DJing the Rep Your Hood booth

this saturday (nov 3rd) is the cabbagetown chomp and stomp.  i'll be there along with the crew, the shirts, a cooler, the turntables and a bunch of other artists spinning music all day long.  if you haven't checked out the rep your hood site you can now do that.

also our friends at the village theatre are going to be there cooking chili right around the corner and we may get a visit from the guys from wasted potential brass band.  this is our third year doing this festival and it's always been a lot of fun..

if you can make it, come by our booth.  we'll be on powell st right at the intersection with wylie street.  get there early for easier parking and check out the new hoodies we're doing.

-jesster

Gerbers: Downtempo House Mix

my relationship with house music has been an interesting one.  Early in my DJing years i kinda avoided it.  At the time house music was strictly for the clubs and too electronic for my taste.  Eventually i landed a gig DJing at a sushi restaurant in midtown called "Cherry" on the weekends.  it was a pseudo-posh spot that got a decent crowd of people who usually made cherry their place to hang before they "went out."  there were some decent places to hang out just down crescent street.

the music i played there was pretty much all "electronica" which in this context means music without guitars, ranging from loungey stuff to house and all in between.  a typical night would start with a relatively slow tempo and a quiet volume... mostly background dinner music.  as the night went on the volume and tempo would pick up.

the cherry crowd really dug all that electronic music.. we'd keep it pretty smoothed out and it kinda fit the scene pretty well.  we called it "gerbers" 'cause it was like feeding the baby.  this was all before serato so we had real-life actual records that you had to buy at a store and bring to gig.

most of these records had pretty non-descript names for songs.  we got around that by taking a sharpie to the label on the vinyl and writing out a little code for what kind of electronic music that records contined..  pretty much went like this:

H = house
DT = downtempo
MT = midtempo
UPT = uptempo


eventually we decided that there were too many different kinds of house to blanket the whole genre with an "H" label... so we got creative:

BBH = broken beat house
DTH = down tempo house

the DTH was kinda always my personal favorite.  all the fun of house music without the overly fast tempo.. i'd say DTH would land you somewhere in the 105-115 bpm area.  although DTH is more of a feel thing than strictly a bpm thing.

over the years the gerbers kinda grew on me.  here's a little mix i put together of DTH gerbers.  the mix is for a dinner party for mercedes that GO! is producing.  this mix was actually made using ableton live.  the old me would've called that 'cheating' but it's how i felt like doing this.  there actually exist some mp3s that i ripped from vinyl because i couldn't find it anywhere else.

come check out my record collection some day and see all the "DTH" labels hand-written on the vinyl.... 
well, in all honesty, now listening to this mix again, it kinda starts MT and makes it's way to DTH and then towards the end is bordering on straight-up H...

DTH MIX

TTL Remix Comp: dj jesster "the studio"

over at turntable lab they're having a remix competition.. it basically involves any james brown, tribe called quest or rakim.  i started out with an idea and this is what i came up with.. it's more of an original beat that samples tribe than a "remix" but i'm going with it anyways.

the remix comp is more or less a promotion for a new site called legit mix.  so that's where this remix/orginal is:

What I Do

this is my regular gig.. working on the flame for turner studios.  client number one is turner sports.  i know that "working on a flame" sounds kinda vague and abstract.. maybe this will help:

Persian Wedding Song Remix (in Farsi)

A couple of weekends ago i DJed a wedding party for Sarge and Leyla.  Leyla's mom brought me a couple of CDs with some persian wedding music to play.  I thought one of them was pretty interesting to i kinda worked it into a beat i was working on.

The lyrics are in farsi so i don't know what is being said and i'm not sure that the arrangement is in a way that the lyrics make any sense now.  i do think it sounds kinda cool though.  When i put this together i did it because i like the idea of blending different musical styles together, i sincerely hope this isn't offensive or rude towards anyone.

Some of the tricks i tried to use involved some grouping of effects in a timeline.  Using a simpler in a bassline and warping and cutting in arrangement mode.  there's a couple filter delays in there, oh and i used a corpus effect on the bass drums after i wired them through their own audio channel.. that was a trick i learned in a tutorial from dubspot.

The wedding was great by the way and both Leyla and her mom are adorable.  Thanks for the tracks.....

Big House Pimpin' - dj jesster [jay-z house mix]

here's a house music mix i put together..  the concept was to weave "big pimpin'" throughout it and make it a quick little mix.  it's about 35+ minutes.  i looked for about 6 months for the jay-z acapella but had no luck (even tried to tweet the man himself.)  i gave up and did the mix with the original.  thanks to my main man Kev Goreham for the v.o. work...

It's Time For the Percolator (dj jesster Re-Edit)

always loved the song "percolator" by cajmere.  on the flight back from LGA today i put most of this together.  i finished it off back here in atlanta.   it's short and sweet, clocking in at 2:00 min on the nose.  the breakdown with the high-pitched synth got the auto-pan xformer trick which is one of the tricks i got from abe duque in the dubspot workshop.  unfortunately i didn't get to say "thanks" to him in person after the class, i had my head in the apc when he took off.