Well, the weekend is here and I hope your weekends, gigs, get-togethers, BBq’s and so on go bananas. Two points of business we must manage before I take the weekend off myself to play a gig in San Diego.
First, There is a cool event in SF this weekend that is all about hi-tek futuristic music concepts, a subject we are all certainly very fond of. Plus its held in some sort of a NASA research center, so that alone makes it fairly cool. Its called Yuri’s Night and our friend Peter Kirn from CDM will be there judging the Futuristic Music Controller event.
Next, the Logo contest: check bellow for the final submissions and vote in the forum on your favorite.
Big props to all of you that took some time out of your weeks to put something together. I really enjoyed seeing every-ones take on what dj tech tools represents for them. It was very cool and we hope to find more ways to continue and involve you in the future.
Continue reading ‘Logo Contest Round 1′
The forums are awash in activity and I am really glad we went ahead and put them up. In one of the posts I asked you for the communities take on this new logo we have been working on. Feedback was mixed with some people suggesting different improvements and possibly even turning it over to the readers.
So in the spirit of letting everyone have their say I am going to open the Logo up to collective design and then we can vote on the final results in the brand new forums. First, download the current design in Illustrator format, logo.zip and you can do one of 2 things:
Continue reading ‘Help Design our Logo and Win 3 Prizes!’
Thanks to all of you for your patience- finally the forum is up and running. Its been a very exciting time watching our little community grow and enjoying to passion that everyone contributes to the posts. Ultimately, a community is defined by group participation and our numbers speak volumes. Currently DJ TT has just under 100 posts and 1600 comments!
Comments alone wont cut the mustard though, so for a while I have been trying to figure out ways to give our readers the ability to start their own discussions and write articles themselves. The forum is a important first step, and next I am working on some very exciting ways to involve you even more.
Continue reading ‘The Forum is UP!’
I don’t think anyone can deny how much fun the ubiquitous Guitar Hero and Rock Band games are. They completely transform gaming into an interactive experience that throws away all the stigmas. You may remember I have been using rock band guitars as a dj controller and some may have even noticed the dj syle controller for rock band on you tube. Activision appears to be melding these concepts into the logical result, a dj hero game. Ripten, a gaming blog, has reported they even filed a patent for the concept many folks have been suggesting for months. Honestly though, who would actually play it and how in the world do they implement it? Crab scratch notation?
Well, this has been an exciting morning and basically our own personal episode of 24 (if only I had Jack Bower to raid the PayPal offices). We apologize for the inconvenience but due to the traffic our servers went down and then PayPal put a hold on our account due to the high volume in purchases. WE had to stop the purchasing process early Friday morning but the webstore will be back up and all problems solved on monday.
If you already purchased a vci-100 Today (Friday)
Your purchase has gone through and you have one of the 100 units. Please disregard the reports earlier that called for a possible refund and then re-charge on Monday. We sent out emails to all confirmed purchases to verify receipt but some people may not have received them due to spam filters. If you received an email confirmation of your purchase from Pay-Pal then you are on the list.
If you did not get a chance to buy one before the store was closed:
The Web store will be back up on Monday morning at 10:00AM Eastern Standard Time (New York). There are still about 50 units left so those that slept in will get another shot at it :-)
Things are growing so fast around here that we need to invest some cash in the infrastructure. Over the next 2 weeks a great team from Australia will be adding some really cool stuff to the site. I am in Germany at the moment where in less than a week Dj Tech Tools will be taking a look at working models of all the exciting equipment that was shown at NAMM. Before Germany I was in Tokyo finalizing the firmware on my special edition VCI-100, and man am I excited. The functions rock and everything works really well!
Continue reading ‘Dj Tech Tools- Under Construction’
A few months ago I wrote a piece on the term “Microwave dj”. This negative description is used by a lot of different people to easily identify their personal interpretation of a push-play Dj. I expected the piece to be controversial but is was more miss-understood than anything else. A regular reader and fellow blogger put it best: “I sort of took offense to the article at first, but when I saw one of your youtube videos I totally understood where you are coming from - your motivation for the article is: if you’re going to be using a laptop to dj you better be putting it to good use… I think people who don’t understand that about you will think that you’re trying to defend that traditional dj culture but you’re really advocating change in a weird way.”
Until people really get the creative potential and intention behind this new digital movement they are not going to see how its can easily co-exist with the old traditions of djing. The German philosopher Hegel is thought to have presented the idea that everything begins as a conflict between two opposing ideas , the thesis and the antithesis and is ultimately resolved by the synthesis - the superior resolution that includes the best of both ideas. We are trying to find the synthesis around here at Dj tech tools.
Continue reading ‘Microwave DJs’
Dj tech tools is working on an extensive comparison of 4 excellent dj sound cards for under $200. We are testing their performance and have created a way for you to listen to the difference between the Numark Dj I/O, Novation NIO, Maya 44 and Indigo Dj. The video and full reviews will be posted on Friday which brings me to my other point. From here on out we are moving to a regular posting schedule. New articles come out every Monday, Wed and Friday morning with bigger reviews and tutorials published on Friday mornings. Its very tempting to get caught up in the blog rush of posting small bits every day but we want keep our focus on a few really helpful articles per week and not dilute the content. So check in on those days OR subscribe to our feed via email in the bottom of the Tool bar.
From the editors desk, on which is piled 50 sound cards-
Ean
I just got back from my first NAMM and man was it an eye opening experience. Like many of you, I dj for the love of it, cut up gear and re-wire software to challenge myself and make cool shit. So when we get ideas for really great things that seem very simple to implement, it gets really annoying when it feels like NO-ONE is paying attention. F&%k, everyone wants a black VCI-100 so release the damn thing already, right? Continue reading ‘Don’t Blame the Suits’
Readers are Saying