It's hard to believe we're already 1/4 of the way through 2010. Here is the latest GOA Trance mix for March. I have April's almost done as well. This micro-genre is not my usual style but I really enjoy listening to this music while driving. I have the house mix for April Week 1 ready to go. I will upload that tomorrow on April Fool's Day. I hope you're enjoying the mixes so far and please pass along the links to friends.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Phossl Fuel Mix - March 2010 - Week 4
Right on the heels of Week 3's mix for March I thought I would get a jump on Week 4. I've been spending quite a bit of time preparing for April's mixes and I'm pretty excited about some of the tracks I will be highlighting. I'm also busy preparing to mix my second GOA Trance set for April which should be out on April 1st. As always, please feel free to comment and pass along to your friends.


Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Phossl Fuel Mix - March 2010 - Week 3
Hope you enjoy the latest house mix. Fire up your ride home with some Phossl Fuel.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Taking a Bite out of the Big Apple

New York City. The Big Apple. It is truly the city that never sleeps. There are amazing things to see and do around every corner. The streets are alive from the crack of dawn until the wee hours of the night. If you're not taking in the sights, attractions, shows or events you can simply stand in one spot and watch a never ending stream of interesting people walk by. To put it in perspective, over 3,500,000 people take a ride up the Empire State Building every year. That's more people than even live in Manhattan. I have to say my favorite part on this trip so far, next to just getting to spend time here with my fantastic girlfriend who is a great travel companion, is the incredible food the city offers. Every meal has been amazing and every day here has left us stuffed and quite content.
I hope you enjoy my latest mix aptly titled:
Phossil Fuel Mix - Mar 2010 - NYC Motion Mix
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
A Sneak peak at my new EP
Here is the first track from my upcoming release Minimal Transgressions. The album tracks build from 122 bpm through to over 130 bpm and are much simpler than my older tracks which were all too busy in my opinion. Either way, it's all a learning process and I'm having a blast on this project. The first track is titled simply 'Minimal March 1' and I hope you enjoy it and look forward to any comments you may have.
My New Denon Rig

It took me a long time to make the jump from being a digital dj to my hybrid setup above. Originally, my rig consisted of the Hercules DJ Console RMX unit and a laptop with all my songs stored on my laptop or an external hard drive. Here's a better picture of the Hercules controller I'm referring to.
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The RMX has built-in sound cards and midi controls for controlling your dj software of choice. It lends itself best to Atomix Virtual DJ pro and the software comes pre-mapped to recognize and use the RMX right out of the box. I settled on Virtual DJ as my software of choice although you can manually configure and map the controls to other DVS (digital vinyl systems) like Traktor Pro.
Now that I have made the jump from digital only to the hybrid setup I have the best of both worlds. I can also easily run 4 decks as well. My setup is configured with the two Denon DN-S3700`s as decks 1 and 4 in the mixer and Virtual DJ`s two decks are routed to mixer channels 2 and 3. I can use either the 3700`s or the RMX to control Virtual DJ in this setup. However, in order to get rock solid performance on the road I had to upgrade the sound card solution and hand`s down the winner for this was the Native Instruments Audio 8 DJ external USB sound card shown below

Here`s a closer look at the media players and mixer in my current setup. Everything from Denon.


So why did I make the jump from such a portable system to the coffin style rig? A few reasons. The primary reason was reliability. Despite the RMX being a solid and professional midi controller with good sound and performance it has one serious drawback. If it isn't connected to a PC it doesn't function. It's not a standalone system. The laptop becomes the weak link in the chain and if for any reason you have a problem with the laptop during a performance you are going to lose sound. I've actually had to reboot during performances and those few minutes required to get XP fully booted will seem like an eternity with a crowd staring at you and thinking "wtf?" By incorporating CD/Media Players in the rig I can use rock solid stand alone players in conjunction with the software and if there is any glitch with the PC I can reboot in the background while playing my set from CD's or USB sticks connected to the Denon 3700's.
The other reason for upgrading the system was based on the philosophy from so many dj`s out there that if you can`t beatmatch than you aren`t a real dj. When using software only the task of beatmatching is normally left to the software to handle. You can set it for manual adjustments but frankly it is tedious and given the software does such a good job it makes sense to simply let it do its thing. The problem is you don`t develop the beatmatching skills you need if you come face to face with a cd player only setup at a venue that won`t support you running a digital system. There is debate out there given the prevalance of digital dj`s about the veracity of the whole "if you can't manually beatchmatch" argument and I will delve into this in detail later. However, suffice to say when you consider the bigger problem of laptop failures during live sets it only makes sense to master the skills required for using a standard setup of 2 cd players and a mixer.
I will also give you a closer look at each of the component parts of the system in future posts. In the meantime, here`s an older mix from February I had originally encoded in WAV format only converted to mp3. I`ll warn you there`s a couple of flubbed mixes in this one but barring that I hope you enjoy it. Please share any comments you have.
Phossl Fuel - Feb 2010 - Week 2

Sunday, March 14, 2010
Phossl Fuel - Feb 2010 - GOA Trance Mix
Phossl Fuel - Feb 2010 - High Life Tribute Rock Mix
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If you haven't seen the Canadian indie flick "High Life" you're really missing out on something. It takes place in 1983 and the mostly rock soundtrack was incredible. Hearing songs from April Wine and Max Webster had me in a time warp. Here's a link to the movie on IMDb. I added some songs to the OST for my Phossl Fuel Mix. I hope you like it and please share your comments.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1143110/
Phossl Fuel Mix - Feb 2010 - Week 3
A new name. A new blog.

So over the last few years I've taken some pretty intense albeit light hearted ribbing over my original dj name, DJ Smooth. I'd realized for quite a while that I was going to have to come up with something new. The thing I realized was that most dj names out there come out sounding ridiculous. I tried every derivative of my first, middle, and last names as well. I had almost settled on dj Glenn Paul not that Paul is in my name. It is just close to how my last name Poulos is spelled and the whole thing rolls off the tongue fairly well. All my life people seem to call Paul as well. Not a few times but thousands of times. So many in fact that I would find myself answering to the name and rarely even bothered correcting people during a casual encounter. I deduced it must have been something to do with my last name and / or I look like a Paul. None of it really matters though because ultimately I rejected the name dj Glenn Paul in favour of something else.
One of the criteria I had when selecting a name was that it would play off the fact that I am, how do they say "no spring chicken". Indeed, many claim "you're old." Well, not to disappoint I finally settled on my new moniker and logo which fits this criteria perfectly. In true fashion of the moment I also wanted to misspell it as well and thus Phossl was born. Not djPhossl just Phossl. I`ve settled on the name Phossl Music for my website under development and the music label I will release under is ``The Phossl Record``. Finally, my weekly music mixes will be titled Phossl Fuel mix.
I hope you like my self developed first generation logo and please subscribe via RSS or your favorite method to my weekly mixes and share your comments.
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