Xtravaganza Megamix (1995) (Patreon)

Hey guys! I have a real treat for you today. I recorded this megamix in the spring of 1995 (if I remember correctly) at Redhouse Studios, my studio in Valencia (Spain) at the time.

As some of you may know, I had a nice career as a professional DJ from 1983 to 1990. After I decided to retire to focus on my career as a musician, producer and artist (that was my first intention), I dj'd occasionally at some parties and events, but it was not something I actively pursued anymore. Music and all the studio work, at that time 90% hardware, had my full attention.

I remember my first experience with professional audio recording to hard disk in 1993. It was something very professional at that time, only affordable by a few movie sound studios in Europe (I was lucky enough to work in one of them). I had also started using samplers in my DJ sets in 1987. At first they were little boxes with just a second or two of audio that you could capture and then trigger manually on the fly. I remember by 1988 I had two Digitech sampler pedals, a drum machine and occasionally a Roland Juno 60 in the DJ booth. People were freaking out about what I was doing back then, it wasn't a common setup.

So I stopped being a DJ for hire and focused on music, but in 1995 I still had ideas about how to do this and that as a DJ. I got my first hard drive 8 track digital system (a System 8 if I remember correctly) in late 1994. In February 1995 I wondered if I could perform live with the samplers and the multitrack and do a DJ set "on steroids" so to speak. Little did I know that this would be the standard almost 30 years later.

So I started loading little pieces of songs onto my Emulator EMAX II sampler, another one that had pads (another Roland, can't remember the name), and a sort of base on two tracks of the digital 8-track system, leaving three pairs to record the output of each machine. And I started experimenting, and this is like the second attempt to make sense of it all. It's mostly live, every piece is hand-triggered, and it includes some snippets of old songs of mine from that time. I know if you like mega mixes like I do, you'll enjoy discovering every bit of it.

Lastly. I showed this to a fellow DJ friend and he was the one who got me a contest sheet a week later to participate in a megamix for Michael Jackson's upcoming album History... and the rest is, well, history 😜.

Happy Friday 😘 ❤️

By the way! You can hear at the beginning of the megamix a tear in the audio, that's the DAT tape, that got bitten once. I recovered this from those old tapes in 2016, before moving to Mexico.