Wasn't Mills DJing long before he began making records? Or am I misunderstanding the connection you're making?
I started making music long before I ever tried to DJ, but it was more lack of opportunity and not having $1200 to drop on 1200s and a mixer. Somehow picking up a synth for a couple hunderd bucks every so often was more managable. People that DJ first often have an intuitive grasp of what makes a good dance track. Whether that starts them down the path to artistic excellence is another question. One does have to attain some minimal musical knowledge along the way though. I people who have released records who are functionally tone-deaf. I've actually 'music-doctored' a few tracks for them, where I had to tell them how to get their chords and basslines in the same general key, tune the vocal samples, etc. And of course, they're way more successful than I am. And I have 2 years of college as a music major. There is a big difference between DJs who start producing, and DJs who hire ghost producers to make tracks for them because they're too busy or coked up to learn how to do it properly themselves. That some weak sh*t, and it's remarkably common, especially among the big room techno and progressive DJs. On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 8:58 AM, kuszyn...@gmail.com <kuszyn...@gmail.com> wrote: > (Here comes some flame bait) > > And this is why I really like Jeff Mills. Frankly, I know very few > electronic music people who look at things as producers. They become > producers after djing, which to me isn't musical, it's beat making. >
