I always keep a safe stack on deck as well with obvious reaches, like breakbeats/electro or vocal shots. Recently, I started chopping stems of tracks too and applying a more hybrid DJing or live approach which allows me to strip down / isolate my favourite parts – purely from a frequency dynamic perspective. I use my own familiar terms for categorising the personality of tracks ranging from descriptions like ‘4×4 glittering’ to ‘peak time rave bangers’ (sadly a very neglected and lonely category at the moment for apparent reasons) through ‘pitch down or up’, designated for beatless tracks where the mids serve as layers over driving percussive tracks. I organise both my physical and digital library selections using a similar method, based on mood. I also have a playlist for every month that helps me put together my radio show & is a nice way to snapshot what I was into at a particular time. This is influenced by the club, my set-time, who else is on the lineup etc. From these main playlists, I create a folder with sub-playlists on a gig-by-gig basis based on where I think the set will go. My digital collection grows quite quickly so I’ve found this is the best way to catalogue it as it comes in, however, I only use these playlists as an emergency last resort when I’m playing out. With digital, I have the same sort of genre categorisation system but I get very granular with the sounds, I’ve got around 20 different folders just for variations of house & techno and there’s around 40 in total. I try not to get too clinical or sort them any more specifically within each shelf because I like the element of surprise when it comes to flicking through records during a mix/listening session. For example Deep house, edits, garage, 4×4 house + techno, broken techno & electro etc. ![]() ![]() It’s fool-proof and even though it won’t win any awards, it goes to show this disorganisation itself has it’s pro’s as well.įor vinyl, I give each shelf in my Kallax unit a broad theme based on its genre. My mind works like a catalogue and together with Lars’ approach on how to describe the songs for which he can’t remember the track titles, we’re sorted. ![]() The best part of our method of non-organisation is probably in our heads. ![]() Our digital music is gathering giga-dust in the download folders of 2 hard drives, 3 SSD’s and a dropbox storage account, so it’s safe, but we’re not librarians so by the time we’re thinking about organising, there are already way too many other things on our plate to really be bothered with it. It probably has to as well, because the record you were looking for in the first place was nowhere to be found. The good thing we found out though: When you’re sorting records for a set, you’ll always come across that record you didn’t think about taking and it’ll be exactly that record that really makes the night. There will be priceless records next to thrift shops pickups and slow soul next to slamming techno. Our records are scattered over 2 homes and our studio and structured by a kind of genre-bending pan-alphabetical post-gig algorithm. To be honest, we’re terrible at organising.
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