http://soundcloud.com/boyinabanddotcom/boyinaband-mum-n-bass - Personalisable version

http://www.facebook.com/boyinabandcom – Share this video on facebook with the little “share” button, post a comment with your name and I’ll record it and send you a link in the comments.

Happy mother’s day!

VIDEO TEXT

Hi! I’m Dave from boyinaband.com

To all my American homeslices, if you’re anything like me you probably totally forgot that it’s mothers day today – in all honesty I forgot this year when it was the English one back in March. But don’t fret! I’ve got you covered.

I was thinking; “What do mothers really like?” and then it hit me – Intense drum and bass! So I’ve made a short track called “Mum n Bass” which you can download and using your audio recording program of choice, overlay your embarassing childhood name just before the drop. So it’ll be like:

[Show the track from mothers day build to “To mom, happy mothers day from, “YOUR NAME HERE”] *DROP DANCE*

In fact, for consistancy, if you go to my facebook page today, share this video on your page and then comment said name on my status, I’ll record myself saying your childhood name so you can have the same voice on both the build and the drop.

If they wonder where you got the voice samples from, say it’s a VST called “British-Voice-o-Matic” or something.

Burn it to a CD and give it to your mom, I guarantee she will be thoroughly appreciative. Warning: this is not a guarantee. Even if you’re not American, you can do what I’m gonna do and say something like “I…uh… thought celebrating it on this day would be more of a surprise! I know how you like surprises.” – she’ll totally buy it.

So free download link in the description, and head over to my facebook if you want me to record your embarassing childhood name for the drop – I’ll be uploading them throughout the day.

Check out the song here

Don’t forget to hit subscribe for weekly boyinaband videos if you haven’t already. If you have, treat yourself to a smoothie today. You earned it.

Cheers for watching and have a nice day!

Compiled by the producer Pitchedsenses, these are really nice, particularly for more chilled dubstep – check the YouTube videos here to hear them in action, and it’s a like-the-facebook-page-to-download thingy, worth it imo since he makes some nice tracks as well.

Enjoy the samples!

Video Text

Hi! I’m Dave from boyinaband.com

This week I want to address the accusation made by far too many people that all electronic music requires no talent or skill.

Being someone that writes and performs electronic music, this pops up time and again in comments such as this and this and this and this.

You know, So a track with heavy vocal processing comes on and “What happened to people who can actually sing?!” or the bass will drop in a more intense track and “These are just noises made on a computer, anyone could slap that together in 10 minutes” but sit them in front of a studio computer and they come up with this.

*Silence*

Then you realised you had Plants vs Zombies installed on that computer and no-one can be expected to produce with that kind of immediate temptation so you uninstall it and give them another 10 minutes and you get this:

*crap music*

So to enlighten those people, I’ve come up with another thought experiment which, for the sake of internet attention spans, once again involves my cat Quistis. I call it:

Davestein’s Theory of Relativity

So we have two dudes, a cat, and a dog.

The two dudes are looking at the dog. One throws a ball, and says “Hey, Fetch.” and when the dog does so, the other guy concludes that “it’s pretty cool that when you throw something, the dog will return it to you.”

The same two dudes proceed to look at the cat. The first dude is like “aww, that cat looks cute, I might post a picture of it to Reddit.” but the second dude throws a ball, notices the cat is not about to go get it back for him, and gets horrendously angry saying “This animal can’t do ANYTHING! What a waste of space, why would anyone even get a cat?” Completely ignoring the fact that the cuteness of the cat is already pleasing millions all over the internet, and in clubs the world over.

The reason dude #2 feels it involves no talent is because he’s comparing these *oranges* with these *apples* – or rather these with these. There are talents involved, he just doesn’t understand what those talents are yet.

So for the benefit of people like dude #2 let me take the liberty of roughly outlining said talents with one of the most commonly contrasted composers that these arguments are levelled between.

So we’ve got our guitarist and our computer musician.

So argument #1 – mr. guitarist has spent years developing his skill on the guitar so he can write a song; mr. computer musician can knock up a song in 10 minutes! And as we’ve established, he sure can, if he wants it to sound like a casio keyboard preset – It can take frickin’ years of study and practice to learn how to produce a professional sounding track.

argument #2 – But you can feel mr. guitarist has authenticity, mr. computer musician’s music is too processed, there’s no imperfections – there’s no talent involved because it doesn’t feel human any more! For sure a lot of electronic music is autotuned and quantised to be precise – but there are still talents involved. Songwriting, for instance – Not just anyone can write a catchy riff, make a clean and powerful mix, or pick a memorable sample to put before a drop.

*cut to someone sitting at a table thinking hard with a piece of paper that says “let the *crossed out words* cannon kick it*

argument #3 – But they’re not even playing anything!
No matter how annoyed you get, that cat is not going to catch that ball. It is really narrow minded to suggest that they are not artists because nobody can play the guitar. Anyway, some electronic musicians do play instruments, just look at MPCs and kaoss pads and…

argument #4 – those aren’t instruments, anyone can press a sequence of buttons. There’s no technique involved, They may as well be playing a video game!

First of all, as the millions of people who watch the world’s top gamers will tell you, someone who can press a complicated sequence of buttons in a specific order can be massively entertaining. And as they’d probably go on to explain, there is more to it than that.
Let’s take a look at a piano – it’s essentially pressing things in a sequence at different intensities. Same with drums. And a plethora of other instruments many of the people proposing this argument would refer to as “legitimate”.

argument #5 – When all these run out, a common retaliating argument I see is that it doesn’t have any “soul” or “heart” in it, which is another way of saying “I can’t think of an adjective that actually has a meaning to express why I don’t like this.”

Perhaps we should give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they are talking about how emotional the music sounds – in which case, I could easily say that I find some of the chord progressions and synth sounds in trance music give me emotional chills where a performance from [insert well respected guitarist] will probably leave me cold.

Or I could argue that some of the screamers in metal bands show so much raw emotion with their voice that they can’t even control it, meaning they are more intense in that respect than a singer who is capable of perfecting a vibrato in the “soul” genre.

And it’s not that these people don’t have talent, I can recognise that they do, it’s just that it’s a very different talent, and I personally don’t enjoy that talent as much. I feel that in order to respect the effort they’ve put into cultivating that talent, that’s an important distinction to make.

If you stop expecting the talents from different genres to match up *match up* then you’ll save yourself a considerable amount of time that you would have spent getting angry at people – perhaps you can take up a hobby. Tennis for example. *holds up ball*

So what do you think about the electronic music talent thing? From both sides of the fence, I’d love to hear your opinions. Let’s have a discussion in the comments.

Don’t forget to hit like and favourite if this resonates with you, and subscribe for weekly boyinaband videos if you haven’t already.

Cheers for watching and have a nice day!

DAT STORE
DAT FORUM

Dem Videoz:

TIME BOMB
MARY’S AWESOME TIME-LAPSE

Dem Channelz in the order they were said (forward, since this focus on temporal-ness requires clarification)

VEELA
FEINT
MONSTERCAT
MARY DOODLES

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Video Text

Hi! I’m Dave from boyinaband.com

I was intending to make a track for you guys, but I had one of those weeks. You know, where you’re sitting at your computer like

“Alright, time to finish off that Drum and Bass track”
and you get started, but then all of a sudden
“Na, that sounds crap”
“Brain?”
“Yeah, you should stop doing that”
“But I really need to finish this, this is the third time this week you’ve said I should stop”
“Yeah but it’s sounding crap”
“It won’t sound any better unless I put in a bit more time into EQing the-”
“You know, you could be playing Sudoku right now”
“…”
“Are you listening to me?”
*pans out to Dave playing Sudoku* “Sorry what?”

Scumbag brain. Anyway, so instead, today I’m going to talk about something I come across a lot on the internet – the concept of REAL music or TRUE music. You know, from comments like this [show relevant comment]. Or this. Or this.

The basic idea being that if a genre evolves a bit, it is no longer worthy of that title, and as such it is no longer “real” [insert genre here]. So a metal song that has a trance synth in it? That’s not REAL metal. A dubstep song that has extensive use of growly basses instead of deep wobble basses? That’s not REAL dubstep. A classical piece that was written in 2012? That’s not REAL classi- ok I guess that one is kinda true.

The point is to me, anyone that thinks like that is frickin’ narrow-minded. I’d like to present to you my proof in the form of a hypothetical thought experiment I’ve devised called “The Davëdinger’s Cat Theory”

1. So we’ve got these two dudes, both of which were educated in primary school that this is a cat.
2. They see this cat walking by and they’d be like “Oh, that’s a cat, that is.”, and the other would be like “Yeah, I agree with that statement.”
3. 3 years later, they see the same cat walk by, but this time it has a hat on. One of the guys says “Oh look, that’s a cat with a hat on it.” and the other guy is like “SHUT UP, THAT IS NOT A CAT, IT’S SOME FAGGY GAY PIECE OF CRAP, HOW DARE YOU CALL THAT A CAT YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT REAL CATS ARE.”
4. The second guy is an idiot, it’s just a cat with a hat on it.

Whether the cat has a hat on it or not, it still has the basic features of a cat – 4 legs, a permanent dissatisfied/glazed expression, 140bpm tempo and half time beat with prevalent use of basses as the focal point.

I’m pretty sure I just forgot how metaphors work, but that’s my first published theory so I’m sticking with it.

What it comes down to is people that are desperately trying to hold on to the point at which they discovered the genre, in the hopes it will never change. Which is so sad because if they weren’t so closed-minded, they could appreciate the new interpretations in the manner they were intended. Or at least learn that they should shut up rather than making themselves look like idiots that don’t even know a cat when they see it.

Genre names ARE useful, since it allows people to find the kind of music they like, but genres evolve over time. Which is a bloody good thing too, or we’d still be stuck in the 1800s writing baroque music and avoiding the diminished 5th because it’s “The Devil’s Chord”

Pfft, what did they know, anyway here’s this new song I wrote called “Let’s summon the Devil” (something with just diminished 5ths)

There is no “sacred”-ness about that or any other genre. If you have an issue with it, try championing one of the many other subgenre names that have popped up in front of the -step postfix that have a more specific definition suited to your tastes. Alternatively, try and appreciate more than one horrendously specific style of music and you’ll discover that life is considerably more enjoyable.

What do you guys think about the whole genre-boundaries-being-pushed issue? I find it fascinating that people get more up in arms about their music tastes being questioned than their frickin’ political ideologies, so yeah – let’s get some healthy debate going on in the comments.

Hit like and favourite if this resonates with you, and subscribe for weekly boyinaband videos.

Cheers for watching and have a nice day!

Video Text:

Hi, I’m Dave from boyinaband.com and today I’ll be teaching you how to be a DJ.

First thing, it’s important to own a pair of turntables and a mixer to be taken seriously as a DJ. You won’t actually be using them (Decks in front of me) – these are just for show really, if you look closely there’s actually no stylus on, and this isn’t vinyl, it’s a piece of paper with “Vinyl” written on it. Instead you’ll be using this – a laptop.

An MP3 player can do the job as well, but if you do get one make sure you buy an iPod – while iPods are considerably more expensive than many competing brands of music player, iPods have a vector image of a piece of fruit on them.

So let’s begin – press play. *Play Electro House* Now we’re getting somewhere.

Now some people think that this is about as complicated as it gets for a DJ, but they don’t know the real intricacies there are in the craft. When it comes to these more advanced techniques, this is when you’ll need a controller.

Let’s start with the a technique called the “Rewind” -

This is when just after a song drops that people are enjoying you have to stop the music *do it*, bring it back with your deck and play it again.

You see, a common misconception about DJing is that it’s important to keep the flow of the music going to keep everyone dancing. This is really narrow minded – when a song drops and everyone’s really getting into it, that’s a sign to replay that song immediately.

Now would be a good time to introduce the clubber. Clubbers have notoriously short memory spans, and since most club music isn’t very repetitive, it’s a wasted opportunity not to play it again.

On the subject of repetitiveness – Being a DJ you will no doubt have a wide selection of songs available, but the important thing to remember is to play exactly the same things that were played at the club the night before.

Now, a good DJ is prepared – make sure you have the entire playlist pre-recorded for your set so you don’t have to worry about messing up, thinking about songs to suit the audience anything like that.

Periodically though, it’s important to put one headphone to your ear and bob up and down a little, just to keep people on their toes.

When mixing between songs, many people will tell you the most vital thing is to match the bpm, or beats per minute of the tracks, so they flow together. This is a very overused technique and from my experience with more modern DJing, the best way to transition between two songs is to simply fade into the song, making sure you have this sample on hand. Trigger it several times, ensuring it’s about 10dB louder than the rest of the mix. Seamless.

Remember – the crossfader is not for mixing, the computer will do all that for you, instead, use it to cut out the song frequently so the drunk clubbers can attempt to sing along.

Ensure you come in a few milliseconds after the beginning of the next bar.

You might find yourself a little bit bored after about 3 songs in once you’ve checked your facebook. To keep yourself entertained, this is the time to talk over songs as they drop.

Clubbers love this – remember, they’re there for the DJ, not the music. If you can do this more frequently and emphatically over the better songs, it generally works most effectively.

If you’re a socially awkward type, never fear, there is a strong convention about what to talk to the clubbers about.

Firstly, suggest that they put their hands up – particularly if the song is already suggesting this, since clubbers appreciate the reassurance.

Second tip – try suggesting that people scream for something, I generally recommend whatever national holiday is closest, somebody’s birthday, or if all else fails, screaming for the day of the week.

If you’re still worried about what you’re saying, ensure the treble is turned right down on your microphone. While it does render you completely unintelligible, People will get the gist of your intentions from the tone of your voice, and you don’t have to worry about saying the wrong thing.

I’m going to stop it there so we can focus for a second, because Health and safety in the workplace is vital.

Remember that putting on a more intense song, perhaps some drum and bass or dubstep, might encourage more testosterone-fueled clubbers to engage in a style of dancing called “moshing” or “fighting”.

Don’t worry though, this can be safely counteracted by requesting that they don’t “mosh” since inebriated clubbers always do exactly what you ask them to.

The talking does get tiresome on its own, so a technique commonly alternated with it, is the use of FX.

*stop music*

Now I better explain a bit of clubber psychology for you – remember, they’ve heard the same songs time and again – the least you can do is to spice them up a bit! So ensure that you’ve got a massive amount of phase, filter and most importantly, beat repeat to hand.

I hope these tips have been useful, I’ve seen DJs all over the place using them to great effect and I’m sure you will too.

Hit like and favourite if you found this guide useful and subscribe to keep up to date with all the new boyinaband videos.

Here’s last week’s video and here’s a random mystery video.

Cheers for watching, and have a nice day!

http://www.boyinaband.com/forum - get involved in the next mix!

This mix was organised entirely by people like you on the biab forum.

Mixed by ReSet -
http://soundcloud.com/reset

Those producers:

ProhJeckTom – Take A While
http://soundcloud.com/prohjecktom
Basscrap – So Down
http://soundcloud.com/basscrap
Crush & NYD – Time To Free ft. Farisha
http://soundcloud.com/crushdj http://soundcloud.com/djnyd1987
ReSet – Cloudline
http://soundcloud.com/reset
Da Wikked – On A Rocket (Drum & Bass Mix)
http://soundcloud.com/da-wikked
Phase Labs – Asymptote
http://soundcloud.com/phaselabs
Vikt0r & Nova Six – Frontline
http://soundcloud.com/vikt0r http://soundcloud.com/jet-ace-logan
Mazza – Pseudocide
http://soundcloud.com/max-whisler

Free Download: http://soundcloud.com/boyinabanddotcom/rock-n-roll-skrillex-djent
Jon’s Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/MojoJojo378

His metal tutorial (He suggests part 6 as a starting point for non-noobs)
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i00E-O0cafA
Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYh4kCUj9-w

You know what will take you to the mountain? A Djent metal remix / cover of Skrillex’s Rock n Roll. Hope you like this version!

Love this song.

And yes, Jon is getting that guitar tone with a bass O_O

http://www.youtube.com/user/HIKAKIN – Check out the other
video on Hikakin’s channel

Cheers so much to Hikakin for the awesome beatboxing and
collaborating on these vids, he’s a frickin’ nice guy.

Also, thanks to my sister for speaking fluent Japanese. That
kinda helped this happen. Her channel (she is an awesome rapper):
http://www.youtube.com/user/WhiteEnglishGirl

But yeah, those genres: 
Hip Hop
Dubstep
Minimal House
Gabber
Drum and Bass
Happy Hardcore
Chiptune
Ambient
IDM
Death Metal

Boyinaband’s next guest tutorial brings us subvibe’s bassy time!

If you like what you hear, grab their free EP: http://www.facebook.com/subvibeofficial

Which includes my remix of “Burn” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vVdDoGn5C0