mixing dubstep and house

[mlopresti]

Hi,

I have a gig coming up, and I'm wondering the best way of mixing a house tune(128bpm) with a Dubstep tune(139bpm)

I realized that dubstep is basically played at a half-time feel of normal house, but its still slightly faster (about 10bpm) like the example above. Whats the best way of mixing this in Ableton 7?

I'm assuming I have two choices, I can either:

1. Set my master tempo for my set to 134ish, for a average of the two.
2. Somehow automate the tempo while I'm mixing.


My set is mostly house, with 1 or 2 dubstep tunes. Whats the best approach? should I just stick with one genre per set?

[flowdesigner]

My set is mostly house, with 1 or 2 dubstep tunes. Whats the best approach? should I just stick with one genre per set?

Hmmm, thats a tough one..
How about finishing your house set with your 1 or 2 dubstep tracks?

[2be]

Beatmatching Dubstep and House won't sound good for the most part. As I see it, you have 2 options that will work with every tune:

1. Heavy usage of FX
For example, use a synced beat delay (use repitch mode). Slowly increase the wet signal to 100%, and maybe filter it. If you change the BPM, the delay will change in a musical way. You can mix in the second tune and reduce the wet level.

2. Mixing the breakdown of a House song with the intro of a Dubstep song
Nearly every House track has a breakdown with little percussion, and nearly every Dubstep song has an intro of some sort. Those two mix pretty well in most cases. If not, use some FX!

[nikulo]

try to find tempochanging songs that will do the work for you. or create short breaks/songs yourself.


warp the whole song to 1 tempo, timestretching the parts that are not in the tempo to the extreme ;D

than when the tempochangepart hits you just need to manually change the bpms up or down and try to fit the original tempochange.


example a song starting at 120 with a 140 ending.

warp the while song to a 120bpm grid, even the 140 part (which than ofc will sound massively timestretched)

and when the part comes where the tempo goes up, you need to raise the bpm manually to 140bpm, otherwise the song will continue sounding massively timestretched, ofc because its warped way to slow ;D

hopw you got it.



alternatively you can ofc try to create your own tempochange breaks (as they do in such song^^), ofc it wont sound that good as in a song with a tempochangebreak in it.
but still, with some practice and presets, prework, its totally doable.

as poster before me, catch 1 kick/hit with beatrepeat and "stylish" turn up the tempo with some fx or whatever xD

ch33rs and good luck^^

[beats me]

Meh, one of the curses of working with a genre that's always starting with drums for 1 minute and ending with just the drums for 1 minute if you want to switch things up a bit.

Just throwing this out there, maybe find (make?) a sample of a vinyl backspin and trigger that as you kill the first track and then start the next song in the different genre.

[DangerousDave]

^^ def an idea. Tempo changes within a set can actually be pretty cool, imo. you kind of have two options here, the abrupt version, where the audio cuts, and like he^ said, play something that grabs everyone's attention, like the backspin or car crash, etc etc. or just start bumping up the tempo of the house track to mix into your dub. Accelerating a track during play CAN be powerful, and get everyone worked into a frenzy, and will be especially cool once the half time drums of the dub fall in. but i would recommend only doing this change sparingly.

just my two cents.

EDit: you might have to produce the transtition, or make some kind of intro on your own which lends itself nicely to the tempo change but it shouldn't be too hard.

[Khazul]

Sounds like a crime against humanity!

[john gordon]

it just doesnt work.

[mdk]

just bang it in.

i'd be bored after however long of beatmatched one-genre activity so it'd be a welcome relief for a style and tempo change

[nikulo]

works awesome, and the crowd can love it, because when you do it good its rare and kinda unique because everyone avoids it^^

ive done some transitions from Dumbstep to DnB so 140 to 170ish. never tried it the other way around though, so from 170 to 140 cause im afraid to change tempo more than once per set ;D
and i thought that speeding things up would work better for the audience!

however a well done slowdown transition works just as good, wa,wah,wah, wahhh, wahhhh, wahhhhhhhh, wahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh wahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 1/beat/bar silence , BASH! your free to go^

[beats me]

But slowdown transitions can be tricky. You either have to do it abruptly almost like a vinyl kill switch or over a long transition where it's almost unnoticeable. If you do it over a period of time that is too short it's annoying on the dance floor.

And forgive my ignorance on this one, but won't there be noticeable audio artifacts and other nonsense if you move things too far away from the original tempo?

[nikulo]

yea well not that abrupt but note more than some seconds i'd say. and totally agree so you gotta do it fast otherwise that would sound totally crappy timestretched.
imho you would really need preworking, probably just play a prerecorded transition^^

so,... if you really need/want to change the tempo spontaneously you better speed things up^^

i made the experience that the audience (only of you find an event with people who like both tempos) likes it when stuff gets faster and faster and ends up beeing DnB all of a sudden.

[beats me]

It would be fantastic if there was some kind of calculator where you could put in the BPM of two different tracks and it would give you an estimate of time and bars to an acceptable transition. Of course it wouldn't be written in stone but at least you'd have a mental note and know there's no way you're going to pull something off in 16 bars or whatever…especially if you see a track is coming to an end.

[Khazul]

You kind of get to know this stuff roughtly from DJing - 32 bar at 128bpm is 60 seconds, at 135 its about 56 and 128->135 is also a semitone increase, at 120 its roughtly 104 sec, and 128->120 is roughly a semitone down... At 144bpm, its about 53 seconds, and 128->144 bpm is roughly 2 semitones up.

6% pitch up/down on a deck is roughly a semitone too, so with the above, gets easy to roughly relate all this even on old fashioned record deck and a mixer with no bpm counter if you have a good idea fo the bpms for the genre(s) your playing.

Pitch up shifted mixes generall sound better if you do one or two semitones rather than some fraction, so piching up from a house track at 128 to a trance or whatever at 136 usually works poretty well if you into harmonic mixing etc - just damned hard to do on decks - easy with software.