u/GardenerInAWar

TLDR: Why tunes today are so short and why songs barely get playtime. Purely anecdotal opinion.

Bonafides: DnB fan since 1997, DJ since 1999, started at 17 and 44 years old now. Recorded nearly 400 full length mixes, played in clubs, warehouses, radio, and livestreams across 7 US states. Also I'm autistic so, apologies for the length.

Technical context: a typical dnb block is 22 seconds at 175bpm. So typical cue markers are :22, :44, 1:06, 1:28, 1:50, 2:12, 2:34, 2:56 and so on. These numbers are tattooed on my arm since time is subgenre agnostic. Want a double drop at 2:34, incoming tune has a :44 intro? Well thats 2 blocks of 22, so start it at 1:50 on the outgoing track and kapow, double drop. Mixing +/- 175 speed will fudge the exact numbers a bit but it still works.

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In the backpack mixtape era around 1996, a common length of a tune was 7 to 10 minutes. Mixable DJ friendly intros were usually at least 1:28 on the short side and up to 3+ minutes. Varying turntable and vinyl quality made the mixing process very touchy, it often took a full minute to beatmatch and reset the needle to actually start mixing. Searching for the next record in your bag in the dark took time too, especially in a bag of white promos. Time was measured in the length of your finger knuckle or tiny pieces of paper stuck directly on the vinyl.

You played the whole tune and only mixed out of the outro, and every tune played full length. This created long transitions, long playtimes, and the production reflected this with long progressive changes in the tune. A tune that was only kinda good didnt get played at all because you could only fit so many. Vinyl was 10 dollars for usually one good song, 40 to 50 dollars for an LP which sometimes you only bought for one song. Commercial DJ mixes were nearly always 17 tunes because of the recording length of a CD. Blank mixtapes were 45 minutes per side. These created the ruleset by which we applied our craft.

Art is about finding a new rule to break in a way the audience will accept. Cream always rises to the top; the skill and creativity of Andy C, Randall, Friction, Dieselboy etc became a shining problem for other DJ's to solve, starting an arms race. They broke rules that taught the rest of us; you dont have to play the entire tune, you can just play the best 2 minutes if you're good enough. Faster mixing meant more songs in the recording. If you saw 25 tunes in the tracklist, you knew before listening that this DJ was blasting through it. Competition breeds excellence; if you wanted to excel, you had to compete.

Playing only the highlights of a tune was (at the time) difficult, meaning respectable, meaning desirable. The most skilled DJs became the most visible, thus most booked, thus most popular, thus the standard, which changed the audience expectation, and the audience is where the next generation of DJs were born, taking their excitement home to their bedroom in order to figure out the tricks and emulate them in order to find a new rule to break.

DJ's began to mix from the middle of a record in order to make exciting things happen faster. They stopped resetting the needle after beat matching, and simply worked on the precision as they brought the tune in, in order to save time. How fast you could switch records and place a needle was a valuable skill. Finger flashlights existed. Every way you could cheat the system made you sound more exciting and skilled as a DJ. Dnb was faster than every other genre by nature, and the transition from jungle into DnB came with an obsession towards shock value, sound design, and big explosive moments.

Producers started to reflect in production what the DJs did; if every DJ is trying to sound like Andy C and play a new tune every 2 minutes, then nobody is playing all 9 minutes so why not make it 5? Why make the intro 2 minutes long if theyre only going to use the first minute? If Dieselboy can take two 8min songs and play the exciting parts of both in under 4 minutes, whats the point of the extra time when nobody hears it?

Enter CDJ's, minidisc recorders, and laptops. No more carrying 500 pounds of expensive and precious vinyl to a club, just carry a cd booklet, a laptop, a USB drive. The skill of finding, switching, and cueing a record got reduced to pressing next track and then the play button. DJs had a passionate debate about losing the romantic tactile aspect of the craft to the soulless but infinitely useful new tech. Barriers to skill were removed and reduced the need for practice and perfection. Sync and Quantize removed the time cost of beatmatching by gentle touches. Once that debate was over, and everyone was now selecting shorter tunes faster, and mixing on 3 decks was typical, hot cues and editing and premade tracklists and Serato shortcuts informed the producers to follow suit again.

If you can't mix like Andy C, you can mimic what he does beforehand in the production: shorten the time before your bass drop from 128 down to 106. Now down to 44. This means you dont have to do any math or special tricks to get there faster, to shock and awe the crowd. I once bought a NuTone vinyl back in 2008 that had a 22 second beat before the breakdown, and I was furious. I thought it was a bizarre choice but now its normal.

When someone like Andy comes along and cracks open the idea of whats possible (which is what artists DO) by mixing faster than the records are designed for, the scene changes. We used to call him Mr President because he won best DJ every single year, the DnB equivalent of Q-Bert and the DMC championship. Bad Company rewrote the production rules in the late 90s, then Pendulum did it again in 2003, then Noisia did it again in 2006, so by the 2010's, you're not trying to improve on Bad Company anymore, you're trying to improve on Noisia. When someone comes along and smashes up the tradition hard enough, the field follows suit because you can't go back. YouTube and Twitch channels today with only 5 subscribers will show 6 month djs doing what used to take a world famous dj, and years of practice; now its just expected.

Take all of that to its natural conclusion: almost all new releases are now 3 minutes or less, with 22 sec intros. The creatives at the top of their game will always find a way to push the rules further, because thats their nature; 4 decks instead of 3. VIP of a VIP of a dubplate. Triple drops instead of double. Mixing in a new tune just to completely sidestep both tunes and suddenly slam in a 3rd and 4th tune from out of nowhere for maximum shock value.

Just like Black Sabbath sounds "decent but outgrown" to a Nirvana era teenager, and Nirvana sounds outdated to a My Chemical Romance teenager, nobody chooses their era of entry but we all get a different set of "proper mixing" embedded in our opinions. This rapid fire shock value mixing culture we currently live in, is someone's new normal, and the current rule breakers will make a new standard in the coming years.

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On a personal note, the loss I grieve the most is riding out a good match up of 2 well suited songs. The pinnacle of enjoyment for me is being in the mix, and you dont want to move on or break up the pairing because they sound perfect together. Letting them roll out in harmony. When new tunes are 2:34 long in total, there's no physical way to roll out a mix for 3 minutes and live inside the moment. So ironically, the bedroom solution now is that I often find myself editing tunes to extend them in order to mix longer, whereas 20 years ago I might have done the opposite. But then again, thats my unchosen era placement talking; jungle is the Black Sabbath to my dnb Nirvana, and the My Chemical Romance of it all looks back at my era the same way.

Ultimate Conquest Lightblade with blueberries from Fireteam Finder. Wanted my Rank 11. Several failed runs all day from blueberries who were not set up for it at all. If they die, sure why not, I'll just keep going and possibly magically get the clear for all of us. They never make it past the first room and I keep dying in the moth run. They always leave as soon as they die.

Last try of the day. Match a Warlock and a Titan, x3 stasis including me, okay so its crystal city time. We're cooking, everybody is handling business. We get to the taxi ride through all the shriekers and wizards and the Titan doesn't even hide or emote into the taxi wall, just mows everything down. Titan to Titan, I like this guy.

I die in the moth run trying to eager edge and stasis punch my way through because I saw Esoterickk do it and clearly we are the same skill level. Titan just casually walks through the whole thing, no eager edge or amplified nonsense. My man. I'm not leaving, I wanna watch this guy play. At the battle overlook before the boss room, Titan walks down and says hi to all the ogre bosses and scorn bosses and unstoppable champs and shirekers. They do not say hi back.

Warlock is keeping up in the boss room but catches heat and dies. Titan, solo now, just walking around putting faces in pavement. Warlock doesn't leave either. I type in chat: I believe. Titan is picking flowers and yawning while he deletes everything.

Then I realize he's had no Barrier weapons this entire time because at some point in the boss fight, there's just the big blue hive hulk and like 5 barriers around the arena. He walks up to three of them and they spawn shields so fast they cover each other, so he just says nvm and goes to fight the boss on the floor while they're all raining hell on him like a fireworks show.

This fucking Titan clocks in and goes to work. Supers, crystal slams, ankle punches, just ten toes in and standing on his goddamn business. Me and the Warlock are watching like a Season 6 Game of Thrones finale.

He cleans up, we respawn, dance party at the chest. Titan gives each of us the hug emote. I type "&@^#^$ that was so badass" and he replies "I HAVE TO PEE SO BAD".

His name was Clutchy.

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Update:

Clutchy saw the post but wants to remain anonymous.

All he had to say was "gg's"

Point one: Everybody who wants a new Storm, Rogue, Emma etc seems to be complaining about using the Fox actors and old lineups for Doomsday. I see constant complaints about how Marvel is ignoring the characters fans wanna see. FOX made all those old casting and character decisions, not Marvel proper. But Marvel is in control now so why have them at all?

Point two: we all know they have huge long term plans for the X-Men, as a tentpole franchise to lead the MCU. They also have been trying to get the rights back from Fox since the early 2000's. Are they gonna build 10 more years of movies chained to Fox's old decisions? I doubt it.

Point three: millions of people who love marvel do not read comics; comic readers and cartoon watchers are not the only ones buying billions of dollars worth of movie tickets. X-Men is not Superman where everybody recognizes all the Jimmy Olsens of the thing. If you start a new X-Men franchise with a new studio, and the lineup (just an example) is Psylocke Magik Forge Havok and Polaris, fighting Sauron with a guest appearance by Ka-Zar, the general public is going to be VERY confused, even annoyed. This isn't X-Men, wtf! Etc etc. You need to show the difference somehow.

Point four: nobody was yelling about the future/source canon of the Illuminati after Multiverse of Madness, because we all kind of intuitively understood it was setup for that movie and not necessarily some new status quo. Are you guys really expecting a bunch of Blade Gambit Elektra team movies because of Deadpool and Wolverine? If not, then why are you expecting all the 50 year old actors for Mystique and Nightcrawler to be the centerpiece moving forward?

So if you're Marvel, and you wanna make 10 years of new X-Men movies and get a fresh chance to do these people correctly, but don't want to confuse the general public, how do you reconcile all that? You bring the old team back for one last hurrah, take them out dramatically, and use Doom/Incursions/Multiverse shenanigans to visually show the extremely wide audience that the old Fox team is now over and after that, later, here's X-Men the Marvel way.

We won't see the actual New X-Men lineup in Doomsday, but down the road when you see a trailer with Doug and Krakoa and Boom Boom and Strong Guy, the whole world saw Doomsday by then so they're primed for the new direction.

So please, take a chill pill and quit telling everyone how mad you are that nobody cares about Mystique and where the hell are Storm and Jean and Multiple Man or whatever. They'll get here when the actual X-Men movies start. This is not an X-Men movie; these characters are showing up to get deleted.

Whoever dies first in a raid, someone else must say "there goes flawless"

If you are farming as a fireteam and you get the drop but your teammates do not, you stay for a minimum of 2 more runs.

If you earned the Reckoner title, you cant take it off. Ever.

Turn all public events into heroic before you burn it down.

If you're fighting Cabal, don't stand where they are arriving.

If you are hunting an interactable pickup, like a quest or triumph object in the wild and you find it, you shoot at the nearest blueberry and then shoot the object to make sure they come pick it up.

All stairs in the Tower must be slid or jumped, up and down, not walked/ran like some kind of peasant.

You never blow up another player's warmind cell/stasis crystal/tangle/subclass object in case it screws up their carefully planned gameplay loop.

If a blueberry helps you in the wild, bow or wave. This is similar to someone in traffic letting you pass them.

The store is accessed via the director, not by interacting with Tess. She knows what she did.

If the whole fireteam is standing in a Well of Radiance shooting a boss, dont fucking move. Treat it like a sports team photograph: kneel in the front, stand in the back, stay still until its over.

If you see the dog, you stop and pet the dog.

If you are doing Garden of Salvation with someone on their first time in the raid, you have to tell them there's an exotic chest in the portal after the third encounter.

Its okay to litter the battlefield with Stasis crystals, as long as you destroy them instantly; never leave your trash in another player's way.

If you have Thousand Voices already, you have to let everybody else open their chests first in Last Wish.

If a player is AFK you must push them off a cliff. Especially if they're nowhere near a cliff.

Towering Barricade is only for solo play or playlists, in a raid or dungeon DPS scenario you shall use Rally Barricade.

New players first trip to Grasp of Avarice have to hit the switches and lead the way to the first encounter. You can tell them where to go but that's all you're allowed to say.

Emotes are mandatory on all elevators.

If you plant a rally before everyone arrives, you sit and wait until everybody grabs the flag before starting the encounter.

If you get to the next encounter ahead of everybody, don't pull the other players with you if its their first time seeing the area.

If you smoke bomb yourself to go invisible, you do it near as many teammates as possible. PvP and PvE.

When you join a group in Fireteam Finder, you ready up IMMEDIATELY. You will not actually be ready and its your own damn fault.

If you have a non-essential slot on your helmet, heavy ammo scout is the way of the lady and the gentleman.

Rally flags must be planted as high as your skill allows.

If someone has successfully climbed atop something precarious and tiny, knocking them off is unacceptable but attempting to land on their head is acceptable. Wait your turn, or further the shenanigans.

Never teabag first but always teabag in return.

The Spacewalk in Deep Stone Crypt is done with music volume up and mics muted, regardless of how many times you've done it.

If any form of the tower ball has been summoned, you may play Keep Up with the blueberry responsible, but you will not let it fall off the tower at any cost.

If you get a new emblem, you wear it for a day before going back to your favorite one.

Above all else, if you see someone doing something silly or ridiculous, or trying to get somewhere they shouldn't be able to get, you have to join them and try it.

Edit: Guys. Someone else, another player, not yourself.

PVP: Warlock blueberry sitting on a half captured flag in 6v6, score is 142 to 145. The rest of us died from a super. Blueberry is stuck in the middle of a long lane near a box, caught between two sets of enemies coming from opposite directions. I cant get back fast enough to help him but I round the corner and see him in the distance. This guy snipes one direction, snipes the other direction, throwing grenades, sliding in circles around the box, crushing every button Playstation ever made. I finally reach him to help and all the enemies are dead; he held the flag and won the game. Shooting the clouds and spinning in circles from adrenaline. Wish I could have heard his mic.

PVE: Titan in a GM, big boss was one shot and mid-air, hopping down to a lower level, and by happenstance the Titan was also one shot and mid-air, coming down slightly later than the boss. On the way down, he throws a stasis crystal past the boss where he's gonna land so that the boss lands on the crystal, sets off an explosion, kills himself, and completes the activity. Rewards drop, solo dance party.

Honorable mention for the Hunters: I was on a Flawless Trials ticket in the last match, 1v1 on a 4-4 final round, this fucking spazzy hunter is one shot and im chasing him around Twilight Gap. All I gotta do is kill this bastard and its the Lighthouse. I get close and decide a punch from the heavens will end it all. He fucking rolls under me to avoid my titan slam, I turn around to see where he went and in the air with a little hop, he calmly puts the end of his sniper rifle in my mouth, hip fires, and blows my brains out from hugging range. I shook my fist at the sky and cursed his name. These days I watch his build guides on YouTube.

TLDR: Wheres the nicest place to find a raid group?

I spent years solo farming red borders from raid chests because A: autism, B: bad apples making raids stressful, and C: i just like tooting around in raid spaces freely with a sword and a grapple. Apparently the red borders are done now so going into the raids proper is the only choice.

Before that sounds like im not willing to do hard content, I have solo flawlessed 3 or 4 dungeons, gilded conqueror, went Unbroken solo, and usually been rank 10 through past seasons - I never hit 11 because it stresses me out to raid with strangers who get mad at me for causing a wipe or missing a callout. I feel often like people want perfection after watching a Datto guide. Sometimes it takes a few tries to get the synergy together and I'd rather play alone than play with certain types of people.

So if I'm going to dig in and start learning Garden, Salvation, VoG, Kings Fall etc, where do people find friendly/patient groups now? Is there some big discord, or clan to join, or Sherpa sub, or like where do we go?

Thats it, thats the post. Whatever goes down here on out, Lance left us united.

Goodnight, Commander.