Vekked

I'm on the hunt for better monitors as soon as I get done putting some more acoustic treatment in my room. I have KRKs right now but they're not very neutral and I have to revise mixdowns a lot to play live. Obviously this is my skill level too, but getting better monitors will at least take out part of the issue. Right now in my price range I'm looking at: Adam A7x Genelec 8040/8330 (not sure the difference between those models yet tbh) Focal Shape 65 I've also heard Dynaudio and Neumann thrown around in that price range. So firstly I'm looking for any first hand experience of any of these, or other recommendations. Secondly... how do you even shop for monitors when you don't get to bring them home and try them in your room? Should I just buy/return every set I'm interested in until I find what I want?

It's likely technique, you shouldn't be tossing/bouncing the faders so much as guiding them to the side and letting go. If your faders are insanely tight cut-in and insanely loose, it could be the faders, but it depends how much success you've had juggling on other mixers/faders to know.

thanks mates! ended up getting it all sorted out

Is there anything happening DMC weekend? Unfortunately won't be around til the next weekend this year

Ok sweet, that's better than nothing for sure!! Now not to be greedy, but does anyone in the area have 2 sets of turntables?? Still having trouble working out a practice spot, we kinda need it because we live across the continent now so haven't practiced much.

Me and Brace are flying in Thursday for DMC and are looking for a place we can practice for a couple days, because living across North America we haven't got to practice our material since DMC Online haha. Anyone have a spot or a link for one? And tbh hotel prices are nutso in London so if anyone has a couch for a Canadian road dog/wants to split a place on nights other than DMC night...

I'll be der

You should be excited, the first product is a standalone portable scratch looper that syncs to a cloud and automatically notifies senior citizen battle DJs when to take their meds so they don't get caught up in a scratch session and forget. PT01 mounts for wheelchairs and walkers soon after.

God I want this too. Flip was a cool step in the right direction of having basic editing features in DVS but it's such a hassle to open a DAW every time I just want to combine a couple files together.

While I don't disagree with you there, that's something I work on outside of this opportunity . And I don't think an equipment manufacturer can do anything about that. Tbh I've been finding modern DVS annoyingly limiting lately. Prepping for the Goldie Awards was the hugest mess of mapping bugs and workarounds just to get relatively simple stuff working. Like you would think using a keyboard to transpose the a sound, and using a video game controller to cue point should be relatively straight forward to do. Instead it took me 20+ hours of hacking into XML midi files, backing up test files over and over, and learning whatever language Serato uses to code their midi files, just so I could get 2 controllers working at once reliably without conflicting with each other, crashing, or wiping mapping mid-set. We have TONS of equipment, software, and controllers made with the modern DJ in mind, but I still feel like not much is made with turntablists in mind, and we have to do a lot of hacky workaround stuff just to make it do what we want. The obvious reason is that most equipment companies don't really listen to, or cater for, turntablists. But that brings us to this thread, because I found one that might.

*should exist but doesn't, fml

I've been working on/looking into a mobile production setup as well. Korg Gadget is super powerful for iPhone and iPad. It's $55 but if you get the app "App Shopper" (which everyone buying pricy apps should have - it notifies you when sales start, and shows you a detailed history of the price drops and increases for every app), you can put an app in and wait until it goes on sale. Korg holds 50% off sales 3x per year and I grabbed it for $27 then. It comes with a bunch of built-in Korg synths and replica synths/drum machines (enough that I don't want any other iOS synths for now), and the interface has been a lot nicer for me on the iPhone plus than other DAW options. So far it's the only DAW that I feel like I could sort of maybe make an actual track with it ALSO if you use Ableton live, you can actually bounce a project to .ALS and open it up directly on your computer. Huuuge plus for me. Medly is also a cool app if you're just composing midi on the piano roll. It has the easiest/most advanced iOS piano roll I've seen and you can whip down melodies and chords fairly easy then export them. I wish the Gadget had some more multi-touch piano roll options and a bit less menu diving/tool switching. Right now my favourite piece of gear is the X-key Air, so I have to plug it: http://www.cme-pro.com/xkey-air/ It has full-size keys but they're only like half a cm high, the whole thing is about the size of my Apple keyboard with the same colour scheme. It's bluetooth and connects to iOS seamlessly. It's also the keyboard I use at my live shows now because it doesn't take up another USB input. It looks like it would feel awkward but it feels sooo much better than any midi keyboard with "micro" keys, it takes up a smaller footprint than 95% of micro key ones and 100% of other full sizes, and takes up less bag space than any midi keyboard I've found because it's soooo thin. I haven't jumped to an interface yet, BUT I noticed that Apogee has the Jam which is made for iOS, and I'm pretty sure the Uno and Duo are also iOS compatible? I haven't tried them or read reviews, but I know they're among the best for Mac, so I assume there's a good chance their iOS interfaces are top notch as well.

I've been working on getting the chance to develop DJ products with a company for a while, and it looks like I might get that chance. I'm guessing that if we actually work on something, it will be something with a smaller price point like a few hundred dollars for now. It probably won't be anything big like a new mixer or turntables... But they do have a lot of effects algorithms and controller patents and available. I'm just trying to brainstorm some ideas for cool stuff that I'd like to see/they would see the point of making. Obviously don't give me any ideas that you don't want to have stolen without compensation haha. I'm treating it like a chance to *maybe* create a useful product for turntablists that might not exist otherwise.

so sick, I really like what he has going on their with the mapping stuff, clever and musical

Thanks dude! Honestly I felt pretty over my head at times (mostly the beginning), so glad that it doesn't come across like that LOL Let's get nerdy haha. So basically going into it I sort of fell into the position. Someone saw my youtube video, ask me to jump in the audition pool, I spent heaps of time scoring a 3 minute clip with a few different scenes and ended up winning it. Their reference artists were Kid Koala, Shadow, Cut Chemist, DJ Q-bert so for me I felt like they actually WANTED to hear scratching in a lot of stuff, so that's what I did... Apparently it was true. I'm not sure how many minutes I ended up with but probably 70-80 full beats/tracks, a few dozen transition tracks of like 3-5 seconds, a bunch of sound effects and scratch/brake/backspin sounds. The biggest challenge was definitely keeping up with the deadlines and learning to translate their requests from non-musician/DJ speak to scratch music. At first I was trying to make masterpieces, spending hours and hours per 30 second track, and they'd just be like "nah, try something else" and I was like man I spent so much time on that!! So I ended up creating a workflow and limitations so that I could stick to the schedule better. For me generally it was: no more than 4 tracks + FX/embellishments, chopped or scratch break for drums, moog bass, main melody or sample, and lead vocal or scratch bit. So a typical track would be: 1) Lay down the drum scratching. 2) Play moog bass with Monark VST (I rarely scratched the bassline cuz they take up a lot of the frequncy range when you do that) 3) Find a dope catchy sample, or synth line. 4) Final scratching... like "hey" or "yo" or "ugh" because I can't use any obvious english. 5) Add sweeps/filters/noise effects to fill it out. This way it forced me to do as much as I could with a few tracks and kept me away from making 30+ track songs that weren't realistic to make every few days. The other challenge was interpreting their requests. I'd get "make something that's like X in X style", and it would be like make Peter and the Wolf a trap song, or make a bill withers track a house song, or make a disco style police theme song. Then sometimes my feedback would be "I like it, but put it up an octave". It took a while for me to be able to interpret what they were asking for and put that into a song. Particularly in the case of "put it up an octave" I realized it basically meant make it more hype... so faster or crazier hats or something haha. I'd say that a big part of scoring seems to be translating and interpreting the requests of the directors. I'm not sure if I had to be tighter for this than live... Like the recording couldn't have mistakes and stuff like you can get away with live, but on the other hand you can just hit record 100 times until you get it right, and tighten things up post. So the end result is a lot tighter. I got better at hitting takes quicker as I went too. The biggest skill that it improved for me was production in general. I took the job with the plan to use it as a way to get better with Ableton and speed up my workflow and I did just that. It was sort of like a training ground for music. I got in the habit of creating tracks and finishing them, mixing them down, sometimes light mastering, so I wasn't just tinkering around with midi and chopping samples... I had to actual get stuff to a point where I could send them off. I'm not a super beast at it yet but I definitely feel more comfortable in getting a finished product than I did. I have a rough workflow for mixdowns and make sure I check things over like all my bass is side chained nice and I've got an EQ on every track cutting out frequencies I don't need, and all of my drums and chops have their transients and no pops in them... Pretty standard stuff but it takes some experience to get in the habit of crossing your T's and dotting your I's for every track like that.

Good find! Haha that's dope that someone like it enough to rip it from the TV and upload it. That one has the logos from the station and such. Would be sick if it got picked up for season 2 because then it has a chance of going international.

Thank guys Haha nope I was grinding the whole time but they got a bit stricter on what we could talk/post about so I was pretty quiet. I probably said a bit too much at the start lol. If it's not I wish I knew because all I really had for reference was Wavetwisters (which was a pretty good reference since this cartoon is also set in space). Yep Kid Koala did the theme ages ago while it was still a pilot and before it was picked up fully. I imagine they didn't have the budget to get him for the entire season, hence me lol. I did a theme as well before I knew they already had it, I might post it eventually if I get permission (it ended up being used in other parts of the show).

I tried to stay pretty true to "scratch music" and not just scratching a sound over a regular beat for the most part. Of course deadlines and post-production made it so this isn't the case but there's a lot of beats that are scratch drums/melody/sample/effects. They have all the stems though and sometimes they would mute layers depending on how much other audio was happening in the scene. Also I wasn't allowed to use distinguishable english or copyrighted sounds so a lot of it I had to sound design myself or source sounds from friends/royalty free sample packs.

ughhh... well here's a clip that I spliced together for now: https://www.instagram.com/p/BX6GEp-Drxq/

hahaha so lame... but so effective sooo hard to pull that off, gotta have so much faith in the other person hitting their spots and/or recovering in time if they're a bit loose

Enjoy

Yea for their podcast it does.

Made a mix with my homie Trapment, the Thre3style world runner up last year. Has heaps of scratching and some of my own production. Has to be 80% music from DJ city, so it's pretty commercial but hopefully there's something enjoyable in there... https://news.djcity.com/vekked-and-trapment-drop-djcity-podcast-mix/

Also Sy, isn't he just doiing really nice tap tears, it doesn't look like he's using his thumb to me, but i might be a wrongist. Solve this mystery Jake! Tigerstyle does them with his thumb too. And some people use the bend up to create the "click" and some use the bend down to create it... They're all variations of the same technique but I think for this scratch it's especially dependent on your hand size/finger length etc to see what ergonomically makes the most sense. I have tiny baby hands and Vet's fingers are each 10 inches +, so if we do the exact same movement it's probs gonna sound/look different by nature.