Digital DJing – modern day jungle

It’s a jungle out there. A jungle of different digital DJing platforms, controllers, sound cards and all.

Being a “traditional DJ” is much easier. If you play vinyl (like we all did back in the good old days) you had couple of choices, and in 99% of the cases it was a Technics turntable.

Couple of years forward, in the new millennium playing CDs got easier and Pioneer CDJ-1000 became an industry standard.

Now you can play music from your laptop with a digital DJing system, control the music with CDs, turntables or a controller. And that is just why it’s so damn complicated.

There are too many options.

Personally I think digital DJing with CD/vinyl control is just a short phase before everyone is starting to mix within the software with their dedicated controllers. The problem at the moment preventing that is that there isn’t a industry standard like in playing cd or vinyl.

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Ableton and Serato present The Bridge

When Ableton announced in October 2008 their partnership with Serato I was super excited. I’ve been producing solely in Ableton and I have also tried to DJ with Ableton, controlled by Pioneer DJM-800, but at that point it didn’t feel right, I didn’t feel comfortable with it.

Serato has been in the game of digital DJing for more than 10 years, their Serato Scratch has been a choice of several DJ’s during the years, and especially among hip hop scene, using control vinyls to control music on your laptop, has been “the” way to DJ.

While Serato has been strong name in hip hop, Native Instrument‘s Traktor has quickly risen to be the equivalent to Serato in EDM.

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The hidden art of sampling

Remember Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up? (Spotify link) The video of this track from 1997 was so violent it was banned from day time television and even MTV had to play it only at night time.

The times have gone by, the video itself has got a cult status, but the track keeps living a life of it’s own still being remembered in night clubs all around the world.

Prodigy’s lead man (that usually keeps everything low key) Liam Howlett is known for his sampling. Some music enthuastics have been spotting various samples from Prodigy tracks. Now in the era of YouTube the stuff gets some videos.

In the summer 2009 a very creative video of how to recreate Smack My Bitch Up was posted to YouTube. The spotting of samples was spot on and the way how the data was presented, indeed top notch.

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Will the Vestax VCM 600 kill the Akai APC40?

So, it havent been long time since the Akai APC40 was introduced to the market with full support from the Ableton developers. But now it seems like we have a new gadget which takes the step further (atleast for me) with the new Vestax VCM 600 comming into the market. Sure, many may argue that how could it possible beat the Akai APC40…

I think that the VCM 600 got a better overview, less messy trigger/button organization and it gives you a better overview of what actually is goin on. The VCM 600 is abit more expensive (around 700 euro) though and it doesnt have the smart play triggers like the APC 40 has… I wish someone could combine these two into one solid piece of midi performance gear!