Three Mix-down Techniques That Change Everything

Making electronic music has been my hobby for many years now. I'm no proper musician, though, and  that's probably the reason why techno suits me so well. This style is usually not about complex melodies and strong lyrics. It's all about making your rhythms sound right and getting your synthesizers to produce something nobody has ever heard before. It's the music of sound engineers.

These are the aspects which have been the most interesting to me and I still find myself learning new ways to do things. I won't talk here about common knowledge like equalization, compression or other basic effects. I believe one can easily find all the information he needs in search engines and Youtube.

Instead, today I'd like to write down three mix-down techniques, that I've picked up over the years and which, although being pretty simple concepts, didn't seem at all that obvious to me, until I learned about them.

Google AdWords - The 100 Buck Experiment

My small AdWords experiment has been completed a while ago and now I'm presenting results here, as promised.

First of all I'd like to point out, that my budget was very limited, as I'd decided to spend only about 100$, so my experience is by no means applicable for real businesses, but it should give you a little taste of what AdWords is and how it works.

Live PA Setup - MIDI Synchronization

One of the key points in my vision of how my setup should be is to utilize all the equipment I've gathered trough the years to it's fullest. Most notable part of it is my DJ-ing gear: Allen&Heath Xone:92 mixer and Korg Kaoss Pad 2 effect processor.

Obviously, I've been using them for many years, and connecting their audio sockets is not worth talking about, but one thing I had never tried before was using their MIDI capabilities.

Upgrading to Windows 8 - Part 2

Since my first attempt, I've heard from couple of people, that they've successfully upgraded their machines to the Windows 8, so I tried to do this again. Now, in late December, upgrade assistant finally accepted my billing information and I was good to go.

First problem I faced was lack of disk space on my laptop's drive. Somehow Vista had managed to take up about 40 GB of space and I was unable to free up the required 16 GB to do the smooth upgrade.

Since there was nothing valuable on this drive, I burned Windows 8 installation DVD and allowed it to format it. All and all installation took me one evening, mostly because I was doing some other things in parallel on the stationary PC.

Google AdWords

I've been running substance.org.lv website for past 7 years and it has become quite a collection of DJ mixes and sets. This has never been a commercial project and I believe it will never become one, but so far, it is indeed the only one real website I've launched, that has some actual value to the potential visitor.

While looking through Google Analytic's statistics once again, I've found that it is very boring and hasn't changed much through the years - there are some people here in Latvia, who know this site and check it out every once in a while and there are also some rare random visitors, who stumble upon it while searching for techno tracks or something. Anyway, it's roughly about 20 unique visitors per month and at least half of them don't find what they're looking for and never come back. Not impressive.