r/DnB

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.

They're doing an album release dj set at Bristol for £35, whats the style of the event likely to be? Already got tickets for their tour but dont know if going to the smaller set too will be worth it.

That early liquid sound 😍