the ssbd set — the list, and how i built it
friday night i'm playing "tea & techno" in dj superbloom's dome at same same but different. two hours, their xdj-xz, a minifreak on channel 3 and a drumbrute impact on channel 4 keeping clock over 5-pin midi. not a laptop set.
the first half of this page is the trim list i'm working from. it's here because i need to be able to pull it up on my phone if i lose the printed sheet, and typing a url from memory is more reliable than finding a file in the dark. if you're not me, skip to how i built it — that part's the interesting one.
the list
setting the target output
- Tape a mark at the trim's 12 o'clock. That's 0 = the reference.
- Play 05 666 Balance: trim on the mark, EQ flat, fader up. Find its loudest section.
- Set MASTER LEVEL so the master meter peaks just below the red — never in it. That's the target. Stay there all set.
- Every track: set the trim from the list before the fader comes up, then match the channel meter to where Balance peaked. The list gets you close; the meter decides.
- MiniFreak (CH3) and Brute (CH4): trim each so its loudest patch peaks where Balance does.
- H1n on MASTER 2: set its input so Balance peaks around −12 dBFS on the H1n.
- If the dome is too loud or too quiet, fix it at the house amp, not the master.
how i built it
the set is my angels essential mix — 67:49, fourteen tracks — taken apart and rebuilt track by track on the decks, stretched out with outside records and with hardware played over the top. a mix i'd already made, rebuilt into something that can breathe.
the spine is the circle of fifths. g minor → d minor → a minor → e minor. 6A → 7A → 8A → 9A, each step up a fifth, then a break to c minor for the 134 block and a resolve down to f minor. the a minor trio — waterfall drops, the price of time, babylon — was the rung that wasn't there. before it, the set just jumped straight from 7A to 9A and hoped.
five tempo stages: 120 → 124 → 126 → 134 → 120. the brute holds one tempo per pattern, each set to exactly .00, because a display reading "124" can actually be 124.37. that's what drifted on me in the dry run in september.
there's one hinge. dare u into 888 moves key and tempo at the same time — the only seam in the set that does. everywhere else it's exactly one thing at a time. dare u is what makes it survivable: it's e minor at 126, so it holds the key while it steps the tempo. the techno record is the transition. bauerpost is on the stick as a splitter if the hinge doesn't land, which is a game-time decision.
four transposes are irreversible, so each one got verified by measuring the shift between the source and the render rather than trusting any absolute key reading. leave the world behind −1 (eb to d minor), touch me −1 (f to e minor), my heart is racing +1 (eb to e minor), and 888 stretched 124 to 134 holding c minor. alchemist and deserted got pulled 115 to 120 as well.
one bug got caught by arithmetic, not by ears. deserted had fifteen unwarped clips. fourteen were spoken word and harmless. the fifteenth was a reverse swell timed to resolve on a downbeat, and unwarped at the new tempo it landed 220 ms late. a reverse riser only exists for where it resolves, so that one wasn't survivable.
the intro got rebuilt from scratch, and its voice had to be recovered. 000 begin is 110 bpm with no drums at all, so there's nothing to grid it to. the fix was to rebuild it at 120 over a kick runway and run begin into 444 safe as one 9:38 track. but the original vocal file was gone, and so was the script — the only surviving copy of the words was inside the finished master, buried under synths. we transcribed it locally with whisper, twice, once on the full mix and once on a filtered vocal band, and where the two passes agreed, the text is real. where they didn't, it isn't. i corrected two lines by ear — it's "core needs", not "coordinates" — regenerated the voice and rebuilt the intro around it. the words are the whole enharmonic thesis anyway: two notes that look different on paper and sound the same.
every track is levelled by flat gain. no limiting, ever. all 27 files sit at exactly −1.0 dBTP with their crest factor preserved to three decimals, which is the point — you get peak control without squashing the dynamics. the loudness matching happens live, on the trim knob, which is what the list above is for. (worth writing down: no ffmpeg loudness tool reliably hits a true-peak target. loudnorm with linear=true silently falls back to dynamic mode and eats the crest. flat gain hit −1.00 exactly, first try, on every file.)
the set is bigger than the slot on purpose. about 2h49m of material for two hours, so eight or so tracks get dropped live. probably more than that, honestly. there's a map of which ones can go and which are load-bearing — 999 is the most valuable drop, because pulling it frees two more.
and one key was just plain wrong. nosedive was filed as f major. playing through every transition the night before, it turned out to be f minor, which meant its old slot wasn't a key change at all, it was a three-step jump on both sides. it moved to the comedown, between circles and vulnerable, where the tempo steps 128 down to 120 and the key doesn't move at all.
the whole thing's one long modulation. the last thing the intro voice says before the first kick is "we are enharmonic."