Reorganization of music

So I've started a HUGE reorganization of my music, and I'm doing it with Smartcrates in SSL. I'm using the "Grouping" tag for anything video and the "Genre" tag for anything MP3. I figure that this will be easier for me than trying to have separate crates for audio and video -- instead, if I DO need to search for an MP3 in a certain genre, I just have to add a line to the smart crate instead of having all my MP3s polluting up my video crates.

Other than codes (which I know some DJs use for their crates) does anyone have a better way? I'm all ears.

Vinyl Side of the Week: George McCrae's "Rock Your Baby" - Side B.

This is my new weekly feature - won't always been on Mondays, but it will always happen - every week I'm going to rip the side from one of my favorite records. I've got a lot of pretty varied stuff and I figure this is a way to give back to so many of the DJs who have given me music. You're going to hear some cracks and pops in some of the records, as some are well over 40 years old. Hope that's okay. Others are pretty new and will still sound damn nice. Regardless, I'm not going to do any touching up of the records - just the original vinyl sound.

For this week, I've chosen the B side of George McCrae's 1974 release Rock Your Baby. It's 8 tracks (well, it's really 9, but the last track is just a reprise of "Rock Your Baby") and I chose the 2nd side because we've all got "Rock Your Baby" in our digital crates to begin with (or you should. If you don't.... please add it) and I figured giving you just the reprise version of "Rock Your Baby" would be good enough.

I found this at the record store "In Your Ear" in Cambridge, MA (or Boston, I can't remember which store I found it in - but I feel pretty confident that it was the Cambridge location) back in 2004 and whoever had it before me was obviously also a DJ as they marked up the record cover and record quite a bit with some information.

Enjoy.

Tracklisting:
"Look At You"
"Make It Right"
"I Need Somebody Like You"
"I Get Lifted"
"Rock Your Baby (Reprise)"

Every track was produced, written, and arranged by H.W. Casey and Richard Finch.

Edits for you!

Just some edits I made.

The Four Tops - Same Old Song [Benny C Edit]
Buck 65 - I'm Gonna Do Ya [Benny C Edit]
Vampire Weekend - Giving Up The Gun [Benny C Edit]
Creedence Clearwater Revival - Proud Mary [Benny C Edit]

Hope these find you well. I love that Vampire Weekend record, and the album Contra has grown on me leaps and bounds. I did not enjoy "Cousins" whatsoever, and was skeptical of the rest of the album, but "Giving Up The Gun" is a great track and probably one of the most refreshing songs of the year. Absolutely worth listening to, and the video itself is fantastic, with guest appearances from RZA, Lil Jon, Joe Jonas, and Jake Gyllenhaal.

Some thoughts

These are all video edits I've done and posted onto the incredibly nice streaming video site, Vimeo. I love how customizable Vimeo is and how high quality things look. I also like that they don't pull every single video with copyrighted material in it within moments of posting. Keep in mind, most of these (read: all) have intros to them and some of the have outros as well - so, you know... if you get bored waiting for the song to start, just keep waiting. It'll get there eventually.


I love this song - the original is great, but the genius known as A-Trak made it better. A-Trak, if you didn't know, is one of the most accomplished DJs to ever live. He was the youngest DMC (a DJ battling competition held yearly) champion ever, winning it at age 15 and then came in second the next year at age 16. He owns the music label "Fools Gold" and was the touring DJ for Kanye West for a long time. Needless to say, he's legit and someone you should make a point to go see spin if he's ever in your neighborhood.


Animal Collective released their acclaimed album Merriweather Post Pavillion in 2009, and I think everyone but me liked it. That's fine. I don't really like Animal Collective all that much outside of a few tracks, including their most accessible and most "popular" song, "My Girls", which was the breakthrough single from the album. Recently, Gigamesh (1/3rd of the DJ/Remix/Production team known as DiscoTech) released what he calls his "Proper House Remix" of the track. I am a big fan of most of the work that DiscoTech (and the new side project that some of them are working on, called Senor Stereo) does, but this is one of the best tracks they've put out so far. I used a few plugins from Adobe After Effects to make the colors change, and I think it works pretty nicely.

I find myself listening to more disco, funk, and soul now than I do music from this era. And most of the music from this era that I do listen to has been influenced heavily by disco, funk, and soul. There's still space in my heart for NOFX, but they aren't something I listen to on a daily basis much anymore (outside of the last few weeks, thanks to Fat Mike's recent episode).

I am looking for some suggestions of classic funk and disco to listen to. I just started listening to the Equals, which was a group that Eddy Grant sang for before he went all Electric Avenue. They have one track called "Black-Skinned Blue-Eyed Boys" which sounds pretty damn close to something by Edwin Starr.



That's what I have for now. Tonight I'm DJing at Fur Nightclub, where I'll be playing hip hop most of the night, and not the good kind.

Blakroc

I know this came out a long ago, but this song is just awesome. The whole Blakroc album is worth listening to, but this track (featuring Ludacris, ODB and The Black Keys) is the best one on there. It makes me miss ODB making new music.

Allo

Comment ça va?

Welcome welcome. If you're a fan of my old blog, "ben loves music", then this is the new hot spot. This is going to be different from that blog simply because it's not about being an mp3 blog first - this is about edits and remixes and shit like that that I make as well as about random thoughts I have.

So enjoy.