DJ Hombre

I’d recommend only ripping those tracks you cannot find in decent digital format anywhere else. For all the rest, you’d be better off buying digital.

The latest version of the DJ Player app on iOS supports the Beamz DJ Lazer controller…

http://beamzdj.com/

…that should send a shiver down the traditionalist DJ’s spine!

Thanks for the kind words Connor!

The spoken words all came from a h-u-g-e crate of vinyl (read-aloud LPs, instructional LPs, radio spots, self-help LPs, giveaway promotional 45s) … dating back before the term OCD was popular! So those snippets came from old read-along Star Trek records, there maybe a kids Spiderman LP in there as well and possibly an old radio documentary (pressed to vinyl) about space as well as the Flip Wilson show LP.

Battle records are OK for instant and easy use, however (…and I suspect this may come up in the scratching course…) if you can collect your own bunch of unique sound snippets then that will make your mix totally custom and different to others.

I think you can probably buy sample-sets based on movie/TV dialogue now (which didn’t exist when I started out), however if you’re a Digital DJ then there’s probably no reason why you can’t start collecting your own clips. I went through our DVD collection a while back, watching each film in turn and taking notes where I thought there would be prime scratch sample potential. Using these notes, I then used Audacity (freeware audio software) to extract the sections of audio I wanted and voila, I can drop these into any digital set with ease.

In the next review I’ve done (due within the week), there’s a demo of a product I used with samples I’d lifted from an old documentary “For All Mankind” about the Apollo space mission. Great documentary and perfect for sample spotters (as used frequently by The Orb).

btw…the Tonium Pacemaker although dead as a product, has a new website ( http://pacemakerdevice.org/ ) where you can download a new firmware release.

I only started sniffing around these products again recently in preparation for a review article coming soon.

It was typically ‘Channel 4’ in it’s approach. The lead programme “How Clubbing Changed The World” was OK. It covered some interesting ground about clubbing history, but jumped all over the timeline in order to squeeze it into a generic countdown style programme which I felt was a shame. I think it would have been better served as a quality documentary (think Doug Pray’s “Scratch”) by dropping the chart aspect.

The following 6hour programme was equally odd. A selection of DJs playing live in a studio sounds good, but when you realise there’s no studio audience and the DJ is flanked by bored looking girls checking the facebook & twitter feedback it becomes a bit bizarre. It may work better if you had organised a house party yourself and had the TV fed through your hi-fi, but the lack of audience killed it. Grandmaster Flash (a DJ who I’ve seen on several occasions, large venues and small) certainly has skills and is also not afraid of using the mic…however it did come across odd as he shouted “stay with me” in an empty studio for the fourth time in the first five minutes of the programme. Annie Mac and Soul II Soul were good though…

I find digital gear, whether its iOS or controller based gives me many more opportunities to twist the tracks I want into the mix. For example, if I was in vinyl-only mode most of the funk tracks I play have a tiny break or short intro which means mixing them together was always a quick, choppy affair. With digital, I can organise my playlist according to bpm (mostly works, even with live funk tracks) and stretch those intros and breaks out using loops and multiple cues. Nothing fancy, just extending the tracks slightly to give me a little more time to blend in the next track.

As for scratching, if you can scratch with vinyl it doesn’t take long (a few hours maybe) to get used to the feel of a jog wheel that is half the size of a 12″ record and doesn’t spin constantly. It certainly feels bizarre to start with, but you do get used to it quite quickly.

Asides from the above, my music collection is way out of date and EDM probably wasn’t a term used back then!

Nick Powers, post: 23510, member: 2466 wrote: I hate what people are saying about young DJ’s, I’m 13 and have bought all of my equipment AND worked for the money. I have read possibly 15 books on the history of djing and on what beginner DJs need to know. I taught myself to mix and beatmatch on a cd/mixer numark box. I don’t and shouldn’t get the respect most of you deserve but I am dedicated to being a DJ and I don’t think anybody should bash kids going with digital. I know the fundementals but I realize I need a lot of practice. I’m going with the best available equipment right now and so if you think kids should begin with vinyl to learn the fundementals it is possible to learn those things on CDs or controllers.

Well said…keep putting in the practice and with your level-headedness you should go far! As long as you have enthusiasm, then it will reflect in how your skills progress and eventually how the crowd (no matter how many) react. Check out Ruthless Ramsey, he was an inspiration to me when I started out…he couldn’t afford turntables so worked his skills on cassette decks, just showing it’s not the equipment you use it’s all about how you use it;

[media=youtube]2b6HeJIKl1Q[/media]

It’ll be interesting to see if Algoriddim incorporate any of the MIDI mappings across to the iOS version (fingers crossed!).