from Hacker News

The Art of DJing: Jeff Mills

by pmcpinto on 4/2/19, 2:58 PM with 69 comments

• by parksy on 4/4/19, 1:36 PM

  I enjoyed reading this article immensely. I'm a nobody bedroom producer but the description of the feathering and blending out tracks, and his interaction with the audience and how he's using layers to tell a story from his mind and not just appeasing the crowd really spoke to why I do what I do the way I do it, made me respect the man all the more for his integrity, and it's something that is increasingly difficult to do - be an artist above being a slightly randomising musical xerox. There's a message there for producers and DJs that there's a soul or spirit that's always at risk, and we have the ability to uphold it.

  Reading Jeff's description of the mental process not just the mechanical process... I was sad the article seemed to just touch on those areas and would love to see deeper into the artistic process. When he's imagining approaching a planet, or being in the forest, and how that translates to music for him.

  What a legendary DJ. I'd love to see / hear him do a modern set mixing old school hits records like he described. And now I'm falling down a youtube hole back into the 80s:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejSvyXlin_s

• by dnhz on 4/4/19, 10:45 AM

  Example no. 1. Jeff Mills once put out a DVD demonstrating his techniques. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtw2-kL32YM (Exhibitionist Mix, 2014). Excerpted in the interview

  (start around 18:00 for The Bells)

• by clydethefrog on 4/4/19, 2:55 PM

  Fantastic feature aside, does anyone love the design and functionality of Resident Advisor? The only review sites that feels like an institute in it's genre nowadays, while all the other review platforms have sold their soul. They have an excellent artist and event database too. Fingers crossed it will never change.

• by empath75 on 4/4/19, 11:11 AM

  My advice if you want to be a DJ is to skip learning how to mix with turntables and go straight to ableton live. It took me years to get good at beatmatching, and played gigs in front of thousands of people, but you can be perfect with a few hours spent learning ableton live, with as many effects and filters as you could possibly want. I switched to ableton basically the second I found out about it and never went back.

  It’s really hard to do what Jeff mills is doing with turntables. Like years and years of many hours a day practice.

  You can recreate it in ableton live with absolutely no practice at all and then do more stuff on top of it.

  Of course ableton doesn’t tell you the right moments to mix or the right songs or the right way to filter and so on, so there is still a lot of artistry and skill, but just in terms of dexterity, it’s a lot easier.

• by 0db532a0 on 4/4/19, 1:50 PM

  For people interested in learning more about the Detroit electronic music scene, here are some more must-check names:

  Drexciya

  James Stinson

  Gerald Donald

  DJ Stingray

  Sherard Ingram

  Der Zyklus

  Dopplereffekt

  Gedankenexperiment

  Transllusion

  Clarence G

  The Other People Place

  Underground Resistance

  Robert Hood

  Marcellus Pittman

  Moodymann

  Theo Parrish

  Juan Atkins

  DJ Qu

  DJ Jus-Ed

  Eduardo de la Calle

  Terrence Dixon

  Omar S

  Clone Records

• by pmcpinto on 4/4/19, 1:48 PM

  It's nice to see so many electronic music fans in HN