It’s laundry day and rest day at the same time. I might as well get another mix session done. This time, I picked out a bunch of electro tracks, pulled the slider back to 121 beats per minute, and grooved along for about 78 minutes.
Digeum Mix Sessions – Volume 02, Session Golf — Laundry Day Electro. Mixed by Apollo Lee in Sunnyvale, California, USA, on Monday, April 13, 2009. Running time: 1:17:49
Go give it a listen and leave a comment with your thoughts.
Hey, CrossFitters:
Just a helpful piece of advice I wish I’d known before tonight’s workout. Make sure that, if you’re doing pullups at a local park or school playground, the gauge of the bar isn’t too narrow, whether you’re wearing gloves or not.
Pinching your calluses is easier on a narrower bar. Doing pullups on the magnificent facility at Cupertino Middle School — a facility which includes many pullup bars, parallel bars for dips, and monkey bars over a rubber floor — found me ripping all of the calluses off both hands. After I finished all my pullups, I discovered that those beautiful parallel bars are too narrow for me to go full extension and do dips on.
So, double check those bars. Make sure you don’t shred your palms. I definitely will from now on.
Another CrossFit rest day, another mix. Maybe I should do one of these every rest day (lately, I’ve been doing one every other rest day). Let’s dance.
I spent part of the day at work yesterday listening to tracks from my high resolution smart playlist in iTunes and grabbing a few tracks to throw in the mix.
This mix aimed at funky deepness and I stayed on a smiling, fist-pumping groove for almost 80 minutes. Most of these are punchy vocal tracks. This is the kind of mix that will be so nice tomorrow on my commute to work. I’m finding myself more and more able to get through a mix without so many mixing snafus as I committed in September. This was very fun to mix.
Digeum Mix Sessions – Volume 02, Session Foxtrot — Four Five Nine. Mixed by Apollo Lee in Sunnyvale, California, USA, on Sunday, April 05, 2009. Running time: 1:19:56
Go give it a listen and leave a comment with your thoughts.
Jay Def and I got together on my last day on my Spring Break Road Trip to hang out, eat some grub, and throw down our first tag team mix since December.
It’s always really fun to hang out with Jay and mixing beats with him is a real pleasure. Jay takes risks with his track selections that always surprise me, but somehow always work out. We wandered between deep house and electro and had a great time trading threes.
Thanks for the hang out, Jay. We’re gonna have to do this again very soon.
Digeum Mix Sessions – Volume 02, Session Echo — Spring Break Tag Team. Mixed by Apollo Lee and Jay Def in Payette, Idaho, USA, on Saturday, March 28, 2009. Running time: 1:16:20.
Go give it a listen and leave a comment with your thoughts.
During my recent road trip to the Northwest, I decided to throw down a mix in my hotel room in Seattle after a long day of driving across parts of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. I decided to slide the tempo down to 123 bpm and play a nice, laid-back deep house mix.
I really like the way it came out. Despite the TV playing next to my head while I was mixing this one in headphones, I managed to avoid slopping the mix too much. Thanks to the wifi in the hotel, I was able to upload this one immediately. This Seattle mix lets me add Washington to my tally of states in which I’ve mixed Digeum Mix Sessions.
Digeum Mix Sessions – Volume 02, Session Delta — Emerald City Deep. Mixed by Apollo Lee in Seattle, Washington, USA, on Tuesday, March 24, 2009. Running time: 1:17:24.
Go give it a listen and leave a comment with your thoughts.
I’ve just returned from a spring break road trip with my family. I spent a lot more money than I intended to and managed to get my first speeding ticket in more than a decade. Here are ten things we did which we enjoyed the most.
Sadly, on the drive home on Saturday, I got pulled over in Parma, Idaho, as I made my way through town, most likely for the offense of driving with California license plates. The official offense: 47 mph in a 35 zone. GPS unit shows 41 mph at the intersection on the ticket, but the fine is $75. I guess I can have one of those moving violations per decade.
I saw an amazing amount of gorgeous scenery in five states, ran into a high school classmate unexpectedly, and got a number of old manuscripts from my storage box. It was a great trip. I need to take more road trips. None of us take nearly enough and I take fewer than most.
I’ve been throwing a lot of electro house and tech house into the mix lately and, in this mix session, I thought it was going to turn out like the last one. I started out with a nice laid-back groove, but after the Dubtribe Sound System cut, I just felt the jazzy coming back.
After that, it segued into a fun set of jazzy deep house grooves. I don’t think I’ve played any of these tracks in a mix before and, this time, I was just focused on really nailing my transitions with as little slop as possible. Did I succeed? You tell me.
Digeum Mix Sessions – Volume 02, Session Charlie. Mixed by Apollo Lee in Sunnyvale, California, USA, on Monday, March 16, 2009. Running time: 1:08:50.
Go give it a listen and leave a comment with your thoughts.
The other day, I ordered a new piece of equipment, a pair of Elite Rings. They arrived today, two days after I ordered them. Each ring comes with a strap, about 20 feet long, with a slip-proof buckle.
After I unboxed the rings, I set them up in my doorway, hanging from a Door Gym pullup bar. Then, I attempted an L sit, although I’m still not solid enough in that exercise to execute it perfectly. I have been practicing that skill on parallel bars and between chairs. I had no idea how much more difficult it is on rings.
I also attempted a few dips on the rings, thinking that, since I can do 15 or 20 in a row on parallel bars, they’d be a little more difficult on rings. Wow. What a difference. I can do two dips on the rings. When you do weight bearing exercises like that, the rings move around infinitely and you have to call into bearing more of your stabilizer muscles.
I should have bought these a year ago. After trying a few dips and L sits, I set up my camera and got a couple of shots. The tricky part about self-photography while doing an exercise like this is setting the timer, racing back over to the rings, and getting into position before the camera goes off.
The fruits of my photographic labor:
Yeah, I smacked my elbows into the doorway a lot. I need to find a nice location with a much higher anchor point.
My friend, Robert, invited me to a concert tonight of the San Francisco Symphony featuring piano soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. After scrambling to find the Flint Center entrance at De Anza College, I arrived, just in the nick of time.
Robert had gotten us perfect seats, right in the middle, eye level with the orchestra. I haven’t seen a symphony in person in a number of years, so this was a very special treat.
Two of the selections, the Overture of Le Corsaire by Hector Berlioz—a spirited overture with a gentle adagio passage in the middle—and Liszt’s Piano Concert no 2—an astonishing concerto performed by the featured soloist—kept the audience enthralled for over an hour. The pianist, Thibaudet, was brilliant and the orchestra complemented him perfectly.
The final piece, after intermission, was a very ambitious operatic score, Orchestral Suite from Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Shostakovich, arranged for orchestra by the conductor James Conlon. It was a brilliant example of Russian twentieth-century composition, was magnificently scored for the orchestra, but ended with a largo called “Exile to Siberia.” To end the concert with such a slow piece is a little strange. Overall, it was a gorgeous piece of music, consisting of several movements, including a baudy come-hither passage by the trombones.
This was the first time I’d ever seen the San Francisco Symphony. The fact that they regularly perform at Flint Center, just three miles from my house, should tell you all how neglectful I’ve been lately at maintaining a broad diversity of musical experiences.
Thanks, Robert, for the concert. I had a great time.
Today’s a rest day, so I threw some tracks into @mix-bin, recorded a voiceover in Logic, and set the tempo to 125 beats per minute. Away we go.
I started out with some Jay Tripwire tracks that I just grabbed recently from eMusic and ran through a bunch of electro tracks. Some of them were bumping Detroit techno, some were big Chicago thumps, and a few were minimal tracks. Some of them were tricky to mix into, but this is a set that diverged significantly from my usual bag of beats. I think it came out pretty well, despite a couple of staggery transitions.
Digeum Mix Sessions – Volume 02, Session Bravo. Mixed by Apollo Lee in Sunnyvale, California, USA, on Sunday, March 08, 2009. Running time: 1:15:48.
Go give it a listen and leave a comment with your thoughts.
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