Vekked

hahaha table scratch, never thought of that. Mine is just simple pats with my fingers, TTM's scratch is like a faderless euro scratch... that vid is probs close to the fastest I can do that and TTM's scratch is probably double that speed still lol

I do hella waves these days in many combos. I don't have much video proof cuz I'm a hermit but I busted some in this jam in Chile. Various combos of 2 and 4 here, and I do some 6 forward earlier and a couple 8 forward at some point and fast reverse triplets. I don't bust any orbits, but I can. https://youtu.be/5826ocFuKzE?t=2m51s I kinda seem them like transforms now... Each tear/wave is just another click/note, I can keep going until I hit the needle, whatever number that is. I gotta give credit to EricUK on waves/bumpy knuckles. I haven't seen him for a minute but when I cut with him at Super Scratch Sunday 2 years ago he was doing wave patterns that I'm just starting to get now like clovers twice as fast as the ones I do in that vid. Enfoe + a lot of the french cats do a lot of wave combos too of course but some they seem to stick to 1 direction and don't mix it up with forwards and backs, so as you said there aren't tooo many examples of people doing orbits or waves in both directions.

Superseal was the OG great ahh. I like the newer Scratch Science ahhs too, but not the older ones. Ruck also put up a digital battle record thing with a single ahh that sounded really good and is pretty much the only one I've used in Serato and digital format because it sounds kinda warm and analog. Dislike a lot of the other skipless Dirtstyle ahhs, and UPR1 ahhs.

Nobodi smashed, some of Rob's stabs sound like cue pointing or copy/paste.

The Reloop RP-8000 straights may be a decent option too, they changed some of my criticism from the S-arms, but I haven't gotten a chance to try them yet. If you want S-arm I would look at the Mixars one, the ST-150, RP-7000, and maybe wait to see how the Denon deck is reviewed.

don't get the PLXs http://djtechtools.com/2016/02/15/2016-dj-turntables-buying-guide-dmc-world-champion/

Sorry Vekked, don't have it . I want it too! I might stoop to ripping this off Youtube and trying it with the vocal version: Oh damn, now that you post that I realized it's instrumental at the end, there wasn't a full instrumental released. Thanks!

Awesome, thanks Mike! You don't happen to have the MP3 for that KNT instrumental do you? I remember tracking it down and learning these patterns 5-6 years ago but I've since lost the track

It is pretty annoying that there's a market for this though, looks like they're making S9 carriers too. I never broke a fader since I got my 08 pro until my 62. Breaking fader stems seemed kind of rare, but now every week or 2 somebody has a broken Rane or Pioneer fader stem/carrier. At least with Rane you can swap out the channel faders into the x-fader spot, the Pioneer you're donezo if the x-fader breaks.

yea I've broke heaps of Rane faders and they've always replaced them quickly, still had a good experience with inMusic too although there was a couple months during the change over that Rane support was MIA in general, but the guys I've talked to since were really cool

No offense but all your suggestions are things that we've already tried and don't like. You're suggesting using hot cues on notes, which we've been doing for a decade and is a very limited way of making scratch melodies. Sure you can bounce all the notes really quickly but unless you just plan on cueing each note without trying to incorporate scratch techniques and styles into it, it's going to take a while to line all of the notes up properly and have them beat matched and close enough together to move the record between. And you're going to have to change them up every time you scratch on a different song with a new key/tempo. The fretless fader has dozens of scales and modes at every root note, etc all programmed in so you can take a single note and play over any song in any key without having to open a DAW. You can literally export a C-note and play over any key or tempo with it. I've tried the Digitech pitch shifters, the Boss pitch shifters, I've had 2 TC rack mount units with all their pitch shifting algorithms... They're not that good, and both Serato and Traktor do that within the software now, and do it better than the external units. Well, the guy in the video has broken 4 million views this past year and has won the most prestigious instrumental music award in the country for his turntable music, so I think a lot of people would disagree with you that he hasn't done anything note worthy, and he's doing pretty good without being a keyboard player or pad masher.

That's it. Even if you made cue points for every note you pitched it to, doing something as easy as baby scratches moving up a scale is way harder with cue points than it is with a fretless or controller one. Each method of pitch control has it's own strengths and weaknesses... The ideal solution is definitely some combination of a bunch of the options we have, and as time goes on we're getting more and more control over melodies as technology gets better and wizards like the guys here come up with more ideas on how to do it.

I'm not really sure what your argument is. At first I thought it was "what is the point of using turntables + pitch changing gear when you can just use a sampler instead of turntables". My point is we aren't pad mashers... aka we play turntables, not samplers. But here it seems like you're saying to use turntables with samplers? I'm not sure. I don't think there are "samplers that can be scratch in DVS" but I'm guessing you just worded that poorly. If you're saying you could just re-pitch all of your samples in a sampler, then scratch the notes on a turntable, then yes you're right, but that's a way longer process and you have to have it all planned out, whereas with controller one, fretless, etc, you can do it in real time without any prep work. So if you're asking "why would you do real-time pitching on the turntable when you could do hours of prep work and bounce a bunch of files back and forth?", your answer is there. How exactly are you going to do any of this stuff with a whammy pedal? Have you used a whammy pedal with scratching to try and play melodies? It's a cool pedal, but it's extremely limited in what you can do, and the re-pitching is wayyy worse quality than a fretless fader... I have both, and the whammy is a cool pitch effect that I nearly used in DMC last year myself (the first routine in Brace's video was originally a team routine idea that we cut where I was using a whammy pedal to play a version of that melody), the only advantage is extreme pitch changes with zero glide... so basically using it as a whammy. Both the controller one and fretless change the speed and pitch both, which is inherently going to be better than any effect algorithm that's trying to preserve the tempo and change the pitch. Speed a tone up 50% on a turntable, then use a whammy pedal to pitch the same tone up a perfect 5th and see if you can't hear any artifacts

We are turntablists, not pad mashers. I have infinitely more control over a record than a sampler... Think about how much more stuff you can do in real time with a single note on a turntable than you can do with that single note on a sampler. Now if you have pitch control, you can multiply all of those possibilities by how many different pitches you have. Probably the most relevant example recently is Brace using both the controller one and fretless to do a bunch of different styles of melodies that would probably be tougher to achieve otherwise, and nearly impossible to re-create identically:

Haven't tried that one, so definitely worth a shot, but my main fear with using digital pitch shifting is that the quality degrades pretty drastically as you go up or down in pitch, in my experience. The benefit of the fretless + PDX is that you're changing the playback speed of the sample and minimizing the negative artifacts of the pitch shifting process. But digitally pitch shifting has the benefit of changing pitch without altering speed for beat matched/tempo based sample. I think if you're after this, it's generally easier to use the built-in Serato/Traktor pitch shifting options than a pedal nowadays, unless you're going all analog of course.

Pop it into any DAW with a limiter and smash it until it's loud enough or it noticeably distorts.

The pitch shifting on guitar pedals isn't that great for turntable stuff cuz we use a much wider variety of frequencies and such that guitar pedals don't always handle well because they're optimized for guitar or bass. And controlling pitch in notes using an expression pedal is very difficult... It does have some merit, but only for a handful of notes, definitely not a replacement for a fretless fader.

Hmmm, the LPK has the mini/spongy keys as well and that's my main beef with it.

I don't have anything iOS but just out of curiosity why the launchkey for that purpose? It's made to work with iOS stuff? The roli blocks look interesting but I definitely want a keyboard interface of some sort. I found that I don't really use pads and such much and keys are way more intuitive for production for me. The Qunexus is kinda borderline because of that since it's not really keys, but it still has that sort of layout... still looking into it.

Considering picking up another 25-key keyboard for use with my DJ set/travel production. Right now I have the LPK25 which is dope but has it's good and bad Pro's: -Doesn't take up a lot of room so easy to throw beside a turntable or on a laptop stand to incorporate into my DJ setup. -It has a standalone arpeggiator which I really like and use a lot. It works with the PDX 3000 so it's great for jamming out ideas. Con's -The keys are mini-keys with pretty bad action overall. Not ideal for jumping back and forth between the turntable and keyboard on the fly, pretty easy to miss keys. Also don't feel nice for jamming melodies for production. -Basically no mappable buttons or features outside the keys and arp. Not a deal-breaker for me, but there are times when I wish there was a couple buttons/knobs or something. Here are the ones I've looked at as alternatives: CME Xkey 25 -from reading reviews it seems like it's actually decent to play and the keys are full size in area despite being really shallow. Seems like the thinnest possible midi keyboard, so would be good for carrying around. Qunexus 2 -definitely more on like a pad/keyboard hybrid. Pads as spread out and seem maybe easier to hit on the fly as a result. Can map vibrato and filters to the pads that could have some interesting implications. Also very small, a bit smaller than my LPK I think. Novation Launchkey mini/25 -More of a fully featured 25-key keyboard with pads, knobs, and other mappable buttons. Definitely the most powerful option, but they're quite a bit bigger than the other 3 options... So I'm not really sure if this is a great option for one to incorporate into my DJ setup given the size. But I haven't seen them in person/tried it, so maybe someone here has used one in their DJ setup? Anyways, anyone have experience with any of these? Hopefully at least one of them really sucks so I can narrow it down. Might end up just keeping the trusty LPK-25.

the video linked is someone who's not DJ Revolution faking the scratches over the original track... so don't try to learn from that. Revolution does a lot of chirps and 1 click flares for sure, I'd start there, but he's doing a lot of stuff in that track. It's mostly his style that makes it dope though, not the techniques so much.

Finally got around to proper backups. Got a 2TB external to back up all my other drives, and signed up for Crash Plan to back that up. This is my life right now, lol, been uploading for 3-4 days straight and another few weeks to go until it's all on there. Once it's up I should be good though because it will only be backing up a few gigs here and there.

Yea def compress the shit out of scratching. Pitch/speed/volume are all connect in a weird way with scratching, and I feel like compressing scratching doesn't necessarily suck the life out of it in the same way as it might with vocals or something. Like having high pitched chirps be louder than slow transforms isn't necessarily a dynamic that adds value to the sound, that's just how our instrument works. Chopping the kicks/hats/snares to different tracks and treating them differently helps too. Even further, I find myself putting the actual cuts on a separate tracks from spots where I drop the samples too, and treating those separately a lot. I do a lot of drum scratching for the cartoon I'm working on, and a common thing I do is take all the regular snare notes and put them on a separate track, and as many clean kicks as I can, and put them on a separate tracks, and have all the back scrapes/transforms/baby scratches on their own tracks. Obviously it depends on the style of drum scratching though, if the drums are made with fast chirp flares I might just treat them all as one because the kicks/hats/snares aren't necessarily distinct hits. It really comes down to how much time you want to spend and how much reward there is. You can probably try to EQ/compress/etc a lot of things as 1 track but if you're not happy with how they sound or how they're sitting then start chopping and copying stuff to a new track and get more precise until you're satisfied.

I think this is a REALLY good idea, but I'm not sure if the execution is there yet... The cap looks a bit awkward. But having controls on the fader could be so insanely useful. I think especially just the top and bottom the cap so you don't accidentally hit them while cutting, but there are so many times when I'd like to cue an effect or something mid-scratch without taking my hand off the record or fader, and this is a more efficient way than a footpedal. And think of doing loop station routines where you can start/stop loops right from your crossfader.

Yes.