Digging In The Crates

Taking a deeper look at where and how I search for the music in my mixes.

The Movements:
📸 Instagram
🎧 My Mixes
⏯ More Mixes
🎹 Music Production
🔊 Bookings & Partnerships

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Yes hope everyone is keeping well and you’ve had a good start to the new year. Before we get into this one I just want to say a massive thank you to all 300+ subscribers locked into Heart & Soul. It’s been amazing to see this community go from strength to strength and expand onto this amazing platform. Its given me another outlet to connect with you all so thank you for being here.

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Collectors First

I’m not sure the total amount of time I’ve spent actually listening and looking for tracks over the years. It’s a pastime I’ve normally always enjoyed and its true that most musicians, curators, DJs etc are collectors first. This is definitely true in my case as it was years after I started collecting that I actually released what I would class as a ‘mix’.

The truth though, is that there is no correct time to start making mixes. If you have 100 tracks in your library or 10,000 I don’t think it really matters. I would say it’s more of a feeling.

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Most of my childhood was spent listening to music and whatever was on the radio. I’ll always remember hearing certain tracks for the first time and that SPECIFIC feeling it gave me a kid. As if time had stopped and the only thing that mattered in that moment was what you were hearing and how it made you feel. The sights, emotions and your surroundings captured in time.

I’ve been chasing and also sharing this feeling with the world ever since.

My old iPod classic contained my first solid library of music I collected. The simplicity and the storage space were game changing at the time and I’m lowkey sad I’ve lost mine.

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Getting Organised

I grew up in the digital age and during the explosion of social media, so the way we were consuming and collecting music seemed to be constantly evolving. One thing I always did, was just keep folders of music by genre or playlist (something I still do to this day) regardless of which music platforms were around. That way I could always move folders around if and when I needed to while keeping everything intact.

My parents never had a record player so I never played or learned much about vinyl yet I am curious (Hoping one day I’ll get a player and build up a solid collection of vinyl). So the majority of what I collected was digital.

I didn’t have much, if any, disposable income growing up so a lot of what I collected came from YouTube or Soundcloud rips (I will touch on the golden age of Soundcloud later on). But then as I started to listen to more DJs and other radio shows growing up I discovered that there were other platforms to find the gems.

Here are my absolute go to platforms to search for new music…