As you probably have noticed, I take a number of my old records, add still photographs of the record sleeve and label, call that a ‘video’ and upload them to Youtube.

Not surprisingly, sharing old, hard to find music with the world is viewed as a copyright violation by some business entities. About half of the videos I upload are flagged as ‘Matched third party content’. But it’s cool because they don’t do anything – they don’t block the videos or make me take them down. About the only repercussion is that additional ads might appear next to the video and the company that owns the songs gets the money. I am technically violating copyright and Youtube and the publishers (so far) are cool with it so I can’t and won’t complain. This happens 1000s of times a day on Youtube.

But something bizarre happened with my last upload. I uploaded the 3 tracks from the single Can You Feel It by Fingers Inc. Track 1 is the music with a vocal track by Robert Owens. Track 2 is an instrumental version. And Track 3 is an instrumental version mixed with Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech.
Tracks 1 and 2 ‘matched third party content’ immediately – again, no hassle towards me so no complaints.
But today track 3 is listed as blocked in Germany due to Sony Music Entertainment.

Soooo, the instrumental is fine – but once you add MLK to it, it’s blocked? Sometimes, trying to understand how copyright law works just makes my head hurt.

While typing this post, I looked on Wikipedia (where everything is factual and true!) and saw that the I Have A Dream speech is not in the public domain but is owned and protected by the estate of Martin Luther King Jr. That still doesn’t explain why Sony blocked this video or why it’s only blocked in Germany (so far). I guess this means that…..it’s making my head hurt some more.

So recently, both Slashdot and NPR had stories about ‘religious’ search engines.  Now, my focus is music – politics and religion are not subjects I want to dive into on here.  For the curious – I was raised Catholic – but just barely.  My family never went to church but my mom did make me go to Sunday school for a year or two.   My mom said they were glad to see me go since I asked a lot of annoying (in other words – logical) questions.  “Two animals of every kind on this boat?  What did they eat?  Enough water to flood the world?  Where did the water go?”  All I remember is that it was every other week so I’d always miss the 2nd part of Electra Woman and Dyna Girl. Currently, let’s just say my religious views are pretty much the same as Bill Maher’s.

But hey, this is from a marketing perspective.  I want my mixes to be listened to no matter who you worship – allah, xenu, peaceful black jesus, hateful Pat Robertson jesus, etc.   So let’s see how I do on these search engines.

Jewogle – the Jewish search engine.  Zero hits for Leroy Skibone or even just Skibone.  Bah – you killed Christ – no house music for you.  (My blashphemy is so severe that the site stopped working while I typed this post.)

SeekFind – the Christian search engine.  Zero hits for Leroy Skibone.  Bah.  But there were 3 hits for ‘priests molesting boys’.  (Yeah, might as well make everyone mad at me.)

ImHalal – the Muslim search engine.  Asalaam alaikum! (Translation – Booyah!)  ‘Leroy Skibone’ has results for my blog and torrents of mine on multiple sites!  I guess that’s good karma returned to me for fully supporting their mosque / community center / whatever it is down the street from the World Trade Center site – although strangely enough, no one of importance has asked for my opinion.

I guess there’s no Scientology search engine yet – but they spend their time suing Google, not trying to imitate them.

So way back when I first started mixing, I didn’t have much money. Actually, I remember that when I bought my first turntable, the guy tried to sell me a SL1200, but that was almost twice my budget, so I ended up with some other crazy turntable. When I went looking for a mixing box, I ended up with some Radio Shack special that probably cost 70 bucks. And you know what – that thing was great. I don’t even think it had any EQ, but for a basic mixer, it did the job and worked fine for at least 5 years. The cross-fader eventually got scratchy and if I had taken it apart and given it a good cleaning, I’d probably still own it today.

Once I got rid of that, I got a Numark DM1002X. I remember at the time thinking that the transform buttons would be really cool – even though I was never much of a scratcher / turntablist and the transform buttons
seemed to work the opposite of how I thought they should. Anyway, I don’t know if this mixer ever worked well – I barely used it after I bought it and it sat around for a few years. When I tried to use it recently, the
levels and EQ seemed to change minute by minute and any mixes I made with it sounded like trash.

So I went shopping few a new mixer. Every year, the price range in mixers seems to increase. You can buy one for 50 bucks or 1000 bucks, so where is a good mid-range?

I ended up with Denon DN-X120. I picked one up for $250 at Guitar Center. I had basically unpacked it just a few minutes before my first live show on Infinity Tunes so although most things on a mixer are self-explanatory, I still had to play around a bit. I can’t quite explain what I didn’t like about the cue function on my old Numark – but I could never seem to get the right levels in my headphones with it. The cueing sounds great on the Denon, allowing you to mix the two channel levels in your headphones, or split the two channels to hard left and right.

The ‘fader start’ and ‘crossfader start’ switches are only used with Denon’s CD players – which seems like a very specific thing to put on a general purpose mixer but hey, crosspromotion is king, right?

The most interesting thing is the contour knob for the cross fader. Put it to fast, and there is no fade between the channels at all. Just the slightest notch from hard right will give you full volume on left and right channels and vice versa. A fantastic help for scratching for people like me who need all the help they can get.

I supposed a review should have a final score. I guess I’ll use the 10 point scale. After using it for a week and about 5 hours of mixing, I’d give it a 9. Why not a 10? Hmm – dunno. The mic input level seems a bit low but that could be my super-cheap microphone. I like to save 10’s for absolute perfection, but so far I highly recommend this mixer.