James Hype will try to play 1,000 tracks in two hours

James Hype is going to try to play 1,000 tracks in two hours. He calls it Project 1000, and the attempt is set for December 4 on 16 CDJs and four mixers. In a regular two-hour set, he says, he plays 50 to 60 songs.

That works out to a new track every 7.2 seconds. "I've done some crazy things in my career but this is the first time I've ever tried something that I genuinely think is impossible," he says in the video explaining the plan.

A track doesn't have to be a whole song. Hype says the drums, the vocal or the bassline from a song counts, as long as it plays for a few seconds and you can recognize it. He calls the set "a bit of a love letter to all the dance music tracks that I've loved through history."

He'll play inside a ring of decks he calls "the cylinder." He tried a rectangle first, but getting from corner to corner was too difficult. Right now, he says, the cylinder is his "number one nemesis."

The rig first appeared in September, and deadmau5 wrote, "All my fav DJs play 16 tracks at once. Sounds awesome." Hype answered with a video saying the point isn't to play 16 tracks at once. In October he posted his first attempt on eight decks and skipped ADE for the first time. He started rehearsing in early November and called it "the hardest thing I've ever tried."

On October 3, a month before the announcement, Hype wrote that after moving to London he slept in his studio and made 1,000 tracks there. One of them became "Ferrari," his 2022 hit with Miggy Dela Rosa.

"If I make too many mistakes, there's no way I'm going to get through a thousand tracks," he says. He hasn't announced a venue or a way to watch yet, though the video's end card carries a Red Bull logo.