This article from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by mrfliz@rcn.com.
Great article on the state of live digital mixing....
kevin kiernan
dj k-now
The D.J.'s New Mix: Digital Files and a Turntable
October 25, 2001
By BILL WERDE
ON a recent Wednesday night at Centro-Fly, a trendy
Manhattan dance club, Richie Hawtin was using two
turntables to play the latest and best techno, a crisply
syncopated hybrid of dark, electronic drum rhythms and
metallic high-hat and snare effects. Like so many other
celebrity disc jockeys on the international circuit, Mr.
Hawtin was mixing records together to imprint his style on
the night's music: he played two records simultaneously to
blend the drum kick of one song with the melody of another,
waited about 45 seconds before replacing the drum sounds
with a new album of more pronounced bass sounds, and
manipulated audio effects equipment to further tweak what
clubgoers were hearing. So it went for hours, Mr. Hawtin
adding and subtracting sounds and the crowd of about 600
dancing and cheering when they heard a mix they liked.
The scene was typical for nightclubs across the globe; the
records Mr. Hawtin was placing on his turntable were
anything but. Mr. Hawtin uses new technology called Final
Scratch from N2IT Development, a Dutch company. The vinyl
records he places on the turntables may look like normal
albums, but they work as conduits for the 900 or so digital
files he has stored on his laptop computer. If Mr. Hawtin
places the stylus on the three-minute mark of the Final
Scratch vinyl, the technology interprets that as a signal
to play at the three-minute mark of the digital file he has
selected.
Final Scratch is not the only music or technology company
looking to help a growing D.J. culture embrace digital
music. A variety of software programs allow D.J.'s to use
laptop computers to mix digital files without turntables
and include perks like sonic filters, synthesizer emulators
and samplers that can add well-laced loops of additional
music or vocal snippets. Traditional audio companies are
making equipment that allows D.J.'s to mix and edit digital
files from compact discs. All of this gives D.J.'s new
freedoms, both pragmatic and creative.
Before the onset of home studios and CD burners, D.J.'s who
wanted to play a new track would have to secure studio
time, then make a dubplate, a fragile vinyl pressing that
costs about $50 and provides 15 or 20 plays before
deteriorating. CD burners allowed disc jockeys to make a
track at home, then play it on a club's CD player that
night, but D.J.'s couldn't manipulate the music as they
could with vinyl.
A breakthrough came in July with the release of the Pioneer
CDJ-1000 Digital Vinyl Turntable. Featuring a
touch-sensitive jog dial that can be manipulated the same
way a D.J. does with vinyl - dragging a hand on the dial to
slow the tempo of the CD, using a finger or two to push it
faster, or "scratching" the CD back and forth, creating a
myriad of potential sounds through friction - the Pioneer
machine made believers out of many analog purists,
including New York D.J.'s like Aaron Albano, known as Ming,
and Freddie Sargolini, who goes by FS. Ming & FS recently
released an album of hip-hop and techno beats called "The
Human Condition" and have promoted it with frequent D.J.
appearances.
"You touch the plate and it reacts like you're touching
vinyl," Mr. Albano said. "If you run your finger on the
side of it, it slows down the platter, just like a normal
turntable." The pair still spin mostly vinyl, but they
experiment more than they did before.
"If we make a track now, we might do three or four
different versions," Mr. Albano said. "Maybe one will have
more bass, maybe one will be faster, and we'll play what's
right for the moment. If we hear a funny sample on the
radio or television, we might grab it and use it. We don't
have to go out and get records made. It's sped up the
creative process immensely."
Audio companies are rushing to embrace the fertile
intersection of two exploding markets: digital music and
D.J. culture. "Except for the engineers," said Brian
Buonassissi, marketing manager for Pioneer's pro audio
division, "everyone who works in marketing and product
planning are all D.J.'s." (Mr. Buonassissi himself spins
discs as Granmasta B in San Clemente, Calif.)
Because of the Digital Vinyl Turntable's price - $1,299,
with a street price of about $1,150 - "we expected we'd
only sell to professionals," Mr. Buonassissi said, but the
audience has proved to encompass "everyone from home users
to gearheads in search of a new toy."
If the gearheads are excited about the CDJ-1000, they may
flip their propellers at the thought of Final Scratch, a
$3,000 hardware-software package that went on sale last
week. The software is loaded on a Sony (news/quote) Vaio
laptop computer that is connected by a tiny processing box
to standard turntables. (A version without the laptop will
go on sale early next year for about $600.)
Conceived at a hacker convention in Amsterdam when some
programmers saw a D.J. run out of records after an hour or
so, Final Scratch allows the mixing and scratching of
virtually all formats of digital music to within a
millisecond of precision. And as those at Centro-Fly could
attest after hearing Mr. Hawtin's mix, it is impressive
when put to the test of an enormous sound system.
Mr. Hawtin says the best part about Final Scratch is that
it is all contained on his laptop. "I don't travel with a
CD burner, and if you start burning a lot of CD's, you run
into an organizational challenge," he explained. Mr.
Hawtin's 900 files are stored within the Final Scratch
software, broken down by subgenres and easily
cross-referenced by a variety of search categories.
With his frequent travel, having his whole set available on
his laptop creates time, in a matter of speaking. "In May,
I flew to England on a Saturday," he said, "played a gig,
flew back Sunday morning and had a gig that night in
Detroit. I had eight hours there and back. I went through
all my records, sorted out what I wanted to play in
Detroit, what I wanted to play in London, picked a couple
of tracks, re-edited them to create some special versions
and played them that night."
Mr. Hawtin is quick to praise the freedom and spontaneity
granted by the digital realm. "This lets us evaluate what's
happening in the world as quickly as possible now," he
said. "I can take a snippet of some news or a popular
record and throw it in the mix in a completely different
way."
At the same time, it is important to him that Final Scratch
works through standard turntables. "It gives me the
advantage of a physicality that not only I understand, but
the crowd understands," he said. "People understand what a
D.J. does now. It's just like how people became accustomed
to freaking out when someone did something cool with a
guitar. We don't lose that, but it opens these floodgates
to a whole new potential."
Some of the greatest potential revolves around much more
mundane issues than digital revolutions may inspire. Mr.
Hawtin carries two crates of records to his D.J. sessions,
each holding about 100 albums. "I'll be down to one crate
by the end of the year," Mr. Hawtin said. "The only reason
I'm carrying as much music as I am now is that there is a
time lag between when I get a record and when I can
digitize it. I have plenty of room in my laptop for tracks
I may only play once a year, but that one time I play it,
it will make the night."
Reducing the number of albums may turn out to be the
greatest advantage of all. "Do you have any idea," Mr.
Hawtin said with a laugh, "how much a crate of records
weighs?"
HOW TO ADVERTISE
---------------------------------
For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters
or other creative advertising opportunities with The
New York Times on the Web, please contact Alyson
Racer at alyson@nytimes.com or visit our online media
kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo
For general information about NYTimes.com, write to
help@nytimes.com.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Oct 25 2001 - 18:56:42 CEST