Nonwrestler Blog

DJ = Producer = DJ?

Since some time in the 90s, a person who makes "electronic music"¹ tends to be called a "DJ". I find it a bit frustrating. Most producers I know are not DJs. Most DJs I know are not producers. I should throw up some illustrative video clips rather than expect anyone to read anything on the web, but I'm in the mood for writing...

Those great masters of not-understanding-process, music reviewers, provide many obvious examples of this. I don’t think they’re shaping people’s views, though, because people that merge the ideas of producers and DJs together aren’t usually interested in reading about music.

Still, the confusion is really very understandable, and I only get sour about it because I produce music myself and am not a DJ. Well, OK, I’m a radio DJ, but here I’m thinking of a DJ in the sense of someone who can mix.

It’s this "mix" business that I think is the biggest cause of confusion. In the above para I mean "mix records live by matching their tempo". Could be vinyl, could be CDJs, could be any number of setups involving software. It’s a performance thing - it happens in real time in front of an audience - and the vast majority of time the records are other people’s. A person doing this is a DJ.

Then there’s the idea of "mixing a track", which usually means remixing someone else’s music. In most cases the person doing this has been given one or more components of a recorded song (e.g. vocals, a keyboard melody and a guitar riff) and re-arranges them, adds new parts and basically writes a track of their own incorporating something from the original. There are many, many ways this may happen, but the key thing is it will as good as never involve any of the tools involved with DJing. It may involve a bit of performance, e.g. playing (piano) keyboard parts or tapping out beats on little rubber pads, but not in front of people. Still, the end result is a track to listen to later. A person doing this is a producer.

A large number of people make music that includes samples of other people’s stuff and for many of them the process is largely the same as remixing. Maybe with less compunction to use specific samples and more nerves about covering your tracks (sorry) by concealing sample sources. So it’s no surprise that the above idea of "mixing a track" extends to someone producing their "own" track. Needless to say, a person doing this is a producer.

There’s all kinds of ambiguity and weirdness.

Heaps of people are both DJs and producers. Plenty of bods making dance music clicked that either DJing would be fun or that they could make more cash by it. On the flipside, heaps of DJs saw the next step from working with other people's tunes was to making their own music.

Among fans of dance music, there’s prestige in being a DJ. This translates to expectations on a producer to act like one. If you happen to go to a gym that plays lots of horseshit Ministry of Sound also-ran crap, you’ll have the joy of hearing music that shows no trace of DJ mixing at all while watching vids featuring awkward producers miming strange gestures over DJ setups. Not that this pains me at all. I mean, mad respect and big ups to those guys. One love.

Tracks produced by DJs often get credited "DJ whoever". There's two scenarios here. DJ Spiller feat. Sophie Ellis Bexter. DJ Tiesto. DJ Hell. DJ Koze. These people produce tracks that to my ears sound like they have nothing to do with anything these people might do as DJs. Maybe some of them aren't DJs at all? Then there's DJ Premier. DJ Krush. Others I can't think of. ;) People producing tracks and scratching on them. I'm not suggesting for a minute that in either case people should not bill themselves how they like, but both scenarios do help to confuzzle what the hell a DJ does and what the hell a producer does. Especially when combined with what I was writing about in the para above.

Scratch DJs in bands. The conga players of the 90s.² I guess they’re not DJs in the way I’m defining DJ mixing above. Regardless, when they’re on stage doing baby scratches before the guitars kick in, they’re not producers. Things get murkier when their role is actually to mix in beats etc. that were done earlier. A detailed study of ‘Encore / Numb’ by Linkin Park & Jay-Z suggests generally that shits sequenced, not beat-mixed.

More extreme are turntablists, who use a DJ’s tools and techniques to meticulously slice and dice other people’s music into short tightly structured tracks, which are surely as much their own as any made by sample-wielding producers. Sometimes they release remixes of other people’s tracks put together like this. None of the varied tools a producer might use come into play here. There’s no way they’re not DJs in the traditional sense, but they’re using exactly the same set of skills when performing or when recording a track. For the purposes of the distinctions I'm trying to clear up, the key thing is that the proportion of DJs who do anything like this is as good as zero. Generalising anything about how tracks are written from checking out turntablists is therefore fairly crazy.

People like Richie Hawtin (both producer and DJ) took drum machines on the road with him and would sequence new beats on top of multiple layered DJ mixes. I guess the thing for me here is the performance aspect, as well as the long format of a DJ set – he’s not doing something intended as a track to be listened to later. He’s also already a DJ and a producer, so ... whatever.

I feel like I’m spelling out the obvious throughout all of this, but sometimes I need to pretend that someone will be interested and/or learn something. I wish I had a pithy closing remark here, but I don’t.

¹ Don’t get me started on what "electronic music" means and the logic of who is in or out of that club. Contemporary hip-hop producers out, even Britney is out, but indie rockers with keyboards are in...? I guess "acoustic music" is a similarly ... informal ... description - generally it's about the overall sound, rather than the technicalities. A good thing?

² I do know there are bands where a DJ is fully involved in the music with other band members, I'm just having a smirk at the nu metal bands.

Labels: music

Posted at 6:34 PM