THE LOVE IS RIGHT HERE
Nov 1, 2005 12:00 PM
On Sept. 24, 89,000 people swarmed the Bay Area for the second San Francisco Loveparade. A couple hundred DJs, 24 floats and the masses paraded from Market Street to the Civic Center Plaza. Then, Carl Cox, Bad Boy Bill, DJ Dan, Ferry Corsten and many other DJs spun well into the night.
Quietly warming up for the barrage of beats was the Loveparade Remix Lounge event with Remix, NARAS and the Pyramind production school on Sept. 22-23. As part of the event, local DJs and producers swung by for a panel about digital DJing (featuring Pyramind instructor Ean Golden, Mei-Lwun, J-Boogie and Norcal DJMPA instructors Larry Stone and DJ Pone) and another one on remixing (with Mark Farina, DJF, Casey Nefcy, DJ Treavor and Saeed Younan). On the remix tip, Younan makes his priorities known: “I'll spend six hours just on the bass line because that's what drives the track.” Meanwhile, Farina prefers to produce parts for his remixes on the fly. “I do it live — it's the Midwestern way,” he says.
On the DJ panel, Pone talked about the benefits of scratching in digital. While touring as The Transplants' DJ on the Warped Tour (with Blink 182's Travis Barker), Barker jumped on his drum kit, causing the tonearm on Pone's turntable to jump, too. “My whole tonearm went from beginning to end,” he says. But using DJ software, like Rane/Serato's ScratchLive, in relative mode, he was able to circumvent the chaos. “It enables the needle to skip around without changing the position of the track,” he says. For Mei-Lwun, DJing with a laptop has been easier on his back than carrying vinyl, but, now, his audience expects him to play whatever its heart desires. “They say, ‘Can't you just download it?’” he says. “It's like they're feeding $10 into my mouth, and I'm supposed to spit out tracks for them.”
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