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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Are you a DJ or a controllerist?

Turntablism is mostly for hiphoppers, right? But the concept of controllerism might fit better into the electronic scene. We have moved into an era where the Mac-lit DJ is more common than the jock playing plastic plates. Since anyone can make flawless beatmixes with cheap gear now, you have to give credit to those digital artists that take more creative use of computers and its controllers.

From Wikipedia: Controllerism is the art and practice of using musical software controllers (e.g. MIDI, OSC, Joystick, etc) to build upon, mix, scratch, remix, effect, modify, or otherwise create music, usually by a Digital DJ or “Controllerist”.

The gear manufacturers are throwing out a lot of controllers for DAWs and digital DJ’ing, but real controllerists create their own equipment. Now you might argue that this extreme use of controllers is relevant only for artists performing live electronic music. But isn’t computer DJ’ing based on pretty much the same?

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The evolution of the lazy dj

When I first started out with the whole dj thing back around 98-99, the prefered media for playing music was vinyl. Today my choice is more or less CD’s. In 2010 I’m pretty sure I’m gonna run around with usb sticks, thanks to Pioneer!

Now this got me thinking, has the evolution made the DJ’s lazy? Lets do the math.

Today I have a CD bag holding 320 CD’s. Every cd has roughly 8 tracks on them, meaning my cd bag at all time holds 2560 tracks.

Now when I first started, if I wanted to bring 2560 tracks to the club on vinyl, I would have to bring roughly 853 vinyls. Let’s say every vinyl has 3 tracks. The biggest UDG record bag can hold 90 records, meaning I would need something like 9,5 UDG bags. And according to Wikipedia an average vinyl weighs approx 100 grams.

853 vinyls x 100 grams = 85 300 GRAMS / 85,3 KG.

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Little hipphoppers: How cute is this?

We don’t cover hiphop, but we had to publish this cutie. After all we do write about incredible talent we stumble upon. Check out hiphoppers Dj Sara and Dj Ryusei, age five and eight. Maybe we’ll see more kids like these in the future, as a part of the Dj Hero generation.

How to improve your DJ act

Whether you are new to club culture or have been around for ages like Woody van Eyden here, this video is quite entertaining.

If you want to lift your own DJ performance to new heights, you might look at this as a good tutorial in alcohol consumption. Or maybe it’s a hint to stay off the bottle/substance completely when behind the decks. Anyway, Woody sure put on one hell of a show.

What do you think? Funny or just embarrasing?

When you put things into perspective

Now, iv always hated djs who are crying about their jobs, honestly, would you rather work in a storage knowing that the tomates goes into the number 347 in your system and that the spanish sallad always gets in on tuesday night so on wedensday you know you will spend half of the day aranging space for it in the storage ?

Sure, flying can be a hassle and it is very a lonely job (unless you are a top 10 dj so you can force the promoters to pay for your agent to come along…). But does it really matter ? You will be doing what you love and you have to sometimes understand that you are one of the lucky once out of the 28347834374637 other djs that tried to make it.

Im sitting hear in my hotel room in Seoul/Korea and im pretty fucked up by the jetlag and the night before. Iv managed to be in Copenhagen, Vienna, Bratislava, Miami, New York, Frankfurt, Beijing, Tampa & Seoul all within 5 days… Should i complain about my flight shedule ? Erhmm i dont think so, i just got paid for traveling the world and to drink a magnum bottle of champagne for free as “thanks” for coming to a club.

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Touchscreen dj’ing

 

Some people think it’s awkward to use touch screen devices, but when it comes to dj’ing this might be the perfect match actually. Imagine, you could see the waveforms, touch it, tweak it, load in plugins/effects, re-arrange stuff and so on… Lots of possibilities!

Scott Hobbs, a brilliant product designer, has taken this seriously and developed a prototype of something really promising: The Attigo TT.

The Attigo TT is still in the development phase, but it looks really good! Here’s a user scenario Scott Hobbs has for the Attigo TT:

“An electronic music production artist/DJ is doing a live performance act at a dance festival. The artist is performing using a variety of different new and innovative sound tools, such as effects machines and drum machines. One of the acts will be using the ‘Sensing Sounds’ product where there is physical performance. There will also be a display of visuals for the audience that will respond to the movements of the artist and sounds being created.” (www.scotthobbs.co.uk)

And here’s a live demonstration:

What do you reckon, is this the future of dj’ing?