I'm on track very shortly to have enough hardstyle material ready and selected to make probably three or four more megamixes. My draft tracklist for Hardstyle Megamix #7 is the following:
- The KGB's—"Channel KGBs [TNT Remix]"
- Noisecontrollers—"E=nc² [Original Mix]"
- Technoboy—"Into Dub"
- The Raiders—"Miss Kidman on a Cruise [Eyes Wide Style Mix]"
- The Juvenile—"Hardcore Suckas [Trance Generators Remix]"
- Alpha² & Wildstylez—"Atrocious"
- 2 Best Enemies—"Les Drums [TBY Remix]"
- Blutonium Boy vs DJ Neo—"Hardstyle Nation [Blutonium Boy Hardstyle Mix]"
- Davide Sonar—"Natural"
- DJ Phil Ty—"Miami Belch [Polite Mix]"
- Donkey Rollers—"Last City on Earth (In Qontrol Anthem 2008)"
- Droid—"Focus [Reversebass Mix]"
- Headhunterz vs Wildstylez—"Project One"
- A-Lusion—"Voodoo"
- The Prophet ft. Brennan Heart—"The Payback"
- Southstylers—"Trippp!"
If I run out of space before using all of those tracks, I guess one will have to be bumped to the next list. That's OK.
If you look, you may well notice that I tend to favor Early Hardstyle over Nu-style (or nüstyle for maximum derogatory shiv-twisting.) I do like some "earlier" Euphoric Hardstyle, and I do like some of the classic artists newer work—Technoboy, for instance, and his partnership TNT still do stuff I like (although I do like his earlier stuff even better, mostly.) I still don't dig too much of the newer stuff, and I haven't really explored Rawstyle or Subground at all, although I'm interested to do so when I get more of a chance. There's very little in my collection that's newer than 2009 or so in either hardstyle or hard trance—although not nothing.
In addition to all this hardstyle, I've also got a lot of hard trance and a few other EDM songs that I'm throwing in even though they aren't specifically hard trance—some classic and progressive trance, some tech trance, some early hardstyle and stuff that gets sloppy labels like progressive house or techno, etc. But mostly hard trance and acid trance by far. I'm going to start doing megamixes of those two, and I'll let Excel randomize the track order for me. I think I'll use ten to twelve tracks per megamix as preselected by Excel—regardless of how long each megamix ends up being that way. Few of those tracks are less than 6 minutes, and many are well over 8 or even 9 minutes; I would guess that the average is about 7:45 or so. If this is so, than my average hardtrance megamix will be a little bit longer than my hardstyle megamixes; but maybe not. After all, as part of mixing them, I'll be doing some cutting of the intros and outros to blend them together a bit. But by and large, these are longer tracks than my hardstyle material, which probably averages somewhere between 5-6 minutes each.
Right now I've got over 250 tracks sequestered for this project, which is... a lot, actually. I don't know if I'll ever actually use all of them, or if I do, how long it'll take, because that's over 20 megamixes easy. In addition to those already sequestered, I've got close to thirty more ready for analysis to see if I think they'll fit—and of course, I do continue to gradually discover more, even though I've greatly slowed down my looking for more so I can digest what I've found in the last few months. Of those thirty, certainly not all will make the cut, but a lot of them will; I'll almost surely be up to 300 before I completely and totally stop.
Now, granted; that list includes a lot of versions of the same song sometimes. For most, it's two or maybe three remixes, but I have at least two songs for which I have six versions ("Acid Nightmare" by A*S*Y*S and "The Answer" by Tommy Pulse.) I actually have more versions of those songs, but the ones not on this list are either remixed into a different genre (such as El Grekoz's hardstyle version of "The Answer") or otherwise just don't make the cut as a real favorite.
For that reason, I'll probably have to massage the Excel output. I ran a few trials and most of them tend to turn up too heavily representing at least someone; (often A*S*Y*S or Tommy Pulse, for that matter, although Cosmic Gate and Arome and Hennes & Cold get hit here too, just because I have so many tracks of theirs.) One trial run even gave me two versions of the same song, which obviously won't do. So, there'll be a little bit of manual adjustments of the output, but I do actually want to see what I get by more or less randomizing the output. When I pick them myself, I tend to focus more on the tracks that I'm more familiar with or the groups that I know better, and "one-hit wonders" sometimes fall between the cracks.
Plus, I think it's fun putting these together. And I'm getting better at it, if I do say so myself. I really need to get an app other than Audacity that helps here, though. Audacity is more for cutting, splicing and manipulating of tracks, but it doesn't do a great job of actually mixing them; i.e. blending one into the other, since there's no BPM synch tool, which would be a bare minimum requirement to make it a good DJing program.
However, Mixxx is freeware and is supposedly as good at what it does as Audacity is at what it does. Between the two of them, I can probably—hopefully—really do something special.
Just for the heck of it, here's a weird photoshopped wallpaper of gigantic planets in the sky. I don't know why trance music is associated with these kinds of images, but it clearly seems that it is, so when I see one, it makes me want to dance.
