When Nature Is Your Hater
At the recent Vinyl Alley event (end of May 2026), the DJ who played before me noted “The wind is crazy today - be sure you’re anchoring your slipmats when you change records!”
It was very gusty. I did have to grab my slipmat once or twice. But then, mid-set, the needle suddenly dragged forwards about a minute or two into the track.
Wait, what?
I quickly picked the needle up and set it back a bit, not completely sure how far into the song it was (it was a track that I play most of the way through). I made one additional correction, thinking I had set it too far ahead. I was now worried that I had mixed my needle drop point on a tricky mix where timing is critical, but realized I still had 64 bars or so, thankfully.
There was one other moment, more subtle, on my last mix, where a gust fudged it just slightly forwards and threw the beat out of sync by about fraction of a beat. Oh well.
After the set, I asked two peers who were there, Proper Philth and J-Sun, “When I put this mix up online, should I correct those environmental issues, or let it ride as-is?” Is it unethical to edit a live set? I can accept that correcting technical errors and claiming the recording is live feels wrong, but what about environmental errors whose context wouldn’t be apparent in the recording, is it OK to modify those?
Both said to just let it ride, for authenticity reasons.
I haven’t listened to it yet, but I am wondering if that initial wind gust created too large a gap with the corrections – maybe it’s OK to leave the error but tighten up the gap (if memory serves, it was 15-20s before resuming). Alternately, I might put the live recording up, as-is, on the Past Events page, and then do a cleaned up edit to put on the demos page?