Don't Edit Your Mix, Don't Think Too Much, and, Most Importantly, Don't Take My Advice

I was asked recently if I thought a mate should edit their mix before putting it out there. Absolutely not is my answer.

It was quite funny and sweet really, because they were nervous about it being their first recorded vinyl only mix, and it’s so much tighter than my latest radio show, which I’ve shared fuck out of and not cared.

In fairness, I’m probably comfortable with this because I have zillions of mixes online, and most of them are pretty bang on, and I know that they’re mostly just records – largely due to the lack of any other means of playing tunes in my house rather than because of any snobbery. Also, the mix isn’t awful (mine), it’s just gung ho, and the result of me being a bit mashed and almost every tune I’m playing being totally unfamiliar to me. I realised about halfway through the set that this was a pretty bold move. Up until that point, I was just doing what I was doing, and then it suddenly occurred to me that I was playing a load of tunes I didn’t know live on the air, having done a througher, that it was all vinyl, and that a lot of people spend weeks carefully considering prep for their mixes before they even think about recording anything.

So basically, I’m either insane, or a total dickhead, or both. Probably both, which I’m fairly comfortable with, too.

Alternatively, it was a perfectly normal thing to do, and I have nothing to question. I have actually played my mate’s tunes out, at a venue before, because I wasn’t supposed to be playing and they asked me to jump on with them. In fact, this has actually happened numerous times, and I can’t recall ever thinking anything of it.

So… If I was recording a mix for someone’s series, I would never just blind record a stack of unfamiliar EPs off my head, and then send it off without a thought. Imagine! But also, I have a lot of respect for my friends who run NARR Radio, and I’m really grateful to have a regular show with them, and I feel that it’s kind of disrespectful to do something like that. I was dead set on making sure that I recorded a particularly decent mix for this show because it was the first one I was doing this year, and it follows a series of unfortunate events. The most recent fail wasn’t actually my fault, and the one before that most certainly was.

The last radio show I did before this one, the tone arm was playing up on one of the decks, so every other tune sounds like the needle is fucked. It wasn’t that audible when I was actually playing, otherwise I would have attempted to resolve the issue, but it’s very noticeable when I listened to mine and another DJ’s sets. Most of the shows from that day are fine, because they must have been mixed on CDJs, but ours have that issue, which ruins them.

It was pretty annoying because the set would have been pretty nice otherwise. There’s one horrendous skillz moment (translation: a terrible mix) during it, but otherwise a nice smooth selection of some tunes I was particularly taken with at that moment in time.

I wouldn’t have been bothered about the bad mix. If it’s a live recording (like a streamed mix or from a gig), it is what it is and it happens sometimes. If I was sending it out for a podcast, I would start again, but that’s a different thing.

The disaster before that was nothing to do with the failure of any equipment other than my brain.

I did think when my mate racked me up a huge line of kezzle as I was leaving the party to go do my radio show, and then he said ‘Now go and smash it’ as I sniffed the line, that there was a serious likelihood that I probably wouldn’t, in fact, smash it, and that I was making a mammoth error in judgement.

He did it in total innocence, I will add. I used to be more hardcore, because I have gone through phases where I’ve not considered myself to be a ket head at all, but I actually have been, because I’ve been around loads of people who actually really like it and I’ve ended up doing it as much as they do, just because I’m there and I may as well. (It’s only tolerable to be in a room where everyone is really ketty if you are, too. Then it becomes sort of fun, but nothing you’re keen to do again. But you do for a time, and then eventually you have the sense to just not go to those parties.) Anyway, if you do it a lot, you build up a tolerance. You lose it quite swiftly, too.

The first half of the show that happened after the line is horrendous, and then, at about 30 minutes in, it suddenly gets tight, as if an entirely different person had taken over.

I did consider asking for it to be taken down, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. As much as it’s an absolute disasterpiece with my name on it, and that I wouldn’t be a booking ever, should a promoter stumble upon it, it’s also exactly what happened at that time; a snapshot of that moment of me doing what I do, albeit an unfortunate one, and an unpleasant listening experience. Also, it’s hilarious. That’s the trouble with me – I can’t help but always see the funny side of everything, and in the end that overrides everything. That and my innate predilection to always go with it, whatever ‘it’ may be, just out of a burning curiosity to see what will happen. Now don’t get me wrong, a good sense of humour and a strong sense of adventure will most of the time result in the most wonderful experiences. But every now and then, all that you end up with is a bad mix and that strange sense of the shame that you know you should be feeling, but somehow never do.

For my next show, I will do one of two things: either I’ll record a mix at home, in the week, and send that over for the broadcast, or I’ll just accept that from Friday morning until early hours Monday I am an unstoppable force of mayhem, and I’ll just bring my records to The Imaginarium, like I usually do.

Deciding not to do a througher was a rare and odd choice for me. I can understand completely why I genuinely believed that I would achieve this. If I actually have a reason that makes it irresponsible or impossible to stay up all weekend, then I will always go home and go to bed. The previous weekend I said my goodbyes and got my head down because I had to do our tax return. A slightly more pleasant one was when Steevio and Suzy came over to play for us and Lick the Lid, and I had to help set up the space for Steevio’s immense and awesome live set up and Suzy’s visuals. This wasn’t like making sure the decks and amps are sound, or that everything is good for a guest to set up their Ableton Push. It was a mission for a sober, rested person.

In my heart of hearts, last weekend, I knew that everything would be totally fine if sleep didn’t happen. I wanted to broadcast and record a good radio show, and I also wanted to attempt to set up our projector for the Wrong’uns party, if they were able to bring their visuals on a compatible laptop. So I left my records at home, and I didn’t pack a toothbrush or a change of clothes.

Considering the many things I often do having been awake for some time, the things I needed to do were not tasks that I would be incapable of if I didn’t sleep. It was the first weekend that The Imaginarium and Plant & Deck were open in 2024, and I thought it was probably going to be good, and it was even better than I expected. The Surface party on the Friday night was awesome, and so would be Wrong’uns on the Saturday.

The morning before, my copy of the Wrong’uns EP had arrived, and then the new Curbside EPs were dropped off, and I bought one of those immediately. Both are such good records – the kind where all the tunes are for playing in a set, not the just one tune you’ll play kind of records. Which is sound as well, but it’s such a buzz when every track is right up your street. Obviously, this is a subjective thing, but beyond my own personal tastes, these are showcases of some excellently crafted music. Leeds is brilliant. Long may the unstoppable creative force that the city – or the underground electronic scene within it, certainly – continue. Also, everyone, by and large, is really nice. People want to help each other and collaborate. It isn’t like this everywhere. Particularly in the UK. There’s a territorial and cut throat attitude in a lot of cities here, but in Leeds everyone just wants to party and share the love of good tunes. That was my main motivation for choosing to live here, and why I haven’t left.

The reason that I didn’t leave the space after the party finished on Friday is because I was having far too much fun. That’s the reason I always end up staying out if I have no responsibilities that require me not to. If a session is not fun, I’ll not stay. If I end up at some gaff with no decks and a bunch of people with shit chat putting on awful music on YouTube and passing round miniscule lines of unidentifiable substances that smell suspiciously like detergent, I will almost certainly leave and go home. I like my own company, I can get stuck into making tunes, or I can go to bed, and go for a walk the next day, or craft some interesting recipe that nobody ever needs to make, but I really want to. Scotch eggs was a particularly good one, just because I was so utterly amazed that they actually worked. And also for the hilarious moment two weeks later when my neighbour popped round and asked me

“Do you have any more of those scotch eggs at the moment?”

As if making a massive batch of black pudding scotch eggs is something I do all the time.

Not tonight mate, just a load of garys and a burning desire to get up to no good.

I seem to have digressed massively. I write the way a lot of my friends talk. I could never be arsed to actually say all of this to anyone in conversation. I’d feel like I was making them sit through Lord of the Rings, and I’d have to stop and walk away. For my own sanity as much as theirs. Some people tell their tales with panache, though. Being a good talker is a skill in itself.

By the time my radio show was coming round, I knew that I wasn’t even going to get a taxi home to pick up my bag of tunes. What I would never do – because I’m not a total cunt – is just grab a random stack of unrelated records from the shop, go upstairs for the radio, and hope for the best. That would be such a dick move. Although actually, who am I trying to kid? I did a massive line of a drug I don’t even like that much – a drug which is used in certain circumstances as a general anaesthetic – because I thought it would be a funny and interesting experiment to see how I managed following that, before my set two shows ago.

I am, without question, an absolute cunt. Kid no one, especially not yourself.

But yeah, I do have enough scruples and understanding of what equates to being a fuckover to not balls up another show like that. It’s not sound. I am so particular about what is acceptable for our space, and then I go and do that to someone. That sucks, really.

Also, as far as my own interests went, I didn’t want to become someone who people think has low standards, because in general I don’t. I remade the final version our latest flyer five times because I kept noticing miniscule details that were slightly wrong or messy. Nobody would ever have noticed any of those things. But I knew, and that is everything.

My plan for the radio set, after accepting that I had two records with me, and no desire to get an Uber, reworked itself into picking a load of tunes from Plant & Deck – which would be good advertising the shop – that I thought would work in some manner with tunes from the two records I actually had with me, the EPs from Wrong’uns and Curbside. Then I could spread the word about them too. That seemed suddenly like it was actually a better idea than playing from my bag.

The stuff I picked out was based on what a customer had been listening to over the counter that afternoon, and from tunes me and Phil had played earlier. Two that I own, and the rest unfamiliar.

As I said, I’d been on with the mission for quite a while (it was roughly halfway through the broadcast) when I realised that what I was doing was actually slightly mad. Or brave. Or not brave, actually, because I’d done it all without a moment’s thought, and in order to be brave you have to experience fear and then conquer it. Anyway, there was a point during it all that I became self-aware, and it did give me a mild jolt. But by then there was fuck all I could do, and it was all going reasonably well anyway, and I was really enjoying playing all this music. But I did realise then how easily it could have been a monumental disaster.

What I really wish I’d recorded was the day that me and Phil decided to mix all day in the shop. I used to record from my mixer into my desktop constantly for years, so I have stacks of recordings on old hard drives of me and my mates mixing. Hours and hours of it, all filed according to dates, so many mixes, because mixing was pretty much all we did back then.

What I did take from my bold move with the NARR show was that it was an amazing feeling to know that the person who not that long ago stood next to the decks and just couldn’t do their set, and felt completely broken by that (I wanted more than anything to play, and it was also the last thing I was ever going to be able to bring myself to do at that moment. A lot had happened, and I was going through a bit of a bad time, I guess) – to know that I’d gone from being like that to rocking up to do my radio show with a bunch of random tunes and thinking that was perfectly do-able and fine – that felt great. Because that’s the person I always was, and I clearly was myself again.

What I will never say I did was ‘survive 2023’. Have you seen those memes? Just fuck off. If in 2023 you had cancer, or lived in a war zone, then yes, please feel free to say that you survived 2023. If you sat in your comfortable house watching Netflix and eating shit food, and you had a few prangs because you spent too much on nights out, or everyone you met on Tinder wasn’t the made up person you’re chasing who could never possibly exist, and then you thought that for some unfathomable reason it would be a worthwhile thing to do to post a shit meme on Facebook, probably sandwiched in between two other posts also sharing exactly the same meme, if that’s you, then do one.

Rant over.

Through all the time I’ve been writing this, I’ve been listening to the mix that my friend asked if I thought they should edit. It’s pretty much seamless, and really well put together, and I’ve been enjoying it immensely. As far as I can hear, there’s one mildly wobbly moment, and that’s sorted out very swiftly. And you will hear the same kind of thing happen in mixes from DJs who have been playing for years, at a high level as their sole profession.

My NARR show is an enjoyable listen, but I would never send a mix like that out for a mix series. It’s got loads of energy, and it’s got the rough edges that you get with a lot of recordings from gigs and streams, and the tunes are ace, but it’s at the very lowest end of any live recording I’ve heard back of myself in terms of smooth mixing, and smooth levels. My pal’s mix, however, I would happily send out to be included in a mix series. It’s really good, and most definitely needs no edits.

There is, I think, somewhere out there, a happy medium in the spectrum of self-doubt. I think that’s something that it would be nice to find, for everyone. Not that there isn’t something to be said for being constantly in that kind of auto pilot where you’re almost entirely in the present all the time. It leads to an interesting life for the most part, I’d say. I know someone who is so full of doubt about everything, that at times, it’s like they’re frozen, and that must be a horrible way to feel. If there was any way of actually helping another person to give less of a fuck, I would, but unfortunately, they have to come to that point themselves. You can explain to someone, in a perfectly logical way, why they don’t need to worry, but even if they understand you, it isn’t that simple, and it’s something that needs to come to them through an understanding that is their own.

Personally, I would certainly choose to take the occasional monumental disaster that occurs from worrying too little over a life lived feeling constantly anxious. I don’t regret many things, even though my life includes many experiences that I would not like to repeat. In fact, off the top of my head, I can think of only three things ever that I would genuinely say that I regret. Like not as in ‘Oh dear, I shouldn’t have done that’, but as in an actual pang, because you know that should have done things differently. Two of those are things that I didn’t do and knew instantly that I should have, and the other is the time when I think I was really mean to someone, completely inadvertently, and I never had a chance to apologise, and I never will, because they were a stranger, and they’d left before I realised that I’d probably just made someone’s day worse.

Anyway, I think this is where I’ll end these ramblings. I intended to write a piece about editing mixes, and why I’d rather not, and it seems to have turned into a weird stream of consciousness about the positives and negatives of recklessness.

I’ll return to mixes. I will edit this post when my friend’s mix is posted, and I’ll share it.

*A MIX WILL LIVE HERE. IT’S GOOD. KEEP AN EYE ON THIS SPACE*

More editing questions? I’m pretty clear on this one – edit typos and media, don’t change what you said. As far as editing mixes goes, I would just rather not, but I don’t think it’s like ‘wrong’ or whatever. It’s just whatever you want to do. I know a guy who used to master his mixes, and I just didn’t understand why he felt that was a thing. But his thing he does, fair play.

I’ve also never got why some people play records and CDJs, and then they go and make mixes on Ableton. That just blew my mind, because mixing tunes actually in the moment, is one of the most fun things ever, and making music, for the most part, likewise. But using production software to stitch together a set just looked like a really laborious way of doing something that you could do equally well in a much more fun way – and the way that the listener would assume that you had. Anyway, if anyone can ever explain that to me, I will buy you as many drinks as it takes to tell me. I genuinely want to know. I have asked two people in the past, and their answers went as far away from actually having anything to do with the original question as most of this piece of writing has from its.

In the meantime, as I’ve gone on about it at quite some length, my NARR show is below from last week, along with various other mixes that are probably better.