Black Coffee And Shimza Type Of Effects

Happy New Year everyone! I have a really nice little video for you today, just a great feeling of friends laughing and playing and building on the feeling of friends laughing and playing. I love and treasure this energy. I treasure it! The video is 4 and a half minutes long, it's called "Black Coffee and Shimza Type of Effects":

As I understand it, there's a beat playing off the computer and into the mixer, it's a loop that's static, it doesn't change. Variations in the beat are produced by fading the sound up and down quickly in combination with the mixer's onboard echo effect. The only things being adjusted here are the overall track level, the echo length, and the echo on/off. And a little filtering. It's a very limited setup, which is why the feeling is so fun here. No one's tasked with writing a sonnet, we're just looking for variants in the realm of New Trick. It's an electric feeling! Your friends are gassing you up, and no one's dunking on anyone, they're just dunking. Everyone in the cipher smiling so hard their faces hurt. At some point everyone tries one hand only.

Echo effect wasn't designed to be used like this, it's just something you put on a track to make it seem like you're in a cavern, either subtley or to an extreme degree. I need a fact check on this but it might be the first "effect", the first electronic method of altering a sound. I heard an old interview with Brian Eno where he talks about hearing Elvis singing "Heartbreak Hotel" on the radio as a kid and the echo effect was so artificial and incredible that it changed the course of his life. It's wonderful to see it being still developed! Still used creatively, actively, artificially. Even the oldest tool can be used in a novel way, towards merriment and joy. I truly hope in the new year, in addition to other great hopes and sincere wishes, that we can all touch something like this feeling.

Oh, and these guys didn't invent this, I don't know who did, but it's been popularized by two DJs in the South African house scene, Black Coffee and Shimza. They're super famous in that world but I didn't know about them, I think I found this video by seaching "effects of coffee" or something completely regular. Searching "Shimza effect" got me to this other video where Shimza displays another cool DJ trick, using the CDJ, he's just walking you through it but it's pretty sick [youtube]. There's plenty of full sets online, if you want to hear these tricks and more used sparingly in front of an audience of partygoers.

I'm sure there's others in the field but only other person I know who really plays a CDJ creatively is Meerk Puffy / Synb / Mat Brinkman. Talk about a DJ with a lot of tricks up his sleeve! I can't find a link to the CDJ stuff explictly, I forget if that mode had it's own avatar or what (comments are open). But I did find the Mucid Cuspidor channel :) [youtube] and there's plenty more available to the searcher. Everything you can adjust is a viable play surface, that's the through-line here. Also before I get a hundred thousand comments about it, I know there’s a TON of great mixer misuse / no input / onkyokei videos! I’m saving that for another email!

Peace everyone :)

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