DjOriented

Plaid have been putting the “final touches” to their studio album ‘Scintilli’ for almost two years now, a delay which has infuriated a few die hards.

“You have angered many people on this forum, Plaid. Least you can do is explain the unbelievable delay for an album that is already finished,” moaned one fan on the WATMM forum. That was back in October 2008.

The frustration stems from the fact that the British electronic music duo’s last longplayer effort was 2006′s ‘Greedy Baby’, an audiovisual DVD project with Bob Jaroc.

Apart from a few movie soundtracks for anime and film director Michael Arias, and two newly commissioned tracks for Warp’s 20th anniversary compilation last year, all has been pretty quiet on the Plaid front.

Well, Plaid fans may have to hold on for just a wee bit longer as no concrete release date for ‘Scintilli’ has been given yet, however with the album launch taking place on March 6th in London it can’t be long now.

To celebrate, we’ve got two pairs of tickets to give away to the album launch.

Read more on Beatportal

Being the younger sibling of Steve Angello must come with its perks. Antoine Josefsson aka AN21 appeared out of nowhere in 2009 with two rather large collaborations with his brother, ‘Flonko’ and ‘Valodja’.

The cuts were two of the year’s biggest singles for the Size Records posse, and ‘Valodja’ in particular became something of an anthem for the Ibiza summer crowd, immediately teeing up the youngster for an international career. Since then, AN21 has quickly embedded himself in the Size family, gaining respect through association.

A production partnership with San Francisco DJ Max Vangeli, resident of the city’s long-running Ruby Skye venue, certainly shows signs of future fruition.

Read more on Beatportal

There are a few DJ related apps floating about Apple’s iPhone app store, but most of them are gimmicks, unsuitable for professional DJ use.

British breakbeat pioneer Krafty Kuts however, has joined the app rush with a DJ-friendly offering that DJs of all genres will find useful. As this promo video shows, it’s an MPC-styled sampler app, that allows DJs to drop audio samples over the top of their DJ sets with the tap of a finger. How dope.

Watch this video on Beatportal

Canadian superstar Deadmau5 took things to the next level during his New Year’s Eve Ministry of Sound set at the O2 Arena in London.

During the live performance of his hit song ‘Ghosts N Stuff’, he flew above the crowd with the help of a harness directly out of the DJ booth to mimic a ghost, as this video shows.

Watch this video on Beatportal

It’s 5.50am on a cold Sunday in Manchester. In a sweat-covered warehouse, Canadian techno DJ Richie Hawtin winds up a set for 2000 clubbers with 10 minutes of mind-bending rhythms and pumped up electronic sounds, as captured brilliantly here by visual artist Ali Demirel.

His video combines different camera angles from the immersive DJ booth and smoky interior of The Warehouse Project that night, which are all warped and filtered to match the awe-inspiring experience of seeing Hawtin play live.

Watch this video on Beatportal

Each year ResidentAdvisor asks the world’s dance music community to vote for their favourite DJs, and the results of their 2009 poll have just been announced.

Like DJ Magazine’s annual Top 100 DJs poll, RA’s results are skewed towards what their readership thinks, and they voted almost entirely for DJs from the techno and underground house scenes.

No doubt trance, house, electro house, and progressive house fans will be scratching their heads over the top 10 below, but online music votes always polarise opinion, none more so than in electronic music.

Let us know what you think of the results.

Read more on Beatportal

By and large, dance music struggles with music videos. Without the big budgets of the major label-supported rock, hip hop, or pop scenes, most club hits never see a visual representation, and the ones that do often fail to capture the essence of the original song. Almost invariably, dance music videos involve plenty of T&A, and very little TLC.

Occasionally though, you find a beauty in the YouTube wastelands such as Whiskas fX’ video for Max Cooper’s ‘Stochastisch Serie’ (above).

Watch this video on Beatportal

Following last week’s Sonic Academy video tutorial which showed us how to create a drum beat in Ableton Live, we now get a brief introduction to Ableton’s Simpler instrument, and how it can be used to make basslines.

In this video, we learn how to load samples into Simpler, and then how to map out MIDI notes for it to play. We also see how you can then manipulate the sample using Simpler’s controls.

Please note that this is a tutorial for beginners, and will only help newcomers to Ableton.

Watch this video on Beatportal

Online music school Sonic Academy offers music production video tutorials that give you everything you need to start producing professional-sounding dance music tracks using industry standard software such as Ableton, Reason, and Cubase.

They very kindly have offered to share a few of their Ableton Live tutorials for free with Beatportal users over the coming weeks, and in this first module, they guide us through how to create a drum beat using the software. Seasoned Ableton producers will find this tutorial very basic, but for anyone who hasn’t yet learnt the software, you may find it useful.

Click through to download the module’s resources, so you can follow along at home.

Watch this video on Beatportal

Native Instruments today unveiled the world’s smallest USB DJ audio interface, the Audio 2 DJ, with an eye-opening Parkour video filmed in London.

In this video French Parkour master Stephane Vigroux demonstrates the portability of the Audio 2 DJ interface by free-running through London.

Watch this video on Beatportal