Music mixing DJ performance at Tao 3GSM party with miniMIXA on Windows Mobile device
Posted by Tim Cole on February 16th, 2007
>> Hear the mix here: Red Lounge – Tao 3GSM Party Mix.
On Monday night (12th Feb) at the Tao 3GSM party in Barcelona’s Red Lounge, I did short performance on miniMIXA, mingling with the party goers – in between a great set from the house DJ, “DJ Monk”. I had miniMIXA++ running on an PocketPC and sending the live 22Khz stereo audio output stream via bluetooth to the venue’s PA system. It all worked fine, and I had some senior mobile industry figures mixing live, too.
For the set I had purchased from Time and Space some middle eastern audio loops (Roots of the Middle East and North Africa from Big Fish Audio and SoundScan Arabian Traditions from Universal Sound Bank) and was mixing these together with some excellent bass and drum loops from the Music Tech Magazine, plus an audio track and a modular synth riff, together with some spot loops. I had set these up with the miniMIXA++ Cell Mix (MusicDJ) mode, and used the new beta XY control surface and quality filter to cool effect.
It really was pretty spectacular (and fun) to be doing this all live on a mobile device, on the floor. I lost the bluetooth connection a couple of times when someone passed in front of the bluetooth module (it was a low power one), so that was useful to know.
Even though I am not a DJ, people seemed to enjoy it, and especially enjoyed participating in the mix and hearing themselves over the PA – seeing the excited reactions was really cool. The XY control surface went down particularly well, too. In the hands of a real DJ, this could all be so much cooler still.
For those interested, I have uploaded a quick mix of roughly what I did. It uses 11 of the 12 tracks in miniMIXA, and all 4 sections in MusicDJ mode. It uses high quality low pass and high pass filters (controlled with XY control surface), reverbs and even a modular softsynth. You should hear that everything is pretty tight. It was live mixed, and recorded (direct to SD card) on an HTC Universal. You can find the recording here :Red Lounge – Tao 3GSM Party Mix.
Was this a world first performance? Quite possibly(!), as it included the following elements: live 12 track mixing on a Windows Mobile device; 22KHz stereo output over bluetooth to the club’s PA; audience participation; modular synthesizer; spot loop triggering; full track audio file streaming from storage card; XY control panel (controlling filter cutoff/Q); loading content into the mix on the fly (auto pitch shift/time stretch from other MIXApaks); use of a range of live fx at track and global level.
February 17th, 2007 at 7:09 am
Wish I’d heard it live!!! Did you video it??!
February 17th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Sounds like it all went really well. I had a listen to the mix and it sounded really good.
February 17th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Cheers Fred. Sorry, no video was shot!
February 17th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Thanks Palm Sounds! It was great fun, and there was a lot of interest in miniMIXA shown during the 3GSM week.
February 19th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
How big were the bodies that passed in front of the bluetooth signal?
February 20th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
[...] Even if you’re not a budding musician you should head on over to Tim’s blog and check out the mix. When you consider it was created live on a Pocket PC I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s pretty damn impressive! [...]