I’ve been lucky enough to have started out DJing when I was 15 on vinyl and cd’s and over 10 years I have moved to a purely digital setup (Midi Controllers, Traktor/Ableton Live, Apple Mac). I do think that there is no point in living in the past no matter how romantic it may seem to be seen playing nothing but records on the old ones and twos. But we live in an age where labels are investing in selling packets data down a fiber optic tube rather than plastic discs in shops. The grand majority of what I play would never come out on vinyl or cd so for me it makes sense to use a purely digital setup.
I do use the sync button during my sets to make mixing easier and why the hell not? I can beat match using vinyl, cdj’s and my computer but if i have a tool there that i can used to save me time and enable me to mix better, faster and enable me to sound better for my audience it’ll use it. Once I’ve sync don’t just stand around once I’ve got my tracks playing, I am quite happily dropping accapellas, rinsing the effects, looping and jumping from cue to cue in order to make my sets as interesting. I do this because sync enables me to free up my time to be able to do this as well as the rest of the technology that I use. On the flip side to this, there are two many DJ’s out there that quite happily “play a track, hit sync, fade into the next track, repeat”. Yes this is unfortunately what most kids call DJing…. This breaks my heart as at time I feel that what I am doing isn’t a far cry from what they are doing and when I’ve been called out by my peers I find I can only defend myself so far. But at least I know where I came from and I’ve tried it all.
