Hello and welcome to my sixth and final In-Depth blog post. In this blog post I am going to be going over my learning from the last four weeks, chapters nine and ten from How to Have a Beautiful mind a finally outlining what my In-Depth learning center will look like.

The last four weeks have been spent applying my new skills by making the result of my project, a full DJ set. I came up with a track-list, fleshed out some rough ideas of transitions for the first half, and then recorded it. In my next meeting with my mentor, we discussed how I could improve those transitions from my first recording. For the next week, I was then tasked with fleshing out all the transitions from the first half and recording a rough idea of what the second half of the set would look like. In my most recent meeting which occurred this week, my mentor gave me feedback on the second half of the set so that by the next meeting I could have the entirety of the set completed. Overall, these weeks have seen a faster progression than ever before in regard to my projects because I already had acquired all of the skills that are necessary to complete my project, and these weeks were spent assembling these skills in a practical way.

Starting with Chapter nine of How to Have a Beautiful Mind, De Bono discusses the idea of concepts, saying that they are “the parents of practical ideas”. In the following paragraph, I will discuss instances from my most recent meeting where concepts were discussed. One of the first instances of concepts from Wednesday was when we were discussing one of my transitions from my DJ set. In this section, my mentor was commenting that I didn’t need to drag out the transition for as long as I did and instead cut it into the first song to ensure that it didn’t sound messy. This discussion I think had two concepts, the first was that of transitioning between two songs in DJing and the broader concept was neatness in my mixing and sound. The second example of concepts I would like to mention was also when discussing a transition in my mix. In this instance, my mentor said that I should have cut the transition earlier because it sounded like one of my snares was offbeat. In this case, the concept was beatmatching and timing because although the snare was beat-matched properly it sounded as if it was out of time, and a sooner transition would have remedied this problem. The final instance of concepts I would like to discuss in this paragraph was when I asked my mentor if he thought it mattered that I was mixing in breakbeat songs into my largely DNB mix. In this case, I was wondering if the concept I should be aiming for was consistency or diversity in my sound. After asking however my mentor said that my mix was better diverse and varied than entirely consistent.

Moving onto chapter ten of How to Have a Beautiful Mind. In this chapter the idea was alternatives. In this paragraph, I will be discussing the alternatives that my mentor brought up with me when he was giving me feedback on my mixes. The very first alternative my mentor mentioned to me was during the first instance of him giving feedback to me on one of my mixes. In this instance, I had used an equalizer to take out the bass of the leading track to make room for the kick of my second track. My mentor offered the alternative of doing the complete opposite, of killing the bass of the track I was bringing in to make the transition less jarring. The second instance of an alternative that I can remember my mentor offering me was when he was giving me feedback on the first half of my mix. In this case, he recommended that I mix in track two first rather than track one because he felt that was a stronger opening. The final example of an alternative that my mentor offered me was in our most recent meeting. This time, my mentor offered up what was in his opinion a better alternative to how I had mixed in two songs. In this instance, the alternative was to do a more concise and earlier transition as opposed to what I had done which was unnecessarily drawn out.

Finally, let’s discuss my plans for the In-Depth Learning Center. I plan to make a PowerPoint that viewers can navigate, being my interactive component. The PowerPoint will be divided into the skills I learned during my time over the course of the project, with video examples, and a section where they can hear the full progression of all of my mixing. I hope that the audience gets an idea of the skills that make up a good DJ, and how I went about learning them.