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How long it takes to get good at scratching


ericuk

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Phil said on another post about me cutting 10+years and (jokingly I hope) said he would never be that good if it takes that long.

 

The crazy thing is, is that I've had decks for nearer to 20 years! Progress hasn't been linear either. Motivation, time, other commitments and interests have either pushed me to practice more or pulled me away from DJing all together.

 

I find that progression has come in bursts. If I've discovered something new or been inspired to try something different, progress doesn't take that long. These moments of inspiration are far and few between though.

 

The months of being stuck in a rut and running through the motions are the periods that hinder progress. These periods normally last about 10 months of the year for me haha.

 

The other factor is our ability to learn new things, take on new concepts and put things into practice. It's easy to get comfortable with what you know and can do, to the point where it's bad habits that prevent learning because autopilot kicks in and you get nowhere.

 

I guess the discussion now should be how long do you think it takes to 'get good'?

 

The question is vague of course but I'm sat in an opticians with a long wait ahead and it was either start a post about scratching or vr porn! :)

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Guest Symatic

If youre dopez, 2 years, everyone else, i dunno like if you were focused maybe like 5 years? but i been cutting for like 15 years now and only recently started liking stuff i was doing

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Guest Symatic

I think theres other things that its important to learn to get a full understanding of scratching tho. Like people who are good on other instruments and production are often very good learners and scratchers

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Guest It'sPhilFromThursdays

I was only joking folks, to end that bit of suspense.

 

Depends on how mch you practice and who you practice with, too. Jeff Butterfingers was a bit Dopez-esque in getting good quickly, but then he had all us lot teaching him and went to some vestax scratching school Jazz T and Muzzell were teaching, but he does have a high learning curve too.

 

As an aside I've had decks 20 years too, Derick! (but i had a 6 year period (2005-2011) in which i couldn't practice cos of arm and back being all jacked up which fucked me up a bit and led me to have to build up lots of muscles again for ages which slowed me up).

 

You're right though about progress being non-linear. It's odd, like i felt like i was doing really awesome cuts for the past few months but have felt really lacklustre the past 3 weeks or so.

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There's a cool book called 'Mastery' that talks about this stuff and how what we learn is a series of peaks and troughs. If you're learning new techniques, you actually get worse at what you're doing as you are trying to master the new techniques. Then you get them down and assimilate them in to your (in the case flow) you start to see improvement again. I feel like I've practiced a lot and not really got to where I'd like to be in that amount of time. But then again, I don't think im particularly musical or any thing. Having turntables as your first "instrument" kind of sucks as there's not as many pre defined things to practice as other instruments, in my opinion.

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great topic Eric!
I got my first belt drives around '95, got £1000 inheritance money and without a moment's hesitation picked up 2x technics and the technics mixer around '98, so that's prob when I started messing with scratching, backspinning etc. It's funny how just with people saying "oh you can't scratch on belt drives" you just don't bother trying, there's probably loads of hand control I could've learnt in hindsight.

 

Weirdly i always defined (subconsciously, never really analysed it I guess) "good at scratching" as what techniques someone did. Kind of like, "fuck that's hard to do, they must be great"...So I always thought just adding techniques was the way to go. Bar difficult record hand movements /nice combos I was pretty happy I could emulate most tricky techniques and therefore "mastered" some scratches to some extent. But couldn't bear to listen to my own cuts, so pretty quickly realised something was up! Now my focus is solely on avoiding repetition, hand control and recording myself a lot to see if I can just about get through listening/watching my cuts!

The funny thing though with all that focus on techniques, it only takes watching someone who's mastered joe cooley's, chirps, or tears with their strong hand for example to re-evaluate your cuts and make you realise it's erm, not what you have, but what you do with it!

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some people do seem to have the "decks factor" :8

 

I've been getting back into chords and keys of recent days... while I can see and hear I'm no chick corea, there's a tonne of theory available to learn, scales, progressions etc. I've wasted my life with bleep ahhhh fresh haha

 

This leads me to wonder how much info is really available for zee scratching, that's accurate, well documented and can be taught/learned?

 

Why are there so few ppl at Qbert's level? I guess there are far less people trying to master turntables compared to keyboard players for a start!

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I keep coming back to the idea that there's a lot of ways to basically make the same sounds. At some point the differences are so subtle that nobody really notices. I always just wanted to sound decent enough on the cut so that my mixes and production didn't get fucked up with wack cuts. The thing is, I got so addicted to scratching that I got more technical than I would have expected. I ended up neglecting the production side of things to scratch.

 

Anyway, it didn't take me all that long to make some simple shit sound pretty good but I'm never satisfied that my complex stuff sounds good enough.

 

So yeah, 2 years?

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Guest broke

Now my focus is solely on avoiding repetition, hand control and recording myself a lot to see if I can just about get through listening/watching my cuts!

I'm not talking about rinsing the same combo for eight bars, but IMO the concept of repetition is important, it provides structure.

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Now my focus is solely on avoiding repetition, hand control and recording myself a lot to see if I can just about get through listening/watching my cuts!

I'm not talking about rinsing the same combo for eight bars, but IMO the concept of repetition is important, it provides structure.

 

 

As the Ruck once said, it's harder to do the exact same thing over and over than it is to bust a bunch of complicated, varied flow.

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Weirdly i always defined (subconsciously, never really analysed it I guess) "good at scratching" as what techniques someone did. Kind of like, "fuck that's hard to do, they must be great"...So I always thought just adding techniques was the way to go. Bar difficult record hand movements /nice combos I was pretty happy I could emulate most tricky techniques and therefore "mastered" some scratches to some extent. But couldn't bear to listen to my own cuts, so pretty quickly realised something was up! Now my focus is solely on avoiding repetition, hand control and recording myself a lot to see if I can just about get through listening/watching my cuts!

 

The funny thing though with all that focus on techniques, it only takes watching someone who's mastered joe cooley's, chirps, or tears with their strong hand for example to re-evaluate your cuts and make you realise it's erm, not what you have, but what you do with it!

Guilty myself!

 

I think this blog entry is kind of in the same vein: http://www.cruiseshipdrummer.com/2017/06/very-occasional-quote-of-day-mastery.html

 

you have to create with whatever abilities you have at the moment, and you have to do that from the beginning. You don't learn a laundry list of skills— which gets longer every year— and then start being a creative artist. You can do real playing at virtually all levels of technical skill.

 

The nice thing about drilling a technique is that the progress you make seems measurable and so you feel like it's controlled practice (e.g. "not stumbling over the 2-click movement at X BPM"). Things like smooth record movements, ease of finger movement and so on are less quantifiable and learning it makes you feel bad at times because it's endless (if I listen to my slowest possible baby scratches, I'm not really amused by what I'm hearing but this is probably what should be practiced :) )

Learning new techniques and getting things into your memory muscles is just the first step - to make progress, you need to re-evaluate what you're doing over and over and make small changes to what you already know. The same goes for rhythmic accuracy.

 

So, I guess there is enough information already out there (record yourself, forget about technique and think in phrases, practice the basics every day) but it's not very rewarding as you're constantly questioning your abilities and don't have as much fun while practicing as compared to noodling away over a loop.

 

TL;DR: Haven't practiced pretty much any scratching over the last two years, what the hell do I know?

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Take a look at how skateboarding has progressed and compare it to scratching. It makes sense that newer turntablists will get better, faster.

 

1. Higher Skill-Cap + Larger participant pool. When greater numbers of people can do a difficult technique, the less difficult/mysterious it becomes (at least mentally). Impossible tricks are now difficult. Difficult tricks become hard. Seeing is believing, and without YouTube some techniques would still be a mystery. Eliminating discouragement is key and gives you a reason to persist.

 

I had to buy skate videos on VHS to learn tricks and it was a slow process. Today, you can google it.

 

2. Exposure. Scratching with other people helps you improve no doubt. How the hell did DJs find each other before the internet?

 

3. Inclusion. Helping out another and paying it forward is "cool" these days. Remember DJs were crabs in a bucket and everything was a secret?

 

4. The X-Factor / Outlier. Maybe you began scratching when you were young and didn't have bills to pay (I mean no disrespect to any in this group). Maybe you were born into a family of turntablists with access to a record shop. Maybe you have no bones in your record hand and a bionic fader hand.

 

5. Raw Talent. I never underestimate this. Some people just have a gift for something and only need a little direction to refine it. Once they discover where they can apply that raw talent, the rest is downhill from there.

 

Of course there is always dogged hard work that is never seen, and perhaps the real skill is making it look easy?

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The number one tip that i usually get is that one needs to learn to be "original" however, in my personal opinion i feel like it usually all starts with imitating our favorite Djs or producers but over time, you then sought of try to develop your own sound? Is this true? :unsure:

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Guest rasteri

I'm not talking about rinsing the same combo for eight bars, but IMO the concept of repetition is important, it provides structure.

There's a Qbert vid where he talks about making your scraches "Rhyme", where you repeat the same rhythm every bar or half bar, but with slight variations.

 

Also if you fuck up, you can repeat your fuckup a half-bar later and it looks like you did it on purpose.

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Guest broke

 

I'm not talking about rinsing the same combo for eight bars, but IMO the concept of repetition is important, it provides structure.

There's a Qbert vid where he talks about making your scraches "Rhyme", where you repeat the same rhythm every bar or half bar, but with slight variations.

 

Also if you fuck up, you can repeat your fuckup a half-bar later and it looks like you did it on purpose.

 

giphy.gif

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Fucking LOL @ Broke!

 

I'm totally down with the repetition thing. I think some people have a tendency to try and bust out absolutely everything they know, during a solo, and then inevitably hit a point where they've forgotten what techniques they know and start reverting back to the stuff they're comfortable with. That's when the kind of repetition you don't want kicks in.

 

If you use controlled, deliberate repetition, as Broke and Rasteri have described, you create something worth listening to and with that comes the added bonus that you've only used a handful of techniques. Chile's heuristic vids are really helpful for this.

 

Not sure how well I explained that... :huh:

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Guest Symatic

I saw a vid on FB the other day where the Beat junkies institute of sound was teaching a massive room of kids by demonstrating a scratch for a bar, then the room of kids would all copy for a bar..... pretty standard way of teaching i guess. but it was getting panned for "creating clones" or some shit.

 

but how would the critics of that vid suggest you teach a room full of kids to scrath? "here you are kids, heres a set of turntables but dONT YOU DARE COPY MY STYLE BITCH!"

 

really the video made me think of this type of teaching which doesnt seem all bad:

 

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