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Homepage > Harmonic Mixing Contest 2009 > Interview with Tamas, Mixed In Key Contest Winner


Post: Interview with Tamas, Mixed In Key Contest Winner
Chad P (Mixed In Key)
12-16-2009
 Tamas Horvath a.k.a Hotta by Mixed In Key Contest

Congratulations to our contest winner, Tamas Horvath. Tamas' entry was unusual because it went against the grain. While most DJs submitted House and Techno mixes, he sent us a downtempo set that immediately caught the attention of the judging panel.


1) How would you classify your genre?

The official category would probably be downtempo as it is slower than trip-hop. I named the mix "A Nu Dawn - Session One" as it captures a certain mood rather than a genre. It was designed to be listened to after 3am – I could also call it “3AM in a Perfect World” after DJ Shadow. There are definitely genre exceptions in the mix, as I use old acid jazz/soul tracks and even smooth jazz. However the slow but heavy groove beat background and the tone of all songs fit an overall theme - in fact most of the old songs I use could now be easily classified as downtempo. It’s a reflection of my personal taste of these type of songs or quoting Shadow again “ What Does Your Soul Look Like” (a track that I’ve used in the mix).


2) The surprising thing is that you played 24 songs in just 15 minutes, but it was almost impossible to tell. The mixing between them was flawless. Can you please share your tracklisting?

Track#. Artist - Track Title (Album Title (Year) Label)

1. Cinematic Orchestra - All That You Give (Every Day (2003) Ninja Tune)
2. DJ Shadow - What Does Your Soul Look Like, Pt. 4 (Endtroducing (1996) Fontana Island)
3. Minus 8 - Sarug & Terah (Elysian Fields (2000) Compost)
4. Nitin Sawhney - Market Daze (Migration (1995) Outcaste)
5. 4hero - Conceptions (Two Pages (1998) Polygram)
6. DJ Krush and Toshinori Kondo - Sun Is Shining (Ki-Oku (1999) Instinct)
7. Nina Simone - Feelin' Good [Joe Clausell Remix] (Verve Remixed Vol 1. (2002) Universal)
8. Sweetback - Chord (Sweetback (1998) Sony)
9. Anthea - Don't Explain (Serve Chilled Compilation (1999) Hed Kandi)
10. Kruder & Dorfmeister - Shakatakadoodub (Ninja Cuts: Flexistentialism (1998) Ninja Tune)
11. Mystery Dub - Edge Test (A Journey into Ambient Groove: Phase 2 (1998) Quango)
12. Bonobo - The Plug (Animal Magic (2001) Tru Thoughts - now Ninja Tune)
13. Funki Porcini - The Deep (Hed Phone Sex (1995) Shawow Records - now Ninja Tune)
14. DJ Cam - Free Your Turntable and Your Scratch Will Follow (Mad Blunted Jazz (1996) Shadow Records)
15. Fauna Flash - Mother Nature [Blue Foundation Remix] (Confusion: The Fusion Remixes (2002) Compost)
16. Soul II Soul - Keep On Moving (Club Classics Volume One (1989) Virgin)
17. Eggo - La Pappaye Mobile (Champs-Élysées Café, Vol. 1 (2002) Wagram Records)
18. Ronny Jordan - Laidback (Light To Dark (1996) Fourth & Bway)
19. Ursula Rucker - Brown Boy (Supa Sista (2001) K7)
20. Boozoo Bajou - Satta [Remix] (Satta! (2001) Stereo Deluxe)
21. DJ Vadim - London Mind State (Ninja Cuts: Flexistentialism (1998) Ninja Tune)
22. Tosca - Chocolate ELvis Presley [Bullitnuts Remix] (Chocolate Elvis Remixes (1999) G-Stone)
23. Cedar - Elusive Tides (Cookin Ingredients (2001) Cookin)
24. Dzihan & Kamien - Homebase (Freaks and Icons (2000) Six Degrees)


3) Is it correct that there is a big difference in BPMs between these tracks? What was your technique for mixing them together?

The tempo difference is huge - I start at 63 BPM (!) and go up to only 101 BPM at the end. This is an over 50% change in only 15 minutes - not an easy task to accomplish, as it's very difficult to mix at 63-80 BPM. Just think about it, a 6 BPM change is 10% here whereas it would be only 5% with a 120 BPM house track. It's much harder to make a smooth, almost unnoticeable tempo change - but not impossible. I like challenging mixes as we all know the ancient DJ saying: "there's not a problem I can't fix, 'cause I can do it in the mix...".

Time stretching does not work that well either at these slow tempos, so I was using a combination of pitch bend and some time stretch. Pitch bend changes both speed and pitch so after speeding up I applied a small pitch shift for tuning some of the tracks. Now you might argue that this does not make sense as I avoid time stretch just to do pitch shift later on – it’s essentially the same result in terms of loss of quality. Well, not really as sometimes a 5-6% increase in speed will transpose a song by almost a full semitone putting it into a different key than the original – it’s a 7 step jump on the Camelot wheel. After this I only need to fine-tune a few cents of the semitone with a pitch shifter while the tempo is perfectly locked – it gives a much better result.

Back in 2002 when I made the original mix Zplane élastique time stretching had not been released yet. I had a pair of CDJ1000s at that time and I used those decks for pitch locked tempo changes. The rest (believe it or not) was manually sped up with Sound Forge or done realtime in SAWStudio (Software Audio Workshop by RMLabs, a multitrack DAW software) that I mainly used for the mix. No Ableton - I can't keep emphasizing that enough.


4) Where did you learn this technique of mixing so quickly? (note: DMC history)

I've been mixing vinyl since 1988 - I believe mixing quicker and quicker has been always an interesting challenge for all the DJs out there. It's easy today to create mashups with software, using Traktor, Serato or Ableton Live; most DJs include that in club sets as well. It was very different back in the turntable-vinyl days, it was not really for club gigs. I did quick mixing at DMC Championships. Our set back in the 1989 Hungarian DMC (with my teammate DJ Pozsi) included a 2 minute segment where I mixed probably over 12 tracks on different records. I had the markers on the vinyl for the proper downbeat of each track (a piece of adhesive paper strip driving the needle into that groove - that is the "industry standard" cueing solution for vinyl) and I stacked the records on top of each other, using the one on the top, throwing it away when finished and putting the needle right underneath it. I also had to memorize all tempo settings for the pitch fader. It was great fun - I should dig up that video some time. The Scratch Perverts did something similar in 2001 - they actually kept on playing when they ran out of vinyl, essentially mixing without records..

I was also there at the World DMC in 2001 with our team from Hungary, the X-Phaders - we proudly made it to the finals (see the video here). From the left it's Quick, Hotta (myself), Pozsi and Andrew J.


5) It’s unusual to hear variety in a DJ set, and still maintain the “one genre” requirement. What was your inspiration for this mix?

I've been mainly interested in playing lounge music lately, which is not necessarily a genre definition but a set that you can listen to while you sit back, relax and feel the vibe. I do mix a lot of genres in a lounge set ranging from oldschool funk, soul, electronica, chillout and ambient, trip-hop, hip-hop instrumentals, lo-fi and downtempo, smooth jazz, nu jazz and even traditional jazz. The winning "Nu Dawn Session" is extremely slow tempo but still heavily groovebeat orientated - my inspirations included Coldcut's 70 minutes of madness mix (from the Journeys By DJs series) - it has the same dark, depressed feel to it while some reviewers noted that Matt and Jonathan just fly through genres and years like they did not exist. Another was Kruder&Dorfmeister's K&D Sessions, another downtempo mix classic. I'm also a big fan of Mark Farina's Mushroom Jazz series (he's an OM Records artist just like Kaskade from the MIK contest judging panel). He also mixes smooth jazz with trip hop - I found a Herb Alpert track on his Volume 3 mix (Flirtation) that is my favourite since then.


6) There are many moments when we could not tell how many songs were being played at the same time. Can you please walk us through some of your favorite transitions?

I take this as a compliment, so "on two turntables you say I'm nice, every cut I make is so precise..." quoting Maley Marl. I have to admit though that there is a maximum of two songs playing at the same time at any point in my mix, it is a very traditional DJ mix. Some songs I used have a lot of samples and loops in the original song, hence it might sound like there were many layers playing at once.


7) How do you view being a DJ versus being a remixer/musician? I think your work blurs the line between them...

I think my work is far from production and it's not even blurring the line, even if it was a lot of effort putting it together. It is fairly simple to get to this level today for everyone with Traktor or Serato and real decks or even with Ableton Live. The art is always the track selection and the composition, building up the mix. The Mixed In Key Camelot wheel concept is a great tool to advance the DJ in the process and in reality you do the same key progression planning for your night-long gig to control the mood and energy level of the audience as a classical music composer like Beethoven or Bach did for their monster symphonies. You cannot DJ without a basic understanding and sense of beats and tempos - but then with MIK you'll understand the musical keys and composition aspects as well. It all brings us closer to learning how music is made and ultimately it allows a DJ to do it in a shorter composition: a single song. Most DJs are interested in becoming remixers and producers so I don't think we should draw a strict line between them. In fact I hope that the future of DJing is in this direction. We'll be able to do more realtime production in a live set as opposed to just mixing ready-cut tracks unmodified. That is way too static for the 21st century.


8) What advice do you have for people who want to mix downtempo/chillout/ambient music? What techniques do you recommend?

Quoting Marley Marl again (Sucker DJ): "You gotta have your own style, not like the rest". I don't think "following" someone's style or taste would lead anywhere, this is all about a unique personal taste. You should be able to confidently say: "This is how it should be done - this style is identical to none". It is very hard today when there's a dumping of lounge, chillout and ambient compilation albums. It takes a lot of time listening to tracks and selecting that very few for your set. It's the old art of "crate digging" - you think it gets easier today with large hard drives and iPods, in fact it isn't - there's much more garbage to go through so even if it's faster to do so, it's still a very tiring process. I have a strong hip-hop and turntablist background so I can't resist referring to related topics - my advise is to watch the movie "Scratch" which has a chapter on crate digging and DJ Shadow - you just don't really understand what that term means until you see that basement with stacks of vinyl (the quote "We don't let just anybody downstairs" from the record store owner is now legendary). You can view the exerpt from the movie here.

I can also share a few tips and tricks that I use:

- Check the grooves first to see if they mix or clash. Percussion heavy grooves do not mix well as they are already very busy by themselves. A busy breakbeat mixes much better with a simple 4/4 that only emphasizes the downbeats and the quarters.

- You can still mix two busy grooves but I do it by cutting over rather than overlaying. Find a bridge in the song without the groove playing and do the cutover there. If there’s no bridge, try to make one.

- Same applies for the melodic instruments – if the track is very solid don’t try to mix, wait for the bridge. If there’s no bridge, make one – it’s easy to loop a few “clean” samples of the beat from the beginning of the track and insert it after a refrain or main theme. You can even mix clashing keys this way as the two melodies won’t play at the same time.

- I also make a bridge by filtering, as a last resort. I filter hi-freqs to kill hi-hats as hi-hats in any two tracks can clash easily (if there’s a complex groove, syncopated or shuffled).

- As a general rule I transition at a point when instruments disappear in a track and I fill the void with new instruments added from the other track. For that reason I usually avoid fading in – I try to mix the new track at full volume at the downbeat of a bar so it appears as it was part of the original song. This can make the mix sound really flawless and professional (see the comments about my winning mix – sounded like production, etc).

- This is very hard to do when you do live mixing as you have to get the tempo, the volume and the filtering exactly right at the very same point in time in when mixing at a downbeat. This is where automated beatmatching can help a lot (eg. Traktor), you can also use MIK’s Platinum Notes to get all your tracks to the same effective volume levels – this all gives you extra freedom and time to concentrate on the other aspects of the transition, there’s so much more to do there as you can see.


9) Since this was a harmonic mixing contest, how complex was your key progression?

I was paying close attention to keeping the mix harmonic, however I did not use the MIK software or any other tool to detect keys, I only used my ears. As I own MIK now as part of my contest prize I have analyzed the tracks in my mix and found the key progression very interesting. Most of the tracks are in minor keys that I suspected as it gives that dark, melancholic feel – I only have a few major keys where my intention was indeed to give some closure and calmness after a long period of minor key tracks full of tension and breeze. I do mix some non-relative keys with jumps of 3 or 5 in the Camelot wheel using the techniques I described above – so the melodies are not clashing as I transition with beats or cut over. There are textbook examples of the energy boost mixing that Yakov describes on the harmonic mixing website – moving 7 steps on the wheel for a semitone transposition or moving 2 steps for a full note shift. The latter is the DJ Krush transition where I pitch shifted the bassline of that track by 2 semitones making the B-flat Minor (3A) harmonic with the C Minor (5A) or the 4hero track.

When I prepared this mix I put all the tracks in an Excel sheet with the BPM details, moving them around and making a lot of playlists for preliminary listening. It is very much an “engineered” mix and I will go down this path in the future with adding MIK and the keys as another dimension, so I can have a better way of composing the overall mix. I find it extremely useful to be able to think about the mix this way.


10) If we wanted to build a collection of the music that you’re playing, where should we look?

You probably realized that I am a big fan of Coldcut, the British producer duo. Their label Ninja Tune has excellent downtempo artists. They also run a radio show called Solid Steel that has been on for over two decades now.

I indicated the labels for all my songs in my tracklisting, it tells a lot about my taste: I can recommend Compost, lots of good electronica there, Six Degrees have some interesting ethno-electronic tracks that I like, they are San Francisco based like OM Records. It's worth looking at Instinct Records for older acid jazz songs and there's Stereo Deluxe with good downtempo. I also go through a lot of compilations to pick just one song or two, it's not a shame - there's only a handful of successful compilation series where the quality did not drop over time, they are essential to know: like the Earth series from Good Looking Records, also the Ingredients from their sister label Cookin. My personal favorite is the St. Germain Des Pres Cafe series for nu jazz and I like the way that Hed Kandi brings back old rare grooves on the Back To Love series, their Chill compilations are also quite good.

I also highly recommend going back in time to explore other genres even as downtempo and chillout are relatively new categories. There are roots for these tracks in other older genres and without understanding and respecting these roots I don’t believe any DJ has a future. It is very well true today in a world of heavy sampling and remixing (the Verve jazz label remixes are a great example, the Nina Simone track that I use in my mix which was written in 1965 originally). Even young beginner DJs can do this. I quite often see comments on YouTube from 14-15 years old wishing they could have lived in the era of acid jazz in the 90s, or stating that Rakim or Guru is the greatest rapper ever – tears come to my eyes when I see that. There’s a lot of gems to be discovered, I’ve been doing the same with 70s soul and funk. The worst thing that can happen to you as a DJ is that you only mix new and overplayed tracks - you end up sounding like everybody else.

11) You currently live in Sydney, Australia, which has a vibrant music scene. What are your goals as a DJ and what do you want to accomplish next?

I still consider myself a bedroom DJ as I have a day job in a non-music related field. I have actually never worked as a DJ for living, had a few paid gigs and professional DMC Championships but it’s still just a hobby for me. I’d like to take it more seriously though especially because of winning this contest, I’m already working on the next volume of the “Nu Dawn Sessions” mix (I have the tracklists finalized for 4 volumes). It would be nice to get them published, so I’m open to any label to contact me. As for the Sydney scene I’ve been thinking about playing just for fun on Bondi Beach over weekends at the skateboard park, it would have a really oldschool, hip-hop feel to it – skaters, feel free to contact me. Otherwise I am more interested in remixing and production, I’d like to enter one of the Beatport remix contests soon with a few of my friends playing real instruments and maybe produce some original tracks as well with them (one of them is a professional table player (a complex Indian percussion instrument))


12) How can people contact you?

I am planning to set up some kind of a website, I don’t really have any so far. The best contact until then is my email, hotta11@hotmail.com.


13) What’s your dream gig as a DJ?

You’ve seen the movie called “Perfume”? It has a strange plot of this chemist guy who is trying to create a perfect mix of scents from the smell of 12 different women. He then releases it to a crowd in a big square to take them to the ultimate experience. I think a dream gig for a DJ is very much like that, finding the perfect tunes for the perfect mix and sending it out to mesmerize your audience at that point and time – as “when you make music and it’s over it’s gone in the air, you can never capture it again”. Maybe it’s just my style, but I like improvisation a lot, it’s very close to what they do in jazz. There are no identical jazz jam sessions, it’s always about a live interaction between the musicians and the audience – I like to think about DJin the same way. This is why I’m excited about new technologies that will allow DJs taking live gigs to these new levels.



Thanks to Tamas, and to all of the DJs who entered the 2009 Harmonic Mixing Contest. 		Reply



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