No. So what I do have is the general ability to leave whatever problems I have and compartmentalise. The fact that I'm in this room, being surrounded by all these people who are basically begging for a good time, I can rise to that occasion. There are times where I'm having a bad day. I have some chronic pains that I don't talk about with people. There are other issues that go on in my life that physically affect my abilities at times. I can often mitigate that and ameliorate it so that I can, at least, do what I have to do for the next two hours or three hours or four hours, whatever.Of course, I'm human, I'm not a robot, and a feeling human, an incredibly self-aware, sensitive and probably a little over-dramatic human, I have issues like that but whatever. I can furlough it long enough for me to get on with the business at hand.Forever. From Jump Street. From when I first started mixing. That's a thing that, especially in Chicago and maybe in New York a bit, you did. A lot of times we had, especially in the early days of proto-house and stuff like that, beat tracks and acid tracks and just somebody with a machine or two and a tape recorder. They made this beat and put a bassline over it and it was a dope beat or a dope bassline. But you can't just play dope beats and dope basslines for five or six hours. You have to have something that either grounds or elevates. Acapellas do that for me. I have a collection of them. Also they provide a little bit of almost like shock therapy to people. It's something they're familiar with but they would never expect to hear it here and not like this—"Damn, that bassline sounds good with that vocal. Who the fuck thought of that?" Me.It becomes a thing where it translates or it incorporates into your normal, daily life. Like riding in the car, listening to the radio, or in the shower, or carrying on at the store, what might come over the radio or come over the speakers... All of a sudden, Whitney Houston comes, "Love Will Save The Day." You're like, "Oh wow, yeah." Or like I have Maroon 5, "This Love." People look at me like I'm crazy when I play that.I think that in the right hands, in the right context, at the right time, with the right soundsystem and the right crowd, things like that are depth charges. They are really like booms. They can be super powerful. If you don't get it, then you don't get it, whatever. Then that's like two, three whole minutes of your life that you want back. Fine. I have a three-minute boo-boo period in your world. If you don't try it, if you don't risk it, if you're not exposed to it, if all you know is this thing where you just shuffle and shuffle and go and go until it's time to go home, then what the fuck fun is that? Where's the highs and lows of that? Where's the excitement or even the emotion in that?I don't know. I was like 11. I had no idea what the fuck was happening in Detroit or New York or any of these other places. I grew up in a vacuum, to some degree. My only input was based on the control that others had over these places, these watering holes, these places where you could go and find or procure or hear or experience this music. So my influences were distilled from their influences.I was listening to the radio or a tape that someone made from the radio or a song that you got at the record store. These were all still, literally, local influences. I didn't have the benefit of being old enough to travel or have other points of view espoused to me, because I was 11, I was 12. I would ride my bike to the record store. These are the records that they have at the record store, that the person who runs the record store thought that people, his clients or customers, would like or buy.As I got older, I could see certain links and could check style references or differences or things like that but in my nascent years, my formulating years, the years that made me and gave me the ideas of what to do or how to do it or when to do it, that's very much a Chicago geographical X. That's a pin drop right there.No, because there's a difference. In Chicago, they would play acapellas and things but it was very much a structured mix format. It was very much like 32 or 64 beats in and out. Mix in at the beginning, mix out at the break or mix in at the break. Go back to the beginning and see if you can mix out of the break again. Like, you play a record this way. When Mark Farina and I used to do these mixes for WNUR, which is like Northwestern University's college radio station, when we would do it, we'd just started doing long mixes. It was almost a competition to see who could make the longest mixes. In that, what we were really doing was blending and mixing and not just playing a song, then playing another song and playing another song. Having these two songs or sometimes three songs go together and become something synergistic. It's not just the sum of its parts but it's something way more. "Did you see the way that did that, when that did that, and then that did that?" That was an exciting thing.So we took that and developed it way more, more than what our contemporaries or even our predecessors had been doing. They wanted to mix clean. They were on the radio. We were smoking weed. So I don't know if that's a thing. We used to smoke weed in his big closet and then do these mixes. His mom would get mad at us and kick me out every once in a while.We were way more into experimenting with music. Thinking of music as not just this static, here's this record, you play this record as this record. It was more fluid.The music becomes the building block. The records become building blocks for what the music can be. That was, I believe, our legacy or our take on ways to improve the mixing of music.It really is. I'm going to tell you, people would dread the mix. Like, "Oh shit, I got to mix out." Like, wait, wait for it, wait for it—mix and then mix for 32 beats. Then, "Shoo, OK, I made it. I made it." We were like, "No, fool, just mix.""Just mix. Throw it now, throw it now." Be conscious about how you do it. You don't just want to mix a bunch of vocals over the top of each other or do things that are going to clash. Mix, whatever, use the EQ. So you just have the bassline of this and the beats of that. Then, I've got another acapella over here that I'm going to play. So now I've got this whole different thing that started off as three separate records. But now they are one thing.I even get people now who will send me messages on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, like, "What's that remix you played of so and so?" I'm like, "Oh baby, that wasn't a remix." That's not mea thing. That's mea thing. I don't even remember what the hell that was because I was in the moment, making stuff happen. You can't buy it. You can't download it. You can only remember it and hope that it felt good. So it's definitely a different take on the mix idea.I'm riding it. I have to ride it. Because I don't trust it to... I'm in control. Whatever, I'm a control freak, there's that. Also, for me to work this out, I have to literally work it out. I'm shoehorning or whatever. I'm making these things go together. That's dependent upon the tempo at any point. The tempo is my continuity.When I get to a club, they'll have [all the equipment] shoved together. I'm like, "Spread them apart." I need some space. I need to be able to breathe. I need to find enough room so I can rest my hands. Because I'm going to be riding this pitch for the next three hours. Literally, making mini calculations and adjusting, readjusting, re-readjusting continuously, for the entirety of my set.I need really good monitoring to do that. I'm riding and listening and like, "How does that feel? That's OK. It feels a little... OK. Now is when I bring this in." It's like intuition, but one that has been formed from the last 30-something years of me being in front of people, trying to get them to like me.I'm a 10. The 6 is a little too rigid. It doesn't allow for a lot of freeform. Then the "wide" is ridiculous. I'll go for the +16 every once in a while if I want to do something fricking crazy.I know it's no one's favourite mixer but the Pioneer 900NXS2 is my preferred mixer. It's a layout that I'm intimately familiar with and one that suits my needs. It's got just enough of an effects module to be able to do some things with that.