So as part of my collaboration set with Madholic, I put together this short mixset of the kind of music I reall enjoy playing and it is the kind of music that I have made a name for myself playing over here, so here it is again, enjoy š
Set List
So as part of my collaboration set with Madholic, I put together this short mixset of the kind of music I reall enjoy playing and it is the kind of music that I have made a name for myself playing over here, so here it is again, enjoy š
Set List
Another music video mix for everyone. This one was obviously set for the girls, so I made it all female pop club tracks, so of course the staple artists in pop for the last decade are here. Also lately I have been playing more pop music in the club so been using these tracks a lot more recently, so feels like a fitting time to reshare this mix
Song List
1. Ke$ha – Take It Off
2. Katy Perry Feat Missy Elliot – TGIF
3. Shakira – Waka Waka
4. Beyonce – Girls Run The World
5. Rihanna – S&M
6. 2NE1 – Cant Nobody
7. Lady Gaga – Judas
8. Britney Spears – Till The World Ends
Ok so it has been a busy last few months, 3 trips overseas, various gigs as well as my usual ones so here is a quick recap of what I have been doing these last few months
June
Well June was a interesting month, I got to do some pretty cool things and also finished my 12 week challenge, 10kg lighter and back up to maybe 75% on the touch field
– Spent my birthday and long weekend running around Japan buying as much stuff as I could! Harajuku for clothes and Akihabara for my anime obsession
– Next weekend was UMF which I got to jam out in the redbull party jeep, pretty cool that I got to go to UMF, wasn’t the greatest of festivals but it is def one of the biggest in Korea and around the world… just a shame the line up was mud
– Spun at venue, nothing but old skool and a bit of a MJ tribute. Also it was a great crowd for early on so made the night even better
Well that was June, short but eventful.
July
July proved to be less busy, was back at venue again but the night ended up being a dud unfortunately. The main thing for July was taking on a new residence at King Club, however that ended up being short lived. Scroll to the bottom for that story…
– I spent most of the time working on my BeFM set.
– I did take a trip to Taipei which was a lot of fun
– Met with Blossom Day which was a kick start to working with JC
– TBT at Venue with Pinnacle and Rich Ben, pitty it was a dud of a night
And that was July
August was a good month
– 2nd Place at BeFM with a trip down to Busan, rocking it out on Gwangali
– Went to WDJ Festival with DJ Korea, jamming in the tent again, but to less fanfare than last year
– Started to do some proper work with JC, exciting times ahead working with her, but did have a fun night out at Bar Fly
– Started on some other projects including learning to produce music
And some other random things I got up to in August…
Went to the One Piece expo in Seoul, it was cool, mostly based around the Marine Ford Arc which was of course total epicness! (Full review in another post)
Went to my first Baseball game in Korea
And that was August, simple but fun, Sept is halfway done but it is also turning out to be another great month, itās already coming into Autumn and the end of the year is rapidly approaching⦠againā¦
So here goes with the King Club story
My hours at bar fly changed to the late shift, so it opened up a time for me to play somewhere else, I was going to look at a second residency after summer since I am usually busy during summer but King Club offered so I thought why not, they are under new ownership and have a new direction that wanted to go in so at first I was excited about working there, because honestly I never liked the place at all or the people that use to frequent it but the hope that it would change and the possibility of the place had me in… But as I began working there it was quickly apparent that any change was going to be slow if at all. The American soldiers still frequented the place, and they bring their own brand of bullshit with them (for the 4 weeks I was there, there was at least 1 fight each weekend…) as well as wanting to hear all the new shit that you canāt dance too. The music they (the boss etc) wanted me to play wasnāt the kind of music the crowd they want to attract want to hear (I even had the bouncer? stop me at the door and start going on about some shit with the music, I just gave him the yeah whatever, like Iām going to listen to you look and walked on by, I listen to the crowd and the boss, not you) and it was just becoming apparent that the direction they wanted to go in was pretty blurry. Also at Bar Fly, the boss asked me to switch back to my old time, so since they come first, had to talk to king club and see if could switch up the schedule, the problem is all of the DJs there have a second residency that is more important to them than king club so none of them can change, which was fine with me, I was the late comer to the party and also working there was really starting to become an annoyance rather than fun, not to say I didnāt have some fun there thou! The place has a lot of potential, always has, and has some good people working there but as is always the way, direction needs to be decisive, not blurry… and changing styles up between the military and Korean/expat scene… seriously there is a reason why I hate Itaewon and even more so hate those young American soldiers and all their bullshit. I avoid the place like the plague
Ok so here is my next video. It is one of the last videos I have made, I finished it before Unleashed 7, but becasue I made them both around the same time, I put this at 8 since the tracks were slightly newer than the tracks on 7.
This video by far came out the best of all my videos, from about 4 onwards I really had a good grasp of how to make them pretty much the way I like and near perfect quality, also it was much easier to get hold of HD copies of each of these videos too, so hope you enjoy
I will upload the rest and share them but its also about time I made some new mixes as well (I have about 3 or 4 old ones that are half finished that were going to be in the series, guess could always just finish them off too)
Unleashed Volume 8 Track List
1. J Lo Feat Pitbull – Dance Again
2. Big Bang – Fantastic Baby
3. Chris Brown – Turn Up The Music
4. Far East Movement – Live My Life
5. Jay Sean Feat Pitbull – I’m All Yours
6. Ne-Yo – Burnin’ Up
So, if you are interested in Graffiti and want to find some pieces in Shanghai, then one of the main places to check out is the Graffiti wall on Moganshan Road. It is pretty easy to find if you just get a taxi, the best thing is to start on the corner of Changhua Road and Moganshan Road and just follow the road. Some of the pieces look kinda old but a few of them look new so it seems as thou it is still used. Shanghai Railway station is kind of close (it looks close on the map but it is a solid walk)
Here is the pics I took, enjoy š
So following up on from 2012, thre3style was again back in Korea for 2013, however this year there was def a lack of quality DJs entering with a few from the previous year not coming back to compete, however there was also some really good DJs entering this year who had some awesome performances, prob better than the previous year so it kind of balanced out (except some DJs really looked out of place up there)
Anyways here is my set for the year, had a lot of mash ups and genre switches which ended up in a pretty varied set. The performance itself was mostly ok, except for dust screwing up my needle, twice! Ruined my intro, thou no one noticed lol and another time during my set it also almost screwed me up. I was pissed about my intro thou because I had to skip a bit of it and ended up using a safe version I had made (just in case something like this happened, yeah I think things thru that far) But apart from that my set came out nice and got some good reactions from the crowd this time round and just overall had a good time up there
As for the result, well yet again didnt make it thru, and yet again there might have been some controversy on that matter, one of the comments I did manage to hear about my set was use of pre mixes, which yes some of it was pre mixed while other parts werent, there was a balance between the 2 since somethings live just dont go well and I hate having ‘dead’ space inbetween switching tracks etc which is unavoidable if your only using 2 decks without having some pre mixing going on to keep the flow going, but I had some premixes just the same as all the other DJs there (some had a lot of their sets pre mixed) so while that does make some sense, in the overall scheme of it compared to the other DJs, well yeah, possibly robbed… Also my heat was definately the hardest, I would say 6 out of us 8 should have made it thru and only 2 from the other heat were good enough to make it thru (the second heat was really very average) But again, its hard to know what the judges are thinking, its also hard to know if the foreigner card is in play or not, I would say it is likely it is but cant confirm either way, also I did hold back which maybe I shouldnt have done, it was only a heat so I did enough to make it to the finals (which obviously wasn’t enough) which if I had made it, would be a no holds barred set, but it was not to be.
So, here is the next video I decided to upload, continuing on my uploading of my videos here rather than Vimeo and Youtube, thou it appears my Vimeo block has been removed… least for now… but it seems to make sense to post them all up here, so I will continue to do so
Anyways, this is an R&B mix and as you can see the video quality is much better and the look of each video and transition is a lot tighter now that I have got a proper feel of how to fine tune the editing process
Anyways, enjoy!
DJ Blaze – Unleashed Video Mix 4 – Song List
1. Mike Posner – Bow Chicka Wow Wow
2. Katy Perry Feat Kanye West – ET
3. Baby Bash Feat Slim Thug – Swanananana
4. Chris Brown & T-Pain – Best Love Song
5. Keri Hilson – Pretty Girl Rock
6. 50 Cent & Jeremiah – Down On Me
Ok, its a new week so time to throw up another old mix, this time its one of my video mixes, this is the first one in the ‘Unleashed’ series I did and prob my second video mix (that is longer than 5mins, my first one was about an hour long, I need to dig it up and post it online at some stage)
The idea for these mixes was to make short 12min long vids of 5 or 6 pop songs just basically mixed together in video format. I kept them short so that the file sizes woldnt be to large and people could watch the on their cell phones (least that was the idea, in the end they ended up being good short tracks for bars to use when there is no DJ…)
Anyways, the way I would do these mixes was to pick 6 songs that were similar and that would mix well together, then I would record the audio, fix up anything I didnt like, then in Vegas I would add the video tracks for each song and do the mixes and transitions there. The reason why I didnt record the video live was because even in live video recording, its hard to get the video side perfect (or near enough to) on the surface it might look ok, but when you look at it closely, there is always going to be random frames etc that you just dont want. Beig the first one, it isnt perfect, there is a few things in the editing process I later managed to fix up and change to make it render more smoothly (as you can see in later videos)
And lastly this is a bit of a trial, uploading these kinds of videos seems to piss of the record companies (they are fucking idiots anyways but thats another story) so youtube and now vimeo basically has copyright filters on them, so things like this are deemed to be in violation of copyright… that shit annoys me to no end, so I am trying the video option here on wordpress and seeing how that goes…
DJ Blaze – Unleashed Video Mix 1 – Song List
1. Flo Rida – Turn Around (5,4,3,2,1..)
2. Chris Brown – Yeah 3x
3. Jay Sean – Hit the lights
4. Busta Rhymes & Tiesto – C’mon
5. Pitbull & T-Pain – Hey Baby
6. LMFAO – Party Rock Anthem
So, thought its about time again to post up another set list, it was from Saturday night just been at bar fly, honestly I thought it was going to be a rubbish night but it actually ended up being ok. Set wise it was ok, there wasn’t enough people there to go of on to many tangents so ended up playing a lot of tried and tested song combos etc but managed to throw in a couple of different ones in there as well as jumping a lot of genres as per usual
Set time 1.30am – 4am (2.5 hours)
New/Re-up/Decided to Play Tracks
Set List Saturday August 23rd 2014
So I was looking back thru my DJ bio and promo stuff and thought I should re-share some of my older stuff as well as touch up and sort out some of my more recent stuff. So will try and post up a mix from either one of the comps I have been in here over the last few years or some of my other mixes over the next few weeks
And we will start with the first DJ comp I entered since coming to Korea, and of course that was Redbull Thre3style back in 2012. It came about at a good time for me, I had just finished my residency at the loft so had a few weeks to throw together and entry set and a few weeks after that to plan out and practice my performance set if I made it thru. But of course being an expat, I wasnāt even sure if I was allowed to enter, but after getting in contact with Redbull they were more than happy to allow me to enter and of course I ended up being one of the 16 qualifiers.
As you might know, Thre3style is 15mins per DJ and you must use at least 3 different genres of music (thou often this is hardly the case) and is a crowd and skill based competition. In Korea the top 16 were divided up into 2 groups of 8 with the top 4 going thru to the final, and yes I was the only expat to enter and the only one to make it to the top 16 so I was in an interesting position.
After arriving late and missing sound check on the night, I got to watch a couple of DJs before laying down my set, it went well enough, but honestly it was kinda funny watching the crowdās reaction to the fact I wasnāt a Korean, I knew this would be the case thou so didnāt plan much crowd interaction or anything instead sticking to music selection, flow and skill. My set went well without a hitch so I was happy with that. To me this wasnāt about winning but about putting my name out there, and thatās exactly what happened, thou I didnāt qualify, there was a lot of people who came up to me afterwards who said they thought I should have got thru, so that was enough for me. During that time I met a lot of local Korean DJs and made some good friends and very important connections as well as showcasing myself as a DJ here.
I have always been the kind of DJ who has let my playing speak for itself so having this competition to showcase that was a great step up since being here in Korea and allowed me to properly get into the DJ scene here and away from the expat DJ trap which is Itaewon bars and clubs.