El Jefe
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El Jefe
MemberKeep in mind that I started on laptop, so vinyl for me is a listening medium and not so much a hands on medium, so I don’t have the attachment to it that a lot of folks do.
What I didn’t like was that I missed a lot of the conveniences of digital. Being able to look and see the BPM of tracks (worth noting: mostly DJing with vinyl that wasn’t mine so it’s not as if I had a long period of practicing with these things prior), a less-than-instant start up = can’t really drop in the way you can on digital (was using 1210’s by the way) no cue button so beatmatching is a pain (also, was mostly playing downtempo/trip hop stuff so it’s not as if I had a nice easy 4×4 beat to work with), couldn’t scratch worth a hoot because there’s a world of difference between doing it on a controller with no platter resistance vs a Technics motor that’s trying to tear your hand off when you oppose it.
Plus the usual stuff about price of vinyl, weight of records, degradation of records, etc. I had a period where I didn’t know if I wanted to go digital or vinyl and this pretty much sealed it for me.
So, no need to get offended, first responder. I’m not insulting vinyl. I’m just saying I’m quite happy with digital.
MemberI’m mostly a breakbeat fan and that covers an awful lot of ground (Trip Hop, Hip Hop, Big Beat, even some Industrial and Drum n Bass) and since I’ve only ever been a laptop DJ it’s been just fine. In fact, once I switched to the VCI-300 mkII it’s probably gotten more fun since I don’t have to beat my brains out over beatgridding/warping and can just get down to it. Also, scratching is great fun. Granted, I can’t get quite the level of tight-but-drawn-out mixes that I could with Traktor or Live, I think it also forces me to make more natural choices instead of trying to force a square peg into a round hole.
MemberAnd that’s exactly what I’ve done. On the one hand I like that it gives you a little cred with the old school DJs to be manually beatmixing but also it’s the instrument thing again. The experience is much more immersive and enjoyable (and, well, physical, which is important for playing very physical music, I think).
Only real problem I’m running into not having vinyl or CDJ background is dealing with some types of music that I use that have 3+ minute long ambient intros followed by fairly pounding 4×4 beats. I’m finding mixing the beat parts up against each other to keep the energy up while still getting the intro in there to be a bit challenging.
Love this thing though. Very glad I listened to you about it. 😀
MemberVCI-300 MkII acquired. I recognize that the 380 is the way of the future, but WOW is the 300 a magnificent thing. I’ve been a musician for 17 years and started with the usual stuff (guitar, bass, etc) before moving on to electronic music and have only recently come around to getting serious about DJing in the last couple years. The best thing I can say about the 300/Itch combination is that for the first time I feel like I’m playing an INSTRUMENT rather than using a TOOL. Does that make sense? This rig is simple as a screwdriver (and I mean that as a compliment) and a joy to use. Maybe I’ll want effects again later, but right now I’m not missing much about Traktor as I *finally* can scratch properly. Also, it’s loud as all hell.
The weirdness of how sync works is a little bothersome but not too big a deal. I can manually beatmatch well enough and should really do it more anyway, given my primary genre. Only things I really miss so far are being able to key shift in order to give myself more options for harmonic mixing and being able to hot key crates. These are small things though. And I haven’t even tried the sampler yet.
2 thumbs way up.
MemberPhil, in your playlists do you mix the genres all together or do you keep them on separate playlists and say, “Ok, now it’s time to jump over to ________ genre”?
MemberHey Phil, is the extra power cable for gain boost really necessary?
MemberThanks to a convenient and reasonably not exploitative payment plan, I ordered a MkII today, sans VFX. Throughly excited. Besides, naming anything a Mark whatever just makes me think of Iron Man, which is always a plus.
MemberWell damn. There goes that idea. Got a review of the VFX perchance?
The VCI-380 looks fantastic but…just can’t swing the price tag at this time. It’s either going to be VCI-300 mk II now and VFX later (most likely) or S2 now (not likely).
MemberWell done!
I feel like I should share the (silly) tale of my first gig as well.
My first gig was about 10 years ago. I got a gig at the only place I could which was a TINY hippie-run coffee shop and since I was using Ableton Live (then v.2) I billed it as a live PA, even though I was really just DJing from multiple sources, which I’ll outline in a minute. I got two friends who were guy with a guitar type musicians with a large following to open in the hopes of someone actually showing up and rented a couple pieces of gear that I would need.
So, got this so far? Hippie coffee shop (run by actual hippies), two guys playing acoustic guitar as the openers, small crowd expecting more of the same.
My rig consisted of a PC laptop running aforementioned Live 2, an M Audio Quattro, one Stanton Str8-20 turntable running into a Gemini PS-650i mixer (still have these two!), one M-Audio Ozone keyboard (that isn’t actually doing anything…I was really nervous about being enough to look at onstage, as you will see), and one tv with an Xbox plugged into it running a DVD of “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” on repeat. In a fit of pique I dressed up as Vin Diesel’s Riddick character from Pitch Black/Chronicles of Riddick, goggles and all.
So the first two guys did their things and were warmly received by crowd and coffee shop owners, so it was my turn. When setting up everything for some reason we couldn’t get the second pair of channels on the Quattro to play ball so I had no ability to cue. Now, I couldn’t beatmatch at this time (barely can now) so this meant I was even more at the mercy of the stuff I was going to be playing, and also meant I was going to be twiddling with Live’s XY effects panels to cover up the fact that, really, I was being a glorified tape recorder most of the time with the odd batch of REAL Live PA happening only sporadically. So i get up behind the mic and coax folks to the front, who kindly oblige. I open with the first two tracks from UNKLE’s “Never Never Land” and then drop into a lesser known track thats halfway between industrial and Drum and Bass.
Now in order to understand the crowd’s reaction to this, I’ll have to add in an important gear-related detail that I left out, and that regards the PA. For such a small coffee shop, the PA there was actually quite good. Hippies do love their music. I can’t remember exact specs but I seem to remember a lot of it being pretty vintage. However, this PA was meant to broadcast live acts, people with flutes, etc. For my entry into live electronic performance I was going to need something…special. That something was a 15″ JBL powered subwoofer that I rented and put on the floor in front of the tiny stage.
So when I kicked into that head-crackin’ industrial meets DnB sub bass fiesta it was with the same delivery as Tony Montana yelling “SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND!” In a split second gray haired hippie owner’s face drops with the dawning knowledge of what he has gotten himself into, the previously obliging frat crowd finds someplace to be other than on the floor, and my friends find that they’ve all forgotten something important outside.
Absolutely freakin’ priceless.
The rest of the gig went about how you’d expect. Played a 1 hour set to a couple people who really wished they could be somewhere else but couldn’t leave, got the hell off stage, thanked the owner, and beat a hasty retreat never to return. 😀
Moral of the story is to use caution when choosing to WEAPONIZE ones sound system for the evening. 😀
MemberYep. Ex-Bipolar here.
That’s right, I said Ex. Now let me qualify that. Due to the fact that I’m still dealing with a systemic infection that causes significant nervous/brain inflammation I am still a moody bastard at times, but it’s a far cry from where I was a few years ago. Plus I know that with proper management I probably only have a year or two left before that’s old news as well. My story:
diagnosed bipolar at 15 with inexplicable mood swings, depression, manic rage, etc. Mother was bipolar, grandfather was schizo, lots of mental illness on both sides of the family, so it was more or less waiting for me. So, I did what the psychiatrists wanted me to. I faithfully took all the drugs i was given for 15 years. Lithium was the most consisten drug on that list but the list was very VERY long. By the time I hit my late 20’s my psyche was wrecked (had done 3 tours of duty in psych hospitals) and my body was going right behind it (internal organs were hitting the critical point, thigns were very very bad). Fortunately for me this was my first semester in oriental medical school (full disclosure: yes I’m a doctor and though I’m not handing out medical advice on here for tricky legal reasons, I will try to be helpful and point folks in the right directions if asked) and one of my teachers happened to be exceptionally good at his job and took a special interest in me. In a few months I went from being on Cymbalta+ Depakote + Lamictal + Geodon (I think. It’s been a while) and barely being alive (I was burning up on the outside an freezing on the inside. Every day was one big psychotic break. People would get cold just standing next to me, despite living in Florida) to being off all that stuff, recovering quickly, getting my mind back, and watching my health rebound like I had never seen it do.
My whole life I’d heard the same things everyone else hears all the time. Mental illnesses are incurable. You can only manage the symptoms and you’re going to have to live with a mountain of side effects. You can basically have your life suck in a way that’s a danger to other people or you can have your life suck in a way that’s only a danger to yourself. Turns out none of that is true whatsoever. It’s just the viewpoint of a profession that is out of its depth and assumes it’s the sole arbiter of all wisdom in the universe. You’d be amazed at what’s curable and even more amazed out how pissed off you are when you start seeing it done on a fairly regular basis.
My point is this: don’t think you’re doomed to be miserable, don’t buy into the romantic notion of the shooting star artist who dies young and leaves behind a legacy of untapped potential, don’t buy into the wrongheaded idea that this is how it is and everyone’s screwed up and this misery is just your lot in life. None of that is true. When people are sick they are sick for a reason (usually a pack of reasons in my experience). We don’t see a guy with pneumonia and go “Oh that’s just Bob. Yeah, he’s kinda phlegmy, whaddya gonna do, right?” When that guy says, “I feel horrible and my temperature is through the roof and I can’t breathe” we don’t tell him to learn coping strategies and do more yoga, we say “HOLY CRAP WE GOTTA GET YOU SOME MEDICAL ATTENTION!!” The body and the mind are one unit, not two separate pieces, and when somethings wrong then somethings wrong no matter what sphere it’s in. And when something goes wrong it can be righted again. Your job then is to find someone with the skills and successful track record of dealing with folks who have had similar experiences and go to them, because I assure you they do in fact exist. If you want to PM me with where you live I might be able to aim you at someone near you or, failing that, at least get you in touch with someone who knows someone.
The point: you don’t have to live like this, there are licensed doctors from many different modalities who deal with stuff like this all the time SUCCESSFULLY out there who you’ll find to be extremely compassionate and accomodating, you just have to find them. Don’t suffer needlessly.
MemberOk truthfully there’s some awesome mashups out there. To quote Satchmo, “There’s only 2 kinds of music: good music and bad music.”
MemberI feel like this: [media=youtube]g61brCepGVE[/media] 😀
Though truthfully, some of those mashups on DJ Hero are pretty fun.
MemberFirst exposure to DJing whatsoever was the original Traktor. Then got Live v2, recently have switched to Traktor Pro.
Live is still my composition software, and if I was doing Live PA or attempting more of a live remix style of doing things I would continue using it. However, the type of music I want to be doing involves a lot of genre and tempo hopping which, though not impossible in Live, is painful. Not nearly as painful, however, as warping every single track before you can use it. When most of the music you use tends to wander a bit in the tempo department, it;s just excruciating having to take a couple hours to warp a few tracks to play around with for a new promo set when you’re inspired NOW.
So, my decision was to switch to Traktor, continue using my APC40 for now, and just learn to beatmatch manually. That way I can deal with any weirdness I might run into with on the fly. So far it’s been WAY more fun. Plus, I’m a pretty visual guy and Traktor/my APC with Traktor just look great.
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