So, as evidenced by my previous post, I was up before sunrise to venture over the Hill (for those of you who don't live in L.A., the Hill is what separates the Westside and downtown Los Angeles from the San Fernando Valley) to Burbank to break into the Power 106 studios.

I'd have never guessed it from the mental image that one gets of DJs (though I'm sure I defy that as well), but E-Man is a quiet, unassuming guy who almost looks like he'd be comfortable sitting in a computer lab. And he's short. But get him behind a couple of turntables, and he's a maestro. The work he did during his 8:20 on-air mix this morning was amazing, and that's just run of the mill stuff for him. It amazes me that he does this for hours on end at the radio station, and that he also tours the world doing it as well -- he just got back from a tour of Japan, and he's getting ready to go to the Bahamas for a gig.

Mixing records is like driving in that it's a simple explanation of what you need to do to make it work, but it takes tons of practice and there's a ton of variables as well. I could tell you that in order to drive, all you need to do is put the car in gear and step down on the gas. But that doesn't take into account all the other cars on the road and how to safely maneuver with them, plus braking, traffic laws, backing up, what to do in an emergency, how to merge, changing lanes... you get the picture. It's like that with mixing. The simple explanation is that it's just beatmatching -- making sure that the record you're mixing into is on the same beat and at the same tempo as the record you're mixing out of. But it's way hard and requires a ton of practice, and you have to account for different tempos (which you can adjust on the turntable), different time signatures, the music going on in both songs, whether you scratch or put in other effects...

I stepped up to the turntables thinking that my innate sense of music would help me out, and it would be easy. So I was glad that E-Man was very patient with me as I tried and failed several times to mix one song into another, including the time that it took me so long to match the beats that I ran out of record.

Practice, Daniel-san, practice. Unfortunately, I don't have turntables and a mixer to practice with, though I'd love to be able to. Though I will be able to see E-Man in action when I accompany him later this month to one of his club gigs, and I'll probably go back to Power to see some of their other mixers do their work.

All in all, I have to admit it was a very humbling experience. D'oh.