How I Make My Mixes

What software does he use? What mixer is that? Where does he get his music from? Let me put you on.

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

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Over the years I have had a lot of questions from people asking the above on how I make my mixes and where I get my music from. To be honest, there’s not really one answer, the setup has been constantly changing and evolving so it’s been hard to distill down. In this post I plan to try and clarify that and break down everything involved in the process and also take you back to the very beginning following the journey up until today.

There is also by no means one method or a correct way to do any of this. I’m still learning everyday, I’ve made a lot of mistakes and there’s probably a lot of things I could be doing to help streamline this process but currently, it works for me! There’s so many different ways into this world so my best advice is do whatever works for you first and foremost and then make tweaks and improvements as you go.

In the Beginning - Cue Play DJ and Virtual DJ

Let me first take you back to the origins to give this some context.

So I was about 11 or 12 when I started consciously listening to London’s pirate radio stations in the back seat of my Dad’s car. If you’re from the UK, you’ll now the cultural impact underground radio had on the music scene and it changed the way I listened to music forever. We had a rotation of pirate radio stations on the go so if one went down, there was always another to fall back on. In rotation were House FM, Point Blank FM, Unknown FM and De Ja Vu. When I first heard these continuous sets and tracks being mixed together it flicked a switch in my head and I immediately wanted to try it myself. (I’ll write a whole post about the significance of pirate radio another time).

So at the time I didn’t have kind of money to invest in equipment like that so I got an app on my banged up cracked screen ipod touch called Cue Play DJ. I was using this using with an AUX cable hooked up to my Dad’s car’s soundsytem, crashing together tracks in the back seat of the car. Sounds mad to say it now but that was when I first blended anything together. I’d look forward to the long car journeys purely just to experiment, so whenever we had to travel far I was in control of the AUX, even from an early age.

This only took me so far though and it wasn’t very practical. Fast forward a year or two and I discovered a desktop app to use on my Toshiba laptop called Virtual DJ. This was wayyyy more accessible and detailed enough to get the fundamentals of DJing. I could also record my sets more consistently on here than on Cue Play but there was a time limit because I only had the free version. Some of my earliest mixes were recorded using this, I never uploaded them though but I may dig them out from an old hardrive somewhere to see the evolution!

First Controller - Numark Mixtrack Pro II and Serato…