DJ Cruze

The awesome music producer Hal Ritson from The Young Punx has just put up his remix of an unreleased cover version of The White Stripes’s “Seven Nation Army” by Openair. As you can read on his site it had some legal issues and hence got caught up in the artist development cycle which can happy at record labels and was never released. It has a funky disco vibe about it and the chanting chorus is very Basement Jaxx-esqe. Get it downloaded here and give him some thanks in the comments.

Openair – Seven Nation Army (The Young Punx Remix)

Back in 1982 I was a ten year old boy who was in love with computer games. One of the biggest movies of the year, well the biggest movie for a computer game obsessed boy anyway, was Tron and I can still remember my excitement when my mum and dad took me and my brother to see it. I also remember that they took a family friend, Abigail who was 11, with us and she hated it but that’s not important!

I knew they were making a sequel to with a working title of TR2N but I didn’t know anything else about. So imagine my excitement today, as a 36 year old man who loves computer games and dance music, when I found out that Daft Punk are going to score the soundtrack! How amazing are both the film and the soundtrack going to be!? Let’s hope it keeps in the same vein as Homework and Discovery and not so much like the disappointing, in my opinion, Human After All.

Found via the Earworm blog (who should have cited their sources!) I found confirmation of it on Reuters and MTV.

This is possibly the best example of the “mash-up” that I’ve ever seen. Ever. EVER!

An Israeli musician Kutiman has taken lots of different YouTube videos and cut them up and mixed them together to make new tracks out of them. Although I’ve called it a mash-up it’s not a mish-mash of acapellas over original tracks in the conventional sense of a mash-up. He’s actual created 7 new tracks which you can hear over at his Thru You website. It’s just so well done you won’t actually believe that these aren’t real tracks that he’s gone into a studio and created. In case you don’t believe him he also puts links to every YouTube video that he used to make the track in the credits. What an awesome producer!

Thanks to Music Thing for the tip.

Following on from yesterday’s hacked dj mixer, we’ve got a custom built turntable with 5 tone arms. It has been designed by Yuri Suzuki. Although this is more of a design project than it is a real-world turntable, I think it’s a really interesting concept to build a turntable which focuses on composing music rather than just playing it. It would be a nightmare in a club though! And in his words “this is an analogue answer for the digitalized DJ”.

Thanks to Nick for the tip.

This is a really interesting video of a hacked DJ mixer which allows pitch control via the crossfader. He’s turned the mixer into a MIDI controller so that the pitch changes as the fader slides up and down the mixer but it still allows you to cut and scratch by moving the crossfader left and right as normal. It’ll make for some really interesting scratch routines as you can see in the video. It’s really interesting to see how DJ technology has really moved forward since I first started DJing back in the mid 80s!