Throwback Sessions Mix 1

The earliest ideas for the Throwback Sessions came to me sometime in mid-2014. My friends and I were seniors in high school, just a couple weeks away from writing our last-ever grade twelve exams, when a friend asked me to send her the playlist I had on in the car:

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This is part one of a six part series on the Throwback Sessions. You can read the introduction to this blog series here.

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With all of us having gone to middle school together, music from the 2000s triggered similar memories: memories from the era of LimeWire, MSN, imeem, and early YouTube.

If you couldn’t convince your parents to buy you music on iTunes, LimeWire was your best bet—as long as you knew the difference between an .mp3 and an .exe. If YouTube was blacklisted by your middle school’s computer lab, imeem was still under their radar so you could stream music there while you did your homework. You put Let me love you...'8 or So sick of love songs...'8 in your MSN bio hoping your crush would notice. If they didn’t, you could just appear offline then online again. The '8, of course, was shorthand for a music note, and made sure everyone knew about your very deep and sophisticated taste in music.

About a year and a half after that car ride with my friends, I would bring those early ideas to SoundCloud and upload the first mix of the Throwback Sessions on January 2016, just two months after buying my first DJ controller:

Between then and the selling of all my gear in the summer of 2017, I would release three more mixes in the series.

The concept of a throwback mix was far from new. Hip-hop, rap, and R&B throwback mixes for the eighties and nineties were all over SoundCloud when I put out Mix 1. Any mix that did go back to the 2000s, in my opinion, was way too long (almost two hours) or had a tracklist that didn’t flow well. With the Throwback Sessions, I wanted to make mixes that I would listen to first. That meant short runtimes—fifteen to twenty five minutes max—clean transitions with minimal key-clashing, acapellas, instrumentals, and only the most recognizable parts of every song. From the start, it was a conscious decision to cut a lot of the songs short—usually after the first verse or hook.

Throwback Sessions Mix 1 accomplished some of these things, but even back then I knew my mixes had more room to be creative—like in Mix 6, where I combined layers from six different songs in the first minute and a half alone. But Mix 1 still has its place and today holds its own as the second most popular mix in the series.

By the time I released Mix 1, I had already played at a few house parties so many of the transitions I used in the mix were similar to ones I used there. BPM-matched echo-outs, hard cuts, scratches, and manual loops using cue points were all common tools. But it was the longer, mashup-style transitions—like the one between Bust It Baby, Part 2 and Buy U A Drank—that I knew I wanted to do more of. Long transitions in electronic or house mixes were common, and I wanted to bring that same energy when mixing hip-hop, rap, and R&B—even if the songs’ structures didn’t always lend themselves to it.

I promoted Mix 1 the most out of any mix in the series. I made custom cover art. I posted Tweets and Instagram stories. I plugged it on the Serato forums and DJ-related subreddits. It took a while for the plays to trickle in, but once they crossed the twelve to fifteen thousand mark was when it began to snowball and I started seeing up to a thousand plays a day.

So, to capitalize on the very small buzz Mix 1 was getting, I started gathering all the Trey Songz, Chris Brown, Usher, and T-Pain I had on my hard drive to start putting together Throwback Sessions Mix 2: Slow Jams.