When to use beatmixxers? That you might be asking. But before the class starts today, well, it’s going to start now.

What are beatmixxers?

Beatmixxers are not really new in the imaging world as they have been used ever since radio imaging directors learned how to create a montage of their station’s playlist. Major radio imaging and jingle production houses are fond of calling it beatmix. But this should not be confused with a relatively similar imaging product that is a property of one of the biggest contemporary jingle producers in the U.S. – Reelworld (www.reelworld.com). Theirs is a different beatmix since it refers to their song intro service.

Beatmixxer is a collage of song bites that is beat matched to a common BPM. Most program directors and imaging guys have found this approach significantly practical in imaging their stations. As they say, “what better way to image your station than using your playlist.”

Beatmixxers have evolved as new techniques in audio design were achieved. The availability of end user audio editing softwares like Adobe Audition ( www.adobe.com ) and Sound Forge have enabled the ordinary radio person to create his own brilliant imaging ideas.

Modern Beatmixxers

Today beatmixxers are not just a pure Frankenstein-stitched imaging approach; imaging directors are now able to seamlessly blend a variety of song bites that can range from pop to rock, hiphop to ballad into a single imaging element. Beatmixxers are driven by pulse beats or drum loops, where each song bite is keyed and tempo-adjusted to match-beat the back ground drums.

Beatmixxers are different from music imagers since music imagers are only composed of 3 song bites. In a music imager, song bites are separated by beat separator FX, so they don’t really follow a common BPM unlike beatmixxers. Reelworld has a good example of music imagers in their Z100 2003 jingle demo, which they aptly call “beat separators”.

Beatmixxers are great for top of hours, show openers, program primer or teasers, half-hour breaks, or just an ordinary station ID. Beatmixxers can usually run from 15 seconds to 30 seconds.

Download beatmixxers

There are a lot of companies now that offer beatmixxing services today. Mint Audio in the U.K. produce great beatmixxing capabilities. You can search the internet for beatmixxing production houses. Radio Jingles blog will follow up this article with some helpful tips on how to create your own beatmixxers.

Listen to a sample of a beatmixxers here. Contact the Radio Jingles Team by visiting our Contact Us page at www.radiojingles.co.nr .