The Future of Electronic Music Performance
Summary:
Unity is hard in a big world.. we need dreamers to keep the rest of us on our toes! Thank you for believing...
On hardware selection in the future: i would hope that some day we will just wise up and have a dedicated laptop for for all djs running one system... there will be more time to do other things such as reworking a synth line or chopping and reversing a beat before a break will be more important than djing... once DJs switch to traktor and djing internally on 4+ decks becomes standard
Live PA acts are pretty much at this point, aren't they?
I wasn't a really good DJ, but when I was mixing top 40/EDM beats for parties (2007-09), I used Ableton Live and I didn't even understand the concept of "decks" - I hadn't even used a turntable or CDJ in my life. I had essentially infinite tracks (practically I could get about 9 or 10 tracks playing simultaneously before the software would get laggy). Only in 2008 did I realize what most DJs were actually doing.
I had thought that they were "making songs on the fly" using programs like Ableton Live - that was mostly influenced by the fact that I was listening to a lot of Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) in 2007... I was under the impression everyone was doing something similar to what he had done on Night Ripper, using 16 samples every 4 minutes, but at a slower pace:
For EDM... I really thought a kick drum would be from one song, a hi-hat would be from another, a high-pitched synth from a third, etc. - I didn't realize people were flat-out just playing someone else's track. But in theory, they could have been done that way...
Anyways, for me I would just find tiny sections (4-8 bars) of a bunch of random songs and try to put them together. You can hear Gregg do the same thing with pop/rock music. It's really hard to mix some sections of songs together, especially with tunes that are heavily compressed, but for a lot of songs there's often some kind of minimal element you can extract and re-use.
This kind of remix/sample-mashup culture is still very popular (especially in East Coast hip-hop) and can probably be contrasted with "Timbaland-style" synthesizer-oriented production, which leans more towards "EDM as we know it" sometimes. Maybe think... Amen breaks vs. gabber kick.