how it’s any different than rap music.??It would be easy to believe that the well for creativity has run dry – but I don’t think it’s that simple.
“Normal” people are not DJs

One might wonder why it seems there is so much bad “manufactured” music being released, while “creative” or “good” music seems non-existent. You all have to remember that the regular market of people consuming clubs and dance music are not DJs. They aren’t drawn to the intricate little things about the music the way we are.

When dance music draws crowds like this, surely it has to appeal to lowest common denominators in order to do so? Is this wrong?

They’re drawn to the images of posh cool clubs with gorgeous people or big massive festivals that are out of this world.?? The masses might be drawn to the images they carry in their minds of what the club and rave scene is, but they still want the safety of their familiar music. Jim Fusilli of the Wall Street Journal had this to say:

“As EDM and its related events continue to grow, an audience may be developing that wants nothing more than predictable, middling entertainment.”

Maybe for some of us here in this blog, as “serious” clubbers/DJs we were/are drawn to that uncertainty. To go to an event, see a DJ come on, and just hear new sounds we’ve never heard. Unfortunately for us, we’re part of a small number of what I call “the converted”. We get it, we know it, and thus we’re capable of opening our minds to new things. Most people who simply rush off to Vegas or Miami to party in the usual touristy/glam spots do not.

Thus the music industry will jump on the bandwagon. You’ve seen this many times. Right now everyone is copying Guetta and Harris. A few years ago it was everyone copying Deep Dish and Benny Benassi. Years before that they copied Armin Van Buuren, Tiesto, and Paul Van Dyk.??This is the usual cycle and problem of a mass of producers more interested in being famous/successful as opposed to being creative. In a Mixmag interview, trance artists Above and Beyond had this to add:

“I’ve noticed that many smaller producers are seemingly feeling a bit lost in where to go with their direction, and are perhaps seeing artists like David Guetta having mainstream commercial success and saying, ‘I want a piece of that!’ They are then diverting from their chosen flight path and heading towards that, which is of course fine if it’s where they genuinely want to be, as some do. But for a lot of producers, they dilute what they are about because they are not David Guetta and don’t do what he does best. That’s not experimenting in my eyes, it’s panic!”

I somewhat agree with Above and Beyond. You would think that the drive for mainstream success may have brought about an end in creativity. But this isn’t the first time the scene has hit this conundrum…
It’s a perpetual cycle

For anyone who really remembers disco, they’ll remember when underground scenes like the Paradise Garage and the Loft played the cutting-edge of the 70s. A wonderful world of funk brought to a faster tempo. Once Saturday Night Fever and Studio 54 came about, we saw the music go downhill… but even after Steve Dahl killed disco here in Chicago, things just wouldn’t die. Ironically enough it all came back as house… in the same city!

Bianca Jagger famously turned up at New York’s Studio 54 in a horse… the club marked the height of disco’s excess, but also for many sparked its demise.

We saw this same demise several times in the 1990s. We had pop music with house beats, eurodance music from the ashes of the rave/hardcore scene, and let’s not forget the soundtrack to A Night at the Roxbury.

It happened again after trance’s big explosion at the end of the 20th century. I personally will never forget how in 2000 I’d show up to play a set and drop amazing tunes from the likes of Sasha and Paul Van Dyk, but then a year later would have audiences begging me to play more mainstream like Ian Van Dahl and Sarina Parris.

All those times when I’d seen the creativity go downhill, I’d eventually find a new sound to my liking and thus move on. I like to think that dance music isn’t a person that is born, grows up, and then dies a slow stale death. It’s a phoenix, that dies to rise again.
Yes, we could see the same tweaky basslines of dubstep and think it’s just jungle with a new beat structure, but that’s again how the music is a phoenix. Think about it. How much jungle or even drum and bass are you hearing at events now compared to dubstep? From the ashes of jungle came dubstep.
There is no stagnation, only saturation

Imagine your favourite record store… or something similar if you never bought a record your whole life. It’s in a small storefront, and the space is packed with bins of vinyl and the walls contain top picks from the staff. Every time you walk in, you can quickly and easily find a small stack of music you would love to buy.

Now imagine one day you find that store expanded into the adjoining storefronts, and now it’s as big as a warehouse. More bins were added and more stuff was placed on the walls, but you find that the music you think is great has been mixed in with loads of more stock that you find mediocre or terrible.

This doesn’t even come close to the choice available online. Isn’t the issue now more than it’s harder to find the good stuff, rather than it doesn’t exist?

This is what’s happened now in music. We’ve gone from having a finite space to infinite space. We’ve gone from having access to only one local record shop to access to a plethora of shops all over the globe. Even before MP3, I used to buy vinyl from all over the planet. If I heard it and wanted it, somehow I would get it.

Now, some can still push that music just sucks nowadays, but I disagree. My only rationale of why is that I still go on Beatport or Traxsource, and end up with a shopping cart or wish list full of tunes. I’ll want to spend $20 and end up with $100 in stuff I’d like. So in my opinion, there is still plenty of great stuff being released… you just have to sift through a lot of mediocre or terrible music to find it. Some make the claim again that vinyl record shops kept the quality level up and the crap out, but I more look at the music industry as the culprit, as they will pick whatever will easily sell.

So let’s say we were all still playing vinyl records: Imagine how you would react if your local small record shop is stock full of big label David Guetta-sounding copycat artists, and not many small innovative producers?

We might have ended up with an over-saturation of music because of the internet, but we also ended up with an even playing field where the small bedroom artist can still blow up without any big label support. That’s a big win in my eyes, because it means I’ll still find good music out there… I just have to dig for it like I did in the past with vinyl.
How to find the good music…

If you’re one of those DJs who goes online shopping and can’t find anything that excites you any more, check out my 5 Smarter Ways To Buy Music Online post. I give you some great tips on how to beat the “saturation blues” and help you get more for the money you spend on music.

If you’ve been DJing for a while, do you have an opinion on whether the overall quality of music has gone up or down? How has the shift from vinyl and record shops to digital files and online stores affected this? what does the future hold? Please share your thoughts in the comments.