Gadgetory

in 2015 DJ's are everywhere they're critical darlings and pop producers playing the biggest festivals and still driving a dance floor at every nightclub in town in this top shelf we're looking at the equipment that makes it all happen and what an amateur needs to get in the game so here's what a basic DJ setup looks the core is the music and while some DJ's still use vinyl most of them are playing it straight off a laptop controlled by software like trackers a rock if you want to play with loops or scratching you bring in a turntable or a CD jet which plugs into the program as a controller and then there's the mixer which keeps everything sounding sweet and gives you one last layer of controls as you send everything out to the speakers we headed to a popular Brooklyn nightclub to check out some DJ setups in the real world verboden opened up in Brooklyn last year and it's become one of the city's most versatile nightclubs hosting everything from burlesque to deep house yoga alongside the usual dance parties production director Michael Roche showed me around the space including the massive sound system three walls of video projection and one very big disco ball the first I asked Roche just show me the gear that makes it all happen you've got a lot of bells and whistles a lot cells and listeners so why don't we start at the very beginning and kind of start with the workhorse of the mixing Nexus which is the pioneer djm 900 this is kind of the central hub of everything the mixer is what all of your playback methods are going to be going through before it hits the main system so your CD players your turntables your computer your sound card any of your outboard effects or anything are all gonna be controlled by this desk here it has multiple inputs so you could put digital inputs analog inputs and phono inputs on a single channel so it basically gives you almost 12 to 16 channels on one mixer with just a flick of Oh having two knobs let's talk about turntables now yeah this is the Pioneer PL X 1000 bian ear is now one of the few companies making professional direct drive turntable x' direct drive turntable basically ensures that the speed that you want the disc to play at continues to play that way so this is the top-of-the-line gear you know we're in a nightclub but what if I just want something as a hobbyist DJ this gear is gonna be out of my league right I wouldn't say that it's out of your league but there are so many different types of mixers and there are so many different brands out there that it's kind of important to do your homework to find out what your actual needs are ten to fifteen years ago you'd only be working with the turntable byun ear Allen & Heath Rane all these companies have different models of mixers that have come out through the years at different price points that will help you kind of find and narrow down where you want to go the things that have come out over the past few years have given people a lot more options on a consumer level that allow you to do more with less okay I mean that sounds like that sounds like a great first step absolutely mixers and MIDI controllers are a good start but that's not all there is to DJ you need to move the crowd forge a connection between the sound and the person who's playing to learn more about that we met up with DJ shifty at his place in Brooklyn my friends this will be my greatest performance shift he's one of the best DJs around a two-time DMC world DJ champion and a master using the tools of the DJ to connect to an audience I come from a battle DJ background where you're really trying to push the equipment and push the technique the physical technique even the turntable yet was not meant to be a scratch tool the whole idea is almost like hacking the equipment and seeing how you can almost like push it beyond what what it was meant to do but I'm always trying to take the technology old and new and see what I can do to sort of push myself and push what I've seen other DJ's do so walk me through your setup okay so first I have the classic technics turntable here the 1212 10 model this has really been the industry standard for turntables for 30 plus years I'm sort of emulating what it would be like to use vinyl but using it yet control my software cuz well yeah when you say emulating that sound we heard my C isn't on the record that Oh a sample that's on your computer that's a sample that's on my canoe what's actually on the record is this which is one of my favourite songs it's not it's not for everybody but what's happening is that signal is getting sent to the computer and the computer is sending the sound back out changing the sound in the same way I'm controlling the signal so if I go like this what we'd actually hear was so it lets you scratch her mp3s and this is what's called a MIDI controller it just gives me more ways to access features of my program which is Traktor but rather than clicking or hitting my keyboard I do these sort of things on here and so that's a much more natural comfortable analog way of controlling digital sound and then in the middle here we have the mixer and this controls the sound from the different decks this is sort of a fancy mixer that I also have MIDI control to jump around my song so really all the sound is coming from the computer and all this stuff is just to give me different ways to control it in a way that feels better than like checking email yeah exactly if suddenly I took all this away and I was like okay just make the same sounds with the software you could do it but it wouldn't really be the same right for the sort of stuff that I do very active so I'll be like that you can't really do in a computer and so there's some sort of beauty to the to the classic technics where you get this level of control that I personally haven't seen yet in in digital so if someone's looking to get into this kind of a bare-bones set up DJing their cousins wedding what do they need how much money is this gonna call first let me say that DJing cousin's wedding is a very important DJ gig so don't don't take it lightly there's a lot of there's a lot at stake the whole marriage is it stay tuned yeah they may not talk to you again one thing that's great about how DJ technology has progressed is there's always new tools available for you to sort of figure out how you can improve what you do so I have here the tractor DJ app on my iPad rather than trying to emulate turntables it's sort of a new way of interacting with the sound and I do know a couple professional DJs that DJ with this and one other piece of gear just one small mixer I'm so the audio quality is good going to a system yeah but there's a lot that can be done just with your iPad in the end it's not about the tools at all it's about using music to connect with an audience that basic skill is the same whether you're using a thousand dollar controller or a two dollar iPhone app of course an entry-level mixer will help it sound a lot better and a basic MIDI controller will let you throw in some moves but none of that will matter if you don't have to write songs for the crowd because it's so easy to produce music on your own and get it sounding at a level and you could really play in a club a lot of DJ's our producers a lot of producers are DJs and really you kind of have to be both in this day and age anyone can get equipment and learning how to take a track and mix it into another track what is gonna separate one person from another is that person's musical world that they create and curate if you have skill sets to really make it your own and manipulate it and make it your own kind of performance that's where you bring everything together so if you can create this distinct musical world which is excellently performed with technique to me this is the pinnacle of DJing