Grimes fanclub but without the simping (Grimes' twitter handle is a direct reference to this sub)
Seeing there is so many different types of misinformation about what happened at Coachella, I thought I'd have to make my own post as a DJ and music producer explaining a bit what happened there and how this is ALL Grimes' fault and not the gear's fault or her team as she likes to claim.
All of this was a super rookie mistake.
I play in small venues for a small niche of electronic venues. Max people I've played in front was 300. I am not a big shot DJ by any chance. In the last year I play around 1-2 times a month.
These are the points I'd like to address (as a former fan):
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For a big festival like Coachella, they 100% will ask you for your own rider, this includes bringing your own decks and asking for a specific set of gear. She didn't do that apparently and played with whatever Coachella has given her, which is probably the latest and most modern piece of tech, probably Pioneer CDJ3000. Which is still a fucking amazing piece of gear. I doubt that Coachella will place on stage faulty gears, they have a whole arsenal of the best sound engineers to ensure that there is no technical fault.
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Analyzing tracks with Rekordbox (which she claims herself/her team didnt do) takes TWO SECONDS. Just select the tracks that you're going to play and press "ANALYZE" and export to your own USB. And even if you don't analyse them through rekordbox, most of the times they work still fine. Not a justifiable mistake.
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It can happen that the deck is not reading bpms properly. It does happen. But all DJs know how to beatmatch by ear, and that's what the jog wheel is for. It happened to make that the bpm started to fluctuate while i was playing. Doesn't matter. That's what the jog wheel is for. She literally doesn't know how to use the decks.
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Very probably the tracks WERE NOT going double tempo as she says, just that the deck was reading it as if it were double tempo. Doesn't matter. Still you can see the waveform and be able to mix it properly. She literally showed everyone that she doesn't know how to read waveforms, and it all leads me to really really think that she never produced one of her single tracks, and had other people doing it for her because,
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DJing should be an absolute walk in the park for music producers. And producing music is all about reading waveforms.
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I had my tracks read half tempo on several occasions. instead of being 130, it would read 65. Doesn't matter. I set both tracks at 65 and they will play at the same tempo. Or I'd set one track on 65 and the other 130, and they would go at the same tempo. "It's such a complex analogy guys i cant really explain to you right now"
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If anything goes awry, and it can happen, and you should expect anything to happen, you prepare a pre-recorded set as backup. In case something starts malfunctioning, you just load your pre-recorded set and pretend to play a little bit, waiting for the technicians to come and get it fixed.
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The fact that she blamed the gear and her team its what makes it so sad. She couldn't bother to analyse her tracks on rekordbox which takes literally two seconds. She couldn't bother to bring a back-up set. Couldn't bother to learn how a jog wheel works. How the master tempo fader works. How to beatmatch by ear which is what all DJs do. Couldn't read a fucking waveform. She could have let one track finish and start with another just right after and no one would have noticed, and it wouldnt have definitely not made the fucking news.
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You may not like Anyma's music but his other project (Tale Of Us) is absolutely fucking massive in the tech-house scene. Tale Of Us are huge and revered. I think this Coachella performance is going to be a deal breaker for him if he doesnt want to get mocked for the rest of his career. Seriously.
Anyway this was a total cringe fest through and through and if i was such an acclaimed artist and making such an embarassment of myself and my reputation as an artist, i'd run away from the spotlight forever. Incredibly insane coming from a 'DIY' i've-done-it-all-myself artist, and her resolution tweet is "one lesson i've learned is do it yourself''. Wasn't that what her whole brand was based on?? You just tell me that you've just learned this lesson?
This behaviour just tells me that she never ever had to work to achieve ANYTHING and she thinks she can jump on stage with no skills, no preparation, no nothing, because this is always how life has rolled for her. And again, i really really really don't think that she produced her songs. There is no way that this is an acclaimed DIY producer, no fucking way.
And all that she took out from this was "be a cunt even if it makes ppl bad" what the fuck??? someone help.
Grimes is literally all show and no tell. Her being obsessed by AI generated art is really telling of what her "artistic" drive is fueled by. Vanity and laziness. The empress has no clothes.
yup! i used to teach audio production and like op this reallllllly called into question whether she has produced her own music
Yes. I don’t know much about producing music, but her claims of producing AA completely herself don’t hold up….. everybody makes mistakes, but with her it seems that she has absolutely NO idea how to handle any of the equipment?!
not just AA, all of her discography....
I think there’s a guy who claimed to produce Visions, isn’t there?
True. I just only mentioned AA because that’s the only album of her I really loved 100%
Thanks so much, u/rough_phil0sophy! Very interesting to get a detailed technical breakdown + debunking of what happened.
Would you know -- and mind you, noob here, plus one who'd really like to believe Old Grimes DID to a fair degree (if that makes sense) produce her own music -- if it's possible to craft most aspects of your music using Ableton without being able to read waveform properly? Like, have an understanding that serves your purpose, but not one that translates to DJ'ing or professional music production?
Thank you! I'll try to explain briefly.
Absofuckinglutely not. Ableton is ALL and only waveforms. Not just ableton, every single DAW in existence.
Example pics: https://musictech.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Ableton-Live-11-Release-1@2560x1625-650x413.jpg
https://musictech.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/04-Take-Lanes@2160x606.jpg
https://cdm.link/app/uploads/2023/11/2_Ableton-Live-12-2.png
Other DAW examples such as protools: https://www.icmp.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/page_background/public/background-image/pro-tools-110.png?itok=Nzlq6xbc
https://www.protoolstraining.com/images/2023/2023.6_Release/Pro_Tools_2023.6_6.png
Cubase: https://dt7v1i9vyp3mf.cloudfront.net/styles/news_large/s3/imagelibrary/C/Cubase10_01-l0zyNYazTcDh7gVvIPWhdsEDy0fuG_s5.jpg
etc. etc.
And you can see here how much MORE parameters and settings there are. Infinite amount of infinite parameters, waveforms over waveforms over waveforms.
The three main (and only) parameters about DJing are:
EQ (low, mid, high frequencies) aka three fucking knobs. Ableton has infinite knobs to tweak infinite parameters, it would take months for me to explain them all.
Tempo (Dear Claire....)
and various FX, like delay, stutter, etc. - I don't even use them because the music i play is already super filled with FX and don't want to add more to make it sound chaotic. I only use a lowpass/highpass filter.
DJing is basically, take the most simplest basic Ableton parameter and tweak it live to make transitions.
There are also HOT CUES in DJing which means, you decide where you want the track to start. From the beginning, from the middle etc. And you set the CUE exactly where you want it, so when you press play you are able to beatmatch correctly. She didn't even set her CUE POINTS correctly. which is, select the point of the track, press cue, save, done. I wouldn't consider that to be a parameter, more like a setting.
There, i've explained DJing in 5 minutes. Beatmatch the tracks and tweak these parameters. Production? Forget it. I would need months if not years to explain everything, and still there are so many things that I probably even don't know about.
So no, I don't think grimes has produced her own music. At all.
I make music on ableton, and gotta say the waveforms on cdj looks way easier than on the DAW itself. If i remember correctly, on the dj mixer they will show you 2 lines of waveforms , the current track and whatever track you load in to beatmatch and bring the fader up. (i just dj on a small controller, not a cdj so excuse me if i say anything incorrect). And normally I would prepare the set by placing markers on sections of the songs that I want to mix in. I assume you can do the same thing on rekordbox app, I was using serato. And its basic knowledge to know which sections or beat (song structure), like 8-16 bar intro, drops etc.. And im just a small bedroom producer 😭😭 I get that you can get overwhelmed on stage and couldn’t hear the songs prolly to beatmatch but this is coachella and so unreal.
exactly. the waveforms on the CDJs are much more easy to interpret and read than any DAW and music production software. If she is not able to read those on the CDJs, no way in hell she self-produced 5 albums, sorry. there's no way around it.
like u can actually beatmatch by eyes not ears if you dont want to like Grimes lol.. My friend said Grimes looks very drunk? and slurred speech just come out of her mouth. This is just so bizzare 😭😭
Hah, damn. F'ing confused right now. But thanks for taking the time to explain!!
I noticed how her music didn't really have the songs mixed well. It just sounded like she put songs on Spotify and let them fade out. It would get quiet at times when I feel like the beat should keep going throughout except through obvious parts ( like before a drop)..
Yeah she doesn't seem to know how to do transitions at all. Her transitions are worse than DJs I've watched on twitch that are in their first month or two of learning
I believe most of her older stuff was recorded using a sampler/looper (something like the SB-404, from looking at old recordings of shows). I also remember reading a story of how hectic the mastering sessions were for Visions. Basically the owner of her label had to slap together a master in a few days because Grimes tried to record everything in GarageBand and he had to use messy files.
I think she definitely had help (other than mastering) on every project since then.
Not that any of this excuses her unpreparedness for the Coachella show.
sorry, i am going to correct you here because that's also misinformation that needs to be addressed.
there are three/four processes in this particular order in music production.
writing / producing
mixing
mastering
assuming that writing and producing can be made together or in two separate different processes, depending on the artist.
the mastering is the very final process. You cant 'clean' dirty stems in mastering. In mastering you work with one single audio file which is the final, after everything has been polished and made sound good in the mixing process. With mastering you make everything sound 'louder' and clean some final bits and bobs. But if the master track sounds 'dirty', gets rejected and sent back to mixing. If there are 'dirty' sounds in the master track, you can be sure as hell that they will be louder after mastering and impossible to correct.
You are literally implying here that she had someone mix their tracks and possibly produce, as the process you are describing aka cleaning messy sounds, cannot be done at all during the mastering process but only in producing/mixing.
Yes, i'm saying that she gave someone stem recordings from whatever she recorded from in a garageband file which itself was disorganized but had somewhat the shape of the track. I understand you can't "clean" audio files.
Edit: i realize now that i should've said "final mix" instead of "master" in my previous comment
He also re did a lot of the sounds, re recorded vocals… sebastian cowan is the only reason visions sounds how it does
There are old interviews where Grimes talks about mixing Visions with Sebastian Cowan of Arbutus. Can’t find them, but paraphrasing: “Seb said, ‘okay, we’re gonna mix these vocals high now,’ and I was so scared.” So, my sense is that she has always had help mixing. Mark Spike Stent is credited as mixing engineer on AA too, iirc
I think something like Geidi/Halfaxa could actually have been made entirely without being proficient with waveforms. Some of those songs sound like 4-track tape demos, after all… I can easily imagine the GarageBand project.
Ah, I was mistaken, it was an interview about the Darkbloom EP: https://web.archive.org/web/20120202045245/http://www.dummymag.com/features/2011/05/09/grimes-d-eon-interview/
“Did your processes change at all in writing tracks for the split?
Grimes: I’ve been studying popstars…those songs, I feel are old though. I’ve moved far beyond that, in terms of like…me and my manager Seb went into the studio and then we mixed everything, and he basically taught me – everything is still bedroom, but we replaced a lot of the drums in the studio, put effects on the vocals. Seb made me…he was like, “we’re mixing the vocals high” and I was like [whispers] “no, I’m so scared…” but now I love it, I just had to get over that fear of hearing myself sing.
d’Eon: For me too, I learned a lot from Seb. I don’t know how to actually produce…”
I remember those days really well. It has been genuinely weird and sad to follow the trajectory.
Tangential but I looked up what Seb has been up to and in 2022 he opened up a new venue in Montreal. And it also seems to be a bit of a haphazard trainwreck: https://cultmtl.com/2022/07/arbutus-records-founder-sebastian-cowan-opens-new-montreal-venue-le-systeme-interview/
He’s referred to as a trained audio engineer in that interview, and as the (former?) head of a label that makes sense to me, and certainly gives credence to the idea that Claire has always had a decent amount of help behind the scenes (validated by what Jaime Brooks has said since, etc) — she used to not deny it so vociferously…
This is so Ironic, considering Grimes made the statement in an interview years ago that her critics were mistaken when they claim that she isn't smart and doesn't know anything about Math,
that she did because she '' looked at graphs all day''!
it's funny because there's no such thing as ''graphs'' in music production. what i think she meant by graphs, is actually called ''spectrum''
Sorry, she might have said ''waves'' instead of ''graphs'' ( though I doubt it). If I can find the interview clip I will come back and post it here.
Edit:
Nope, she said Graphs!
https://www.businessinsider.com/who-is-grimes-claire-boucher-singer-producer-dating-elon-musk-met-gala-2018-5#aside-from-singing-grimes-also-produces-music-and-shes-been-vocal-about-how-the-music-industry-and-media-treat-female-artists-the-thing-that-i-hate-about-the-music-industry-is-all-of-a-sudden-its-like-grimes-is-a-female-musician-and-grimes-has-a-girly-voice-she-told-the-fader-its-like-yeah-but-im-a-producer-and-i-spend-all-day-looking-at-f-ing-graphs-and-eqs-and-doing-really-technical-work-9
Yes, because she probably did everything as a preset instrument (Juno synth etc) and just plugged in midi notes. Used a Boss vocal pedal for vocal harmonies she probably doesn’t understand and you have something like Visions. She did sample as well so I think unless someone else did it for her, she should understand some stuff about waveforms and bpms.
I think she has a ear for catchy hooks and that’s where she shines. This performance to me definitely reinforces the narrative that she knows nothing about actual production or the art of sound.
You can't use midi notes on a Juno since it's a synth and not a midi keyboard. You can only record the Juno (aka waveform)
You can send (i'm probably using the wrong word here) midi notes from your daw to your synth so it plays them for you and then record the sound back. Which is probably what she did for Visions and what the other commenter was referring to. No need to learn to ready waveforms for that. However she should have been able to read waveforms for Art Angels definitely.
I don't know if you can send midi notes to the Juno itself °specifically° but its not an intuitive thing to do and requires a bit of nerding out. Which sorry, its not something I'd expect to be able to do by someone who doesnt know how to fucking set the TEMPO of a track.
And yeah, once you've sent the midi notes to whatever device you want, you NEED to record back into waveforms. There's absolutely no way around that.
Saying that a producer doesnt have to deal with waveforms is like saying that an electrician doesn't have to deal with switches. Especially since she based her whole brand on "I did it all myself"
You can't send midi to all synths, only the ones with MIDI in/out, i don't know if the juno (her specific model of Juno) has that. However I find that counterintuitive, why sending midi notes when you can play those with the keyboard / use an arpeggiator? Takes the fun of the synth out of it. At that point I'd rather use a VST.
And i'll say that again, she should have been able to read waveforms for Geidi Primes, however you wanna put it, there is no way around that. It's like saying 'i've wrote this whole book in another language" and then finding out that your vocabulary is confined to "hello" , "thank you" and "what's your name". Sorry but its the fishiest thing i've heard and i'm not buying it.
Pretty sure juno has midi
The Juno-06 does not have midi while the newer boutique version does. This can easily be circumvented by using a midi to cv converter.
I refuse to believe she produced all her albums at this point. The disaster, it was the last performance, makes me believe her experience as an artist, she doesn't get the simplest things? I am inclined to believe you.
I'm going to rewrite here what I wrote under another comment.
It's like she claimed all these years to have written this 5 amazing books in another language all by herself.
Then you finally catch with her and you ask her to speak in that language for you
And then she fumbles and stumbles and barely can splurt out an "hello" "thank you" "what's your name" in that language, can't even spell the most basic stuff
I'm not fucking buying it, sorry.
Like you're that classmate that didn't make the project in the group and claim to be part of the group and the other classmates being nah-ah ya ain't part you did not do it all.
Also have you heard she and anyma have a duo project "the last artists"? At this point, I am thinking she's leeching onto any good producer.
Her album MA, the track Violence is just her vocal on top of i_o’s beat. I remember listening to his mixset and there was a song identical to Violence just with a different vocal. However, the term producer can mean a lot of different things when it comes to music, so now im not sure if Grimes actually produces her own music in a way that she claims to do. Her ex boyfriend claimed that they helped her making her music but couldn’t reveal more (NDA situation?) I mean I absolutely adore some of her works due to its creativity and difference, but now I have difficulty trusting her words
I've read the ex bf thing too... and same.
That's funny, there was a comment posted on this sub a while ago from a user who claimed to have lived in Montreal and part of the same indie music scene that Grimes was in at that time.
They user said that back then Grimes was deliberately pursuing and throwing herself at any male music producer she could find.
More and more, I'm starting to believe that it may actually be true.
Reminds me of the the guy who claimed to paint those paintings of kids with the big eyes and turned out it was his wife, remember watching a film about it.
Walter Keane, maybe this was Grimes’ side by side painters moment.
This is her Milly Vanilly moment. Or, it should be anyway.
Grimes ex wife Jaime…
the movie happens to be very aptly named - big eyes. it was a tim burton movie!
Idk I've watched her old videos so much, seen her old art and the things she's made, it really feels like she used to try hard. Maybe she was always a shyster, trying to get the easy upperhand, but I think making that level of work with so little knowledge has to be really hard. Lots of bootstrapping involved. Makes me wonder if she has fried her brain with drugs or has developed a mental health disorder
Kind of like how Grimes lived in Montreal for years but can't speak French, yet made her new ''Liberte'' song with a deliberate accent, in order to seem like she is adept at speaking the French language fluently.
On the stage she had 3 legs to stand on.
Preparation, ok i give it to her that failed coz she was working on extra track for the set.
Dj skills, all she had to do was unsync and just play the track to her headphones to get the right tempo then move a fader and play it live.
Mc skills, she had mic to work with, insted of working with crowd she give me secondhand anxiety and embarasment, all she had to do was hype the crowd bewteen playing 2 songs and it would still be ok set. It was that easy but she fumbled the mic so hard, prettymuch threw herself in front of train.
what preparation? it takes TWO SECONDS to analyse tracks on rekordbox.
As i've already explained the process is ultra simple.
Load tracks on rekordbox
Click "analyse"
Export tracks on your USB
done. There's no excuse for this.
Also once you've analysed the tracks on the USB, they're analysed forever. Just need to do it once.
And again, i've played without analysing tracks and it all worked fine. Because i know how to use a jog wheel which is the most basic thing on a deck.
She relied on the MaChIneS to do everything for her and she was dumbfounded when she realised that you can't really trust computers. She just wanted to press play and wave her hands in the air.
sorry it just makes me mad that she is getting paid 6 figures and given stages like Coachella just because of her connections, while there are TONS of super skilled and passionate DJs (yes, even amazing women...) who will never be offered 6 figures or big stages just because they don't have the right connections.
I get your anger :D I used to dj from vinyl back in 90ties, now i only tour with liveset, so i know how it works. What i mean with preparation is that i wouldnt go to gig without trying the whole set before. She said she had the track 8 hours, i would totaly spent one hour on practising the whole set. But i give it to her maybe there wasnt time. I could work around that and i bet you would too and easy, with finger in nose. I was trying to point out that her behind the mic was the real disaster. She could totaly just fade out and in while thanking crowd for atendance or give info about tracks. Instead she was using the mic to dig a bigger hole to fall into, while all the tracks played were good and i liked the selection and it had potential to be great.
I don't even prepare my tracklist recently, I go with the flow and by feeling the audience and the atmosphere of the night. I only select my intro and outro track and the rest I select as I go. I consider myself more of a producer than a DJ but i really enjoy that as a side gig.
That's what I also wanted to say, you don't even need to rehearse (even though for Coachella I would fucking probably do...) if you know how to use the gear. Liveset is a whole other bandwidth and I'd become a studio rat the whole month before playing live/touring.
And yeah, she really really didn't have to use the mic as such. She could have let one track finish and start the next one while overlapping the outro/intro of the two tracks and she wouldn't have been mixing and no one would give a fucking shit.
Same here i just try to remeber wich tracks work good together when mixing and wich dont, on small parties you never know what tracks Dj before you will play so playlist doesnt make sense. Tho i bet both of us would run thru our tracks multiple times if invited to gig of same magnitude as her.
I don't know anything about how DJing works, but I do diy recording, and I'm still confused. So DJing, the way we're talking about, involves having your songs loaded onto a set of decks, and then you just select and play songs, and the only high-stakes part of it is fading from one song to the other at the same tempo?
Is each song just a single audio file, or are the songs more like sets of stems so you can fade various elements of the song in and out? (E.g., like, can you mute the bass drum for a bar then bring it back, or play a guitar track from one song overtop of another song? Or are you just playing a single audio file and basically the only live performance element isusing eq and effects?)
I mean, even if she failed to beat-match, why didn't she just hit play on the next song? I still really don't get why she has to do so much starting and stopping.
She built an entire legacy based off of the talent of other people, and took all the credit. Only to humiliate herself publicly. She really is the perfect fit for Elon, no wonder they used to get along so well. SMFH
Yeah, I remember her life shows from back in the day where she barely knows how to use her gear in the gear is there for show completely… like pressing on SP404 with the backing track and then putting a few black keys on top is not hard. Also, a lot of her live sounding vocals were pre-recorded too. And she pretended to play guitar, etc.. she’s always been a hack. That’s why she used to need blood pop on the stage, and then Hana. It was always funny back in the day to watch her doing all this stuff on the stage and she’s really not doing much at all and all the gear didn’t even need to be there
I mean.., this PER se I wouldn’t mind…. At least she put on an enjoyable show. She could have done this forever, but yeah, now we get these lame “DJ sets”…,
Thank you for this breakdown, very interesting and explained very clearly for people like me with nonexpert knowledge - tysm! I did read something that suggested her CDJs weren't turned on (seen in this footage): https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5ub9yuvfwz/
what does that mean/what is the significance? - if they are or aren't?
OMG they aren't turned on..... 😭😭
no fucking way, you should have never showed me this.
It means she is playing a pre-recorded set somewhere and she is completely pretending to turn the knobs and completely pretending to DJ... while the gear is completely turned off. like 'lipsyncing' DJ. Like air guitar.
This is so fucking sad, what the fuck is this???
so the ... fuckups were ... staged????
or ... drug-related psychosis?
WTF. this is so weird. seriously wtf.
I really have no fucking clue at this point. I havent watched the performance so I dont know at what point of her set was this going on....
This is disturbing tbh, if you figure it out, can you please make another post? And thank you for posting this, very interesting stuff
Screenshot here, screenshot 2
Not a single button on the Nexus is lit and most obviously none of the LCD screens are turned on, I think only the mix panel is turned on but I'm sure they told her not to touch that otherwise it would ruin the pre-recorded set.
What a absolute dumpster fire
OMG its really really turned off. A moment of silence. I cant see anything for the life of me on the mixer either.
How did she manage to make such a fuck up with a pre-recorded set?! this makes it all even absolutely crazier and sadder to so many levels.
This is just.. super disturbing. I mean, she was completely unhinged on stage. The deranged screaming. Totally incoherent babbling, slurred speech, etc. It's so fucked up.
drugs are a hell of a drug
LOLLL
how can you tell were not turned on? Can you take a screenshot?? i saw some lights there but not sure since im not a dj anyway lol Im not surprised
no the lights were just the reflection of the stage lights. They are all completely turned off. The screens are off. There is no volume coming out of the fader. All the buttons are dark.
OMG now I see! damn I've always liked electronic music but now recently Ive been watching more DJs performances online and what embarrassment Grimes is. I think she having the whole gear turned off is the cherry on top. People would always joke about how she has all the songs pre-mixed and just hits play but I think this confirms it. Maybe at one point she turned her CDJs on? and that's when she started to fuck her all set up.
I managed to keep my ears throughout the full video of her performance. IT IS TURNED ON, trust me.
It is even cringy hearing her transitions later on because all she did was filter up and then fader down.
Here's my theory: Her deck 2 was stuck on fucked up tempo whatever it was maybe 200%. So all she did was to use deck 1 instead.
Load track > play the whole song > fade out w/ high-pass filter > cut it abruptly > talk to the mic then scream > repeat.
This mixing transition ran through all the way to the end. I guess she really doesn't know how to use the other decks 3 & 4.
So CDJs turned off = prerecorded set, turned on = live set? Is there any chance the IG link is wrong
The CDJs have to be turned on to be able to mix anything or even play music through them. If the CDJs aren’t turned on then you aren’t DJing. It’s like playing a game with your older brother but your controller isn’t connected
Damn. My bf said from the start he thought she faked the whole thing as a PR stunt but I thought no way would she ever take such a major hit to her ego
So she just made the whole thing up?
Most DJ’s/Producer use the gear that on the spot, 4X CDJ3000 because that’s the Industry standard. Only DJ I’ve seen bring his own controller is Kaytra, probably because he’s with Native Instruments, and he plays with samples from his songs and stuff, so a controller might be easier to get creative and funky with your set. I saw him rockin’ the CDJ’s a few times and he absolutely knows how.
As for the Grimes situation, there’s now way a performer should come on stage unprepared or not knowing the basics of Djing. You’re book months ahead. Thousands (if not millions) of people are going to see you perform, live on the spot or on the internet. As OP said, analyzing songs in Rekordbox takes a few minutes. You see the analyzed BPM in the software before you export the music on a device, if there’s a bad reading (let’s say 240BPM instead of 120) you can fix it right away in the software. There was a huge lack of preparation before the set and when you do a gig like fuckin’ Coachella, that shouldn’t happen.
Soooo I learned how to dj with actual records, where you legit beat match by ear. My art school legit had a class where we learned how to dj.
Like… I find it mind blowing that these famous “djs” can’t do the most basic part of their job. You shouldn’t need endless amounts of software to do the literal bare minimum.
Play track Cue up next track (Plan this ahead of time unless you actually know what you’re doing) Use headphones, Match the beats Move fader
And there you go. Rinse wash repeat.
I will never stop shit talking her “dj” career move. It’s insulting to talented djs, to female djs who are booked a lot less than guys despite being just as good, if not better, it’s insulting to those of us who love what a good dj is capable of doing, it’s insulting to all bed room djs,
And it’s hella insulting to her poor fans who are still dumb enough to pay money to see her.
I think she started off playing a pre recorded mix set then slowly mixing in her actual set, and she still kept the sync button on then the tracks jumped to double speed (mixing a 75 bpm and 150 bpm for example, if you press sync the 75bpm will get twice as fast, even tho 75 and 150 is the same in music production).
Even if the CDJs were turned off (or she accidentally unplugged something at some point which is possible seeing as she was straight up standing on that table multiple times) where was her tech team? Why did nobody stop the show even for a minute and get the plugged back in? It’s Coachella, surely there’s a whole team of people backstage making sure the tech is running fine… right??
Because them being off means they were working as intended for her set
exactly.....
Honestly there are quite a few DJS who have a pre-recorded set and pretend to turn knobs that arent turned on. If this happens to leak out they become the laughing stock of the scene, but still several people do that. I've seen that happen quite a few times live as well. It's not sabotage, it's intentional, unfortunately.
Sabotage?
I love to think about fed up "tech guys"(the ones who make her music) setting her up w this as some behind the scenes payback or whatever. "Good luck out there..." then actually runs away
OMG this is HILARIOUS. She’s not even DJing.
Thank you for explaining this to those of us who knows nothing about DJing. She spent more time being all about how she looked instead of how she sounded and how the DJ sounds is everything. Did you see Anyma 's show last night on the stream? I thought he nailed it.
Anyma is a massive producer and his other project Tale Of Us is legendary to say the least in the tech-house scene. I wouldnt expect any different from him, whether you like his music or not. I think that pairing with grimes does not look good at all for his credibility tbh
I wonder what he thinks of her excuses. I suspect he will be doing some work for her this week so she slays on stage next weekend.
is it just me or Grimes is slowly adapting whatever things her partner’s into? Im not sure about the timeline or when did they meet (along with the Elon mess) so i’m just speculating
He’s incapable of moving on. Incapable. Fixated, helpless and indebted buying her love forever. What a sorry sod he is.
Elon broke up with her. Helping an ex doesn't mean you are the lesser,
I don't think Anyma cares what people think about his credibility, he's already established his proficiency. He is in love with Claire and being a supportive partner, which is why he made the public Instagram post coming to her aid on the mishaps
Thank you for doing this. I had some similar insights but I have never played in front of people, I am a hobbyist lol, so I didn't feel like I should lay it out from that perspective- but I am glad you came through with a detailed explanation for everyone. I think rekordbox is pretty easy software/tool to use and understand, and I'm really not super musically inclined! It really does take like two seconds to fix bpm, and I was like girl why are you not using your jog wheel... I did hear her grab the top of it at one point during the set (where rekordbox makes the pitch up/down sound) but it made me laugh she didnt know to gently grab it in the finger indentations around the edge and pull or push from there. Djing well is a challenge, but if you've ever seen the equipment in your life and played with it at home... No matter how much you panic, it's intuitive, and like you said- always have a backup.
my friend just sent me this
As a former fellow DJ, thank you for this post. You verbalized everything I thought when I saw her Coachella performance.
the simplest answer is that she has just become lazy and her music is secondary to whatever grift she's on
But if she had the skills she would have not been screaming on stage over and over. I wonder what Anyma thinks of it all.
i would argue she does not have the skills as she was making some basic ass mistakes that even a beginner wouldn’t make or at least could correct it on the spot.
she has become the definition of style over substance
Is making me think she may have been grifting and using/ forcing ndas on others as rumoured from the start. Shame, cos there's no reason she couldn't have learnt these skills legitimately