Regardless of how America’s financial crisis pans out in the coming months or years, its safe to say that people will be cutting back big time on un-necessary expenses. Something tells me that dropping $100 at club every weekend may be the first things to go and some of the higher paying gigs will soon dry up. Even if you don’t happen to live state-side, djs around the globe might feel the crunch as our remarkably interconnected economies all start to show painful slow downs. So here are 3 essential rules to remember if your a dj and the economy goes bust.
Archive for September, 2008
Is your Midi Controller Late?
Allow me to introduce you to your new least favorite musical companions: latency and jitter. This evil pair can take what would have been a really stellar musical performance and digitally drag the life out of it. Because MIDI is becoming more and more a part of the everyday DJ vocabulary, it’s crucial to understand that not all MIDI systems are created equal. No matter how tight your playing is, sending it through a system that is beset by latency and jitter issues will result in a sound that does not necessarily reflect your skills.
New Rock Band Instruments are looking sweet!
You may remember the video of me re-playing “sweet child of mine” live on the dance floor with a Rock Star guitar. Soon after we posted a guide on how to set that up yourself in this article. Coming in October the makers of Guitar hero are going to be releasing “Guitar Hero World Tour” which boasts a pair of sick looking controllers equipped with new features that might be great for djing.
The Guitar not only looks significantly better than the last version but boasts a bunch of new features that upgrade its usability as a dj controller or live stage instrument including:
Continue reading New Rock Band Instruments are looking sweet!
Digital Dj Mix Competition
We are very happy to announce the first Dj TechTools digital dj competition. This is a chance for you to show off your skills to a wider audience and win some incredible prizes.
Grand Prize:
A week long residency with Ean Golden at the 5 star Karma resorts on the island of Bali. Your flight and hotel will be paid for courtesy of Karma Resorts, all you need to do is show up, relax and rock the islands best outdoor parties and day time chill out events.
Runner Up:
A Novation Nocturn and a subscription to Remix Magazine, Dj TechTools T-shirts and stickers.
Third Place
A subscription to Remix Magazine, Dj TechTools T-Shirt and stickers
All 3 winners will be featured in a story right here on Dj TechTools.com
How to Enter:
Our best wishes go out to Dj AM
This weekend, a damn good dj and a friend of Dj TechTools was badly injured in a terrible accident. Adam Goldstein, or Dj AM, is one of the top djs on the American club circuit and has been doing an innovative show with blink 182 drummer, Travis Barker, for several years now. Adam and Travis were leaving a show back east when their Jet overran the runway and crashed into a nearby highway. More details and a video on this terrible accident can be found on a CNN article here. Both men are currently in critical condition and its unclear how they will fare. We want to spread the word and send out all of our best wishes for a full and speedy recovery. Please keep Adam and Travis in your thoughts over the coming week.
Serato joins up with Pioneer
The team at Serato has been working with pioneer to fully integrate their CDJ-400 Dj player with Scratch live. This means full control over Scratch live’s features by a CDJ-400 through a USB connection. Currently any CD player can be used to control scratch live with a control CD but allowing direct digital control offers the following benefits according to a press release sent to us yesterday.
Touch it or grab it? Another Dj Touch controller.
Stanton has carefully leaked news of a new controller through the most underground of sources, a guitar center flyer. They have then decided to put up a confidential website, containing additional sensitive information that was not mailed to 500k guitar center customers. Is this what passes for guerrilla marketing these days?
Its called “Dascratch?” and appears to be the love child of the pacemaker and a kaos pad. The point of this article is not to re-announce news that skratchworx and CDM have already covered but instead to talk about the concept of touch pad controllers- again.
Continue reading Touch it or grab it? Another Dj Touch controller.
The death of Aurora?
About 2 months ago a brand new controller showed up out of no-where and the big three, CDM, SkratchWorx and Dj TT all wrote about the mixer in the same day. The small website dedicated to the controller crashed under the weight of the traffic and the creators of the multi colored Aurora, were surprised to find them selves besieged with requests to buy their new product. The only problem? There was no product.
Servers down
As you may have noticed, djtechtools.com has been seriously dysfunctional for the past 24 hours. Our host provider, Blue-Host aka “the last company you every want to depend on for reliable service or hosting” randomly deleted a bunch of files inducing every picture we have upload in the past year. During the process of trying to recover those files, they made more mistakes and our wordpress installation became corrupt. After a full day of work its all back now but any comments or questions asked over the past 3 days have been lost along with the article I wrote for today. That article, a review of the Aurora controller, will get posted on wed instead.
Any recommendations for a new server?
Rockin Digital Doubles
About a year ago, I suggested a feature to the Traktor team which they quickly implemented much to my joy. It was instant deck duplication to and from any deck. Even though this is great for the obvious application of freeing up a deck its also turned out to be good for many other creative uses. Lately I have been getting into juggling opposing copies of the same track with different treatments and cue points tricks. Lets walk through 5 fundamental techniques and then roll them into one routine:
Continue reading Rockin Digital Doubles
VCI-300 Reviewed
The Vestax VCI-100 made quite a splash in the digital DJ market, selling a significant number of units and raising the bar for DJ MIDI controllers. The most significant difference between the VCI-100 and its larger cousin, the VCI-300, is more conceptual than physical. The VCI-100 is a multipurpose MIDI controller designed to interface with a broad range of DJ software by offering a generic palette of controls that could suit many purposes. The VCI-300 adopts an entirely different approach. It has been designed specifically to control one piece of software, the Itch program from one of the leaders in the DVS world: Serato. The goal, as explained to me several months back, was to eliminate the disconnect between hardware and software design so that all the important controls in the software are found in a logical place on the physical mixer. The end result would be a cleaner marriage between the virtual and analog world and a much easier setup for the user. Anyone can plug in a VCI-300 and have it work right out of the box with the supplied Itch software — no MIDI mapping or tedious software setup required.
