The PaulWay Transcriptions Fast Trance Mix

Many years ago I used to tape a couple of radio stations that played dance, techno and other stuff. One was 4ZZZ, a Brisbane alternative free radio station, whose program Crucial Cuts introduced me to many new mixes and great tracks. I fondly remember hearing "Insomnia" by Faithless three years before it 'hit the charts' commercially here. And the other was Triple J, the youth radio arm of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australia's advertising-free broadcaster. Triple J still broadcasts its Mix-Up program every saturday night, featuring local and international DJs and artists mixing it up for three hours.

As soon as I had a computer worthy of the task I started transcribing those tapes into the digital domain. I removed noise, tweaked a few EQ settings and generally tried to get back as much as possible from the tapes. And, of course, I started compressing those songs into MP3 files. For one day I would have some device that would allow me to play all those songs whenever I wanted. Furthermore, a computer worthy of the task of transcribing those tapes could also mix together my favourite tracks and sections of mixes into one (hopefully) seamless mix of pure listening enjoyment. So I took the MP3 files back to wave files and mixed them together - although some of the tracks were already mixed by the DJs playing them and were left in their original order.

So, as the astute would have realised, this mix is not an example of sterling fidelity at all. These tracks have been through as much audio mangling as they can take and still sound like the original piece. Likewise, in more than a few cases I have no idea what the name or artist is for a track - that's the problem with not having access to the playlists. So those people that can recognise the tracks marked "Unknown" and tell me what they are will be doing me a great favour. People who criticise me for the quality of the audio can climb the Eiffel Tower using their teeth alone.

But, after all that, the music is still the thing we want to hear, and that music is what I present to you. This is the "Fast Trance" mix: it spans the faster BPM range of the tracks I picked and it's a mixture of what I call trance and techno. This mix starts at around 140BPM and makes its way up to 172BPM, it's encoded with Lame's high quality VBR encoding (at -q 4) and the whole file is around 64MB.

Punch In is when the track physically starts playing. Punch Out is when the track is no longer playing at all. This is the start and finish, respectively, of the fade in and out, so these times are not when the track can first be 'heard'. The Punch Out of track 1 is where track 2 is the only track playing. Just thought I'd explain that.

Tracks 1-5 originally from Triple J's Mix Up by Adrian Van Ray (Tracks 4 and 5 originally not consecutive)
Tracks 6-7 originally from Triple J's Mix Up by Ken Jensen
Tracks 9-13 originally from 4ZZZ's Crucial Cuts by Peter Mogg (Brisbane's Pete Tong)
Tracks 14-15 originally from 4ZZZ's Crucial Cuts by Peter Mogg (Brisbane's Pete Tong)

Use this link to download this mix using BitTorrent.

These mixes are only available as complete files and I do not trade in the albums that these tracks are compiled from. On the other hand, I welcome feedback of any description about the mix, especially if you have recommendations of tracks I might like. My email address is at the bottom of the page.

I welcome any suggestions, criticisms and recommendations for new music to listen to. I will consider doing specific mixes for people, but this is only a hobby. Hope to hear from you!