WARNING: This video contains language we don’t tolerate in writing on the blog. Don’t watch at work or if you’re easily offended.
Despite the language, I’ve chosen to repost this video, which is blowing up on Facebook, because it does contain – in a nutshell – exactly this blog’s opinion on the whole vinyl vs digital debate.
You'll be able to work happily in DJ booths alongside CDJs and record decks if you follow this commandment...
So we reach the halfway stage in our definitive 10 Commandments of Digital DJing, with a commandment that will help digital DJs to earn the respect of vinyl DJs, CD DJs and venue owners.
Today’s commandment should help to ensure that when you’re DJing in pro DJ booths, you can play your part and join in fully, and feel more confident that you can handle any situation that might get thrown at you.
The independent record store: Becoming a footnote in recorded music's history. Pic: dogwelder
Tomorrow is Record Store Day, celebrating the few remaining small, independent record stores in countries all around the world. There are special limited-edition releases available from dozens of artists (if you get there early enough), and free performances in some locations too.
While it’s all well and good, and certainly a fun slice of nostalgia for those of us old enough to remember record shops at their prime, I do wonder what the purpose of it is. The cynic in me says it’s simply to prolong a fatally outdated distribution system for the benefit of those who still have a stake in it.
Get a fruit bowl made out of recycled old vinyl and keep the vinyl alive!
Every week, more and more DJs finally “ditch the decks” and go digital. That’s an awful lot of old vinyl hanging around out there. While high-profile DJs continue to auction off their records on eBay (the latest was Digital DJ Tips friend and long-time UK DJ/producer Mike Monday), still more find that once they’ve sold the best of their stuff, they’ve got a load of unwanted, unloved old vinyl left that nobody seems interested in.
If you’ve got cardboard boxes piled up with old promos, unloved white labels, and other vinyl that’s surplus to your requirements, then this series is for you. For a bit of monthly Sunday fun, we look for ways resourceful individuals are recycling vinyl to keep it in our lives, if not on our record decks. This month we bring you the vinyl bowl!
From black disk to hard disk... how to rip your old vinyl successfully to MP3
If you’re returning to DJing as a digital DJ but still have a vinyl collection, or are considering making the switch but are scared about what on earth you’re going to do about your “vinyl mountain”, then ripping your old records to MP3 is probably high on your priority list.
Luckily, with some planning and a bit of understanding, such MP3s can sound fantastic.
Not quite ready to ditch the decks?
Many of our readers are too young to have ever bought a record – fact. Many more have DJed in the past with vinyl and decks, but for whatever reason stopped, and got rid of all their stuff, only to get back into DJing thanks to the value and fun offered by modern kit.
Both of these groups tend to dive right in there as digital DJs, and once they’ve messed with DJ software on their laptops with the keyboard and trackpad for a while and got hooked, they proceed to buy a decent DJ controller. Job done.
No need to throw away all your vinyl: Send some of it into space instead...
So you’ve taken up digital DJing. You have a hard drive full of great MP3s. You’re cutting, scratching, looping, searching and mixing your digital collection like a pro. Only one issue remains: What are you going to do with all that old vinyl?
Number six in our ongoing series of suggestions is this: Instead of selling your old records, why not keep a few of them and dig them out to impress people at dinner parties in years to come by playing them on the incredible floating turntable?
OMG, we’re REALLY excited about this month’s Creative Uses for Old CDs. Not only do we get to make a hovercraft, which means we find another use for one of those crappy old CDs we don’t DJ with any more since going digital, but we also get a BRILLIANT video explaining how to do it!
Wait, wait, it gets better. It works with old vinyl too, and to introduce this fantastic twist, Rachel, the presenter of the video says: “Here’s one I prepared earlier… 20 years earlier, in fact!” LOVE IT!
Are your records leading you astray? Repent while you can!
As a digital DJ, your tunes are the tools of your trade. They’re not a collection! “Collection” implies a quest for completion. It implies looking at rather than using. It implies that the act of collecting is the whole point – like collecting stamps or fridge magnets.
As a DJ I used to be pretty brutal with my records – they were already “tools of the trade”for me. I’d put them in white sleeves if the originals were flimsy, and throw the originals way; lend and borrow them; buy them again when they wore out. But I knew people who were plastic-sleeves-and-all-in-alphabetical-order types too – lots of people like that.
Is it a record, is it a CD? It's both!
In this world of MP3s and digital DJing, it’s ironic that the first innovation in the world of vinyl AND in the world of CDs since, oooh, some time last century is brought to us by a techno DJ/Producer, Jeff Mills. His recent album The Occurrence is not even out as an MP3 – it is only released on a curious vinyl/CD hybrid format.
Of course, for novelty factor this scores 10/10 and for that reason may well be my first vinyl or CD purchase since about 2004. There’s every chance it will be my last ever, too. It’s certainly going to be my first hybrid vinyl/CD purchase!
Laser-etched and unique, these clocks put unwanted old vinyl to good use.
In our continuing quest to keep the vinyl 12″ from disappearing into the history books now digital DJing is replacing it, we report on and encourage novel new uses for records, wherever in the world we find them. This time, the intriguing Trend Hunter website brings us news of these rather fantastic vinyl clocks.
They’re laser-cut by designer Pavel Sidorenko, whose designs (which he calls “Re-Vinyl Clocks”) take the form of everything from animals to kitchenware.
