George Martin Hall (STU) Set Playlist, Fredericton, February 8th

For anyone who was at this party last night and wondering about my setlist, here you go. As you can see from the track listings below, this was a mainstream/top40 event. I started out with an hour or so of hip hop, then moved into indie/pop, and then to upbeat dance tracks for the rest of the evening:

01. Migos & Drake, "Versace"
02. Pusha T, "Numbers On The Boards"
03. Big Sean, "Control"
04. Jay Z, "Picasso Baby"
05. Kanye West, "Blood On The Leaves"
06. Future & Lil Wayne, "Karate Chop"
07. 2 Chainz feat Pharrell, "Feds Watching"
08. Kevin Gates, "Wylin"
09. Rich Homie Quan, "Some Type Of Way"
10. Major Lazer, "Bubble Butt"
11. Jay Z, "Tom Ford"
12. Chance The Rapper, "Chain Smoker"
13. Drake, "Wu Tang Forever"
14. Ace Hood, "Bugatti"
15. J Cole, "Crooked Smile"
16. Lorde, "White Teeth Teens"
17. Blood Orange, "Chamakay"
18. Jay Z & Justin Timberlake, "Holy Grail"
19. Cali Swag District, "Teach Me How To Dougie"
20. Daft Punk feat Panda Bear, "Doin' It Right"
21. Parquet Courts, "Stoned & Starving"
22. Arctic Monkeys, "Do I Wanna Know"
23. Laura Marling, "Master Hunter"
24. Justin Timberlake, "Mirrors"
25. Elvis Costello & The Roots, "Walk Us Uptown"
26. Franz Ferdinand, "Treasons, Animals"
27. Betty Who, "You're In Love"
28. Haim, "The Wire"
29. One Direction, "Little Black Dress"
30. Thundercat, "Oh Sheit It's X"
31. Miley Cyrus, "Maybe You're Right"
32. Lorde, "Royals"
33. Snoop Lion & Miley Cyrus, "Ashtrays & Heartbreaks"
34. Kelly Rowland, "Freak"
35. Superchunk, "Me & You & Jackie Mittoo"
36. Eleanor Friedberger, "Stare At The Sun"
37. Paramore, "Still Into You"
38. Macklemore, "Can't Hold Us"
39. One Direction, "Best Song Ever"
40. Fall Out Boy, "My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark"
41. Lonely Island, "Yolo"
42. Katy Perry, "Roar"
43. Avril Lavigne, "Here's To Never Growing Up"
44. Daft Punk, "Get Lucky"
45. Disclosure, "When A Fire Starts To Burn"
46. Taio Cruz, "Dynamite"
47. Robin Thicke, "Blurred Lines"
48. Katy Perry, "Dark Horse"
49. Bruno Mars, "Treasure"
50. Selena Gomez, "Come And Get It"
51. Sak Noel & Sito Rocks, "Party On My Level"
52. Demi Lovato, "Heart Attack"
53. Inna, "Be My Lover"
54. Psy, "Gentleman"
55. Miley Cyrus, "Wrecking Ball"
56. Eminem & Rihanna, "Monster"
57. Ylvis, "What Does The Fox Say"
58. Martin Garrix, "Animals"
59. Avicii, "Wake Me Up"
60. Darius Rucker, "Wagon Wheel"

I didn't list the remixes that I used for any of the dance tracks (starting around track 40 onward) because I've edited a lot of them to make them unique. So in other words, you wouldn't be able to find them on the internet.




My helper, Amanda, playing some music early in the evening.

To download any of my studio mixes or recordings of lives shows, visit:

djbolivia.ca/mixes 

Then go into the folder called "Bolivia's DJ Mixes & Live Shows"

Thanks for your support!

I'm Jonathan Clark, known online as DJ Bolivia.  Do you want to learn more about DJ'ing and music production?  If so, visit:

djbolivia.ca/training

If you happen to enjoy techno tracks, most of my tracks are available as free downloads from this link:

djbolivia.ca/tracks

Thanks so much for visit, and for your support!  I really appreciate the fan base that I've been able to build up over the years.

Also, if you want to visit any of my other sites, here are a few links:

    YouTube:  youtube.com/djbolivia

    SoundCloud:  soundcloud.com/djbolivia

    Blogger:  djbolivia.blogspot.com

    Main Site:  www.djbolivia.ca

Nuthin' But a G Thang Remix

This past summer, one of the projects that I did for one of my classes at Berklee was a remix of Dre's classic hip hop track, "Nuthin' But a G Thang." At the time, I did the entire project in Reason. This weekend, I was listening to the original, so yesterday afternoon I decided to dig out my project and start fresh, by re-building it from scratch in Ableton (with some major changes), just for practice. Here's the result:

Dr Dre feat Snoop - Nuthin' But a G Thang (Bolivia's Beats) by djbolivia

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utsdZ0x4yK0




The original was released in 1993 and is pretty well known. It reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts that year, and VH1 listed it as number 3 on the top 100 hip hop tracks of all time, just a year or so ago. It's also included in Rolling Stone's "forty tracks that changed the world" list.

The project is certainly not perfect. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a clean original acapella, so the one I used has some obvious artifacts, such as the female vocal harmonies that pop up occasionally, and some extra light percussion. I also mangled the layout slightly - the song is set up as eight-bar sections and I didn't tie the verses to those sections accurately for the first third of the song, just because I was playing around with things. I kind of wish that I had access to the original clean vocals so I could do this properly, but I don't know how I'd find those, short of asking Dre for the original vocal files.

On a positive note, I tried to keep this extremely simple, so the project only uses audio loops that are included in the Live Pack, and no external VST's or VSTi's. Ableton doesn't have good brass sounds, so I created the horn section in Reason and exported it as an audio loop, to make sure that anyone with Ableton can see how everything works in this remix with no missing pieces. Even Reason isn't great - I would have rather played the horns live if I had a trumpet and trombone here at the studio. And there are several shortcomings, such as generic reverbs instead of tailoring them to instruments, lack of global grooves, etc., which I was ignoring because I was trying to "speed produce." But whatever. You've got to stop somewhere. If you're going to be a professional at this someday, you'd better get used to the dichotomy between deadlines versus enhancing artistic creativity.

There is practically no automation in this project aside from volume automation the arrangement view. The only exception is a bit of automation of the wet/dry on the ping pong on the keys. No filters anywhere. My general view is that if you need effects to make your productions sound good, you need to work on your basics more. It's like DJ'ing - no matter how much technical prowess you have, 90% of the job is programming (playing good tracks). So with this project, I tried to make it sound decent in a "quick and dirty" session, without obsessing about effects.

By the way, the school course that I took this for was the Hip Hop Production course at Berklee, taught by Michael Hamilton. I really learned a lot from this course, especially since I'm not as familiar with hip hop as I am with some other genres. And Michael was a great prof - if you read his bio, you'll see that he has an incredible amount of experience in the genre (and he's worked with Dre and Snoop and Warren G, among many other producers.




Anyway, like I say, this is just an educational project for me, but it was fun to play with yesterday. Repost if you like it though. Here's a link to the original video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gK1e2TCFAA

I'm Jonathan Clark, known online as DJ Bolivia.  Do you want to learn more about DJ'ing and music production?  If so, visit:

djbolivia.ca/training

If you happen to enjoy techno tracks, most of my tracks are available as free downloads from this link:

djbolivia.ca/tracks

Thanks so much for visit, and for your support!  I really appreciate the fan base that I've been able to build up over the years.

Also, if you want to visit any of my other sites, here are a few links:

    YouTube:  youtube.com/djbolivia

    SoundCloud:  soundcloud.com/djbolivia

    Blogger:  djbolivia.blogspot.com

    Main Site:  www.djbolivia.ca

Video: Classified, "Oh Canada"

Now that hockey season is heating up, I figured it was prudent to show a bit of Canadian nationalistic pride. Here's a video by Classified, a group from Halifax, which has been a favorite of mine for a while now. It's kind of funny seeing quite a few of my friends in this shoot.



YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znejGNjOtmY

Sorry that I had to use this smaller version with lyrics. The original on YouTube, which had a lot more views, just got blocked in Canada by Sony, for reasons which I haven't figured out yet. Probably because of the entire Heritage Council commercial that was also included. Viewers from other countries might be able to watch it though.

Anyway, big ups to Classified & IV for this little bit of Canadiana.

I'm Jonathan Clark, known online as DJ Bolivia.  Do you want to learn more about DJ'ing and music production?  If so, visit:

djbolivia.ca/training

If you happen to enjoy techno tracks, most of my tracks are available as free downloads from this link:

djbolivia.ca/tracks

Thanks so much for visit, and for your support!  I really appreciate the fan base that I've been able to build up over the years.

Also, if you want to visit any of my other sites, here are a few links:

    YouTube:  youtube.com/djbolivia

    SoundCloud:  soundcloud.com/djbolivia

    Blogger:  djbolivia.blogspot.com

    Main Site:  www.djbolivia.ca