We dropped into the Thud Rumble labs recently and linked up with three members of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz: Qbert, ShortKut, and D-Styles. These three guys have been rocking the turntables and sporting some mad turntablist skills for quite a long time, so we took the opportunity to pick their brains about techniques. For those that are in the Bay Area, all three will be performing at a special show called “Fader Fest” this Saturday. Yours truly will also be rocking my own special brand of faders for a special controllerism set. More info after the jump…
Everyone has an opinion on what it takes to make it as a professional DJ. To some, the genre you play will dictate whether you have a future or not. To others, you are defined simply by the tools that you use. You may even stumble across the occasional lunatic who’s convinced it’s just hard work and giving people a good time that matters. I caught up with DJ Shortee to help answer some of these questions and get her perspective on everything from laptops to running record labels.
Revealed earlier this month at the SIGGRAPH Conference in Vancouver, the flashy PocoPoco musical interface seems poised to bring a new level of tactile control to controllers. We reached out to one of the device’s designers, Takaharu Kanai from the IDEAA Lab team at Tokyo Metropolitan University, to get exclusive details on the device.
Today Native Instruments announced a new installment in their DJ line of products, the two channel all-in-one controller called Kontrol S2. This is a more portable and streamlined version of the popular Kontrol S4, which condenses a four deck workflow into a very compact form, using decks C and D as always available sample/loop players. Since I shot the S2 promo video for NI last week (video after the jump), we got the exclusive chance to really dig in and test the unit fully.
Two projects have surfaced out of the homebrew scene recently, and whilst they come across as very different ideas they each share one thing in common: A love for the 12” platter.
Many of the topics we cover on this site end up touching on controllerism, or the musical manipulation of music with controllers. It seemed strange then, that we dont have more tutorials that help develop fundamental techniques and improve DJ’s music chops. Well, starting now – it’s time to end the dry spell and bring you the 2nd installment of controller essentials, which I hope to grow into a cannon of fundamentals useful for building a solid music repertoire. Let us know in the comments what you think of the concept and topics that might help! Continue reading Controllerism Essentials – Basic Beat Juggling
While I was in LA shooting a new super secret video to be released next week, the guys in the Dj TT Labs decided to have some fun and see if they could kill a Midi Fighter Pro. What better test than dropping the controller off a three story building onto concrete? Even I was surprised to see that it fully survived with only a few scratches to boot. At your suggestion – we are giving away the controller to a lucky reader. The Pros are back in stock, so if you are down with the program and want to support this site, check them out here. There are also some brand new clear/black glowing arcade buttons that look wicked! More photos of the buttons after the drop.
On one hand, our laptops are awesome portals into our entire music collection and the hub for our DJ setup, commanding sound waves with increasingly powerful software. On the other they’re clunky, we associate them with spreadsheets and email, and they literally put a wall between the crowd and us. The laptop’s enjoyed both major evolutions and revolutions in the past five years – is it due to bow out soon or will it continue to be an integral part of our setups?
What’s it going to be? Mac or PC? One is the toast of the creative industry with each unit being delicately hand crafted on a silk pillow by a choir of angels. The other is a clunking black hole sucking the cool out of the universe and replacing it with narcoleptic accountants and device driver errors. At least that is what we are led to believe. If you happen to fall into the latter camp you might grudgingly admit to having a PC stashed under the desk for mundane office work but you certainly wouldn’t consider taking it to a club? Would you?
Itch is a much misunderstood beast. Specifically designed as an integrated solution in conjunction with hardware developers, its total 1:1 control plug and play usability is what’s at the centre of its charm. Whilst it looks the same on the surface, under the bonnet Itch is tweaked and perfected for the specific controller it ships with.
To many, MIDI mapping in Traktor is a dark world full of confusion and endless frustration. In this complex world, it seems like only the truly worthy are able to unlock the mysteries of TSI files and use Traktor to its full potential. The reason for all of this heartache boils down to primarily one thing: Traktor’s ridiculously small and unyielding mapping window (the Controller Manager). There you’ll find no use of the arrow keys, no hot keys, and no cut and paste functionality; in other words, none of the things that the modern computer user has come to take for granted nowadays.
However, one brave soul has taken the torch for the righteous and sought to do something about this problem. Enter Extreme Mapping, a new Mac-only app that promises to make the long and extenuating mapping sessions a thing of the past.
In the landscape of promotion, there are now unlimited sites on which you can place material on about your work as a DJ. So when someone asks “what do you do?”, which link do you send them? Many DJs have signatures that look like library cards with 5 different links to Twitter, Soundcloud, Facebook, Myspace and if they are lucky a custom homepage. Since you can’t possible expect people to visit all of your content sites, why not aggregate all of those sources into one single page that is easy to set up and changes as your DJ world grows? Well, fortunately, someone invented a service that does just that. It’s called: “One Sheet” . Check out mine here, I created it within a few hours, and in the following article we will cover how to create your own.
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