Hard trance

When making these DJ sets, I usually end up having to pitch some of the songs up a little bit to get the tempos close to each other so that they blend reasonably well.  I tend to merge towards the higher BPM tracks, so I'm usually speeding up the lower BPM tracks, but sometimes it's the other way around.  When this varies, it's usually because I've got some older acid or Wave I Hard trance that's from the mid-90s.  BPMs were higher in that era, and the Wave II hard trance era (which is where most of my favorite tracks are from) and even Wave III hard trance era (i.e. today, mostly) have lower BPM tracks.  Not low BPM tracks, but not crazy hardcore style hast BPM tracks of 170 or anything like that.

But I like a lot of older tracks too, they just don't fit very well without being slowed down.  Luckily, Audacity allows me to slow the tempo without changing the pitch, so usually this works just fine to put some older tracks in with the BPM reduced to better match what I've got otherwise in the mix.  I was surprised by how much I had to reduce the tempo on the latest mix I've been working on, though.  Lostsidon's "Lostsidon (Stone Gleam Mix)" and Cocooma's "Virtual Experience" both had to have pretty significant slowing.  Funnily, they don't sound weird at all slowed down; they sound great.  The Cocooma song in particular sounds better at a more reasonable tempo, although I think that the same is true for both of them.

I now have 70 hard trance DJ sets (of 12 tracks each) mixed, and I listen to them almost exclusively when I'm playing music.  I won't do that forever, of course, but I'll do it a lot.  But I have so many that I'm already at the point where it's hard for me to get to know the mixes, or even sometimes the songs in them.  I'm getting stuff too fast and mixing it up with my randomizer, and hardly having an opportunity to listen to it again so that I feel familiar with the tracks.  I do see an end approaching in terms of making more mixes, but I do still have quite a few left, so it's not exactly imminent.  It's just not really all that far away anymore either.