Mixing old house music

[mhbeats]

Hi all,

I have quite a lot of old house music from mid 80's to about 92/93. I have been collecting for some time and attempting to play on my 1210's. Its got to the point now that I am getting more frustrated with trying to mix it and wondered if anyone can give me some tips on mixing this kind of stuff. I know music was made different in them days and all I can think is that when mixing most of this type that it needs to be done fairly quick because there are quite a lot of changes in some tracks. On my mixer, when playing it gives me the bpm, I'm thinking if i put a label on each record with the bpm it will help me organise them and i can then pick track with fairly close bpm, is that the right way to go do you think?

Cheers
Mark

My gear is
2 x 1210
Allen and Heath PX5


To give an example of some of the music, this is some of what i have.

Orbital - Chime
LFO - LFO
Wood Allen - Airport 89
Carl Cox - Let the bass kick
Unique 3 - The Theme
Leftfield - Not forgotten
T Coy - Dream 17
Orange Lemon - The Texican

[Daniel S]

I started out mixing in the mid 80s and I don't think it's that much different than today. The biggest difference with I guess is that your mixing it with vinyl, where you don't get as much "free" track info as in today's digital systems, like tempo, key and waveforms. Marking your records with the tempo is a start. That's what I used to do back in the day. You could also put info like how many bars the intro, breaks and outro are on each track. Back then I also acquired less music than I do now, since records were expensive. That meant I would practice a lot more with each track and get a better feel for what would work together. That really is the key for making a good mix, finding what fits together. So just keep on practicing and listen to your old school records and you'll soon get the hang of it.

[mhbeats]

Cheers, thanks for replying

[SWS Productions]

Labels on the album covers with BPM were how it was done back in the day.

[ImNotDedYet]

I know this is an old thread, and I'm new here, but I'll post this for any people that may have a similar question and run across this info.

Marking BPM/musical key, etc on the record itself, the sleeve or the record cover will seriously de-value those records - some of which are pretty valuable at this point. (others worth pennies) I use a plastic sleeve around the record cover of my valuable records and write any pertinent information on that with black sharpie in order to mark any pertinent info on that record - that way the value of the record isn't decreased, but I still have easy access to all the info I need.