Vekked

I've done a fair bit of digging into it myself and ended up reaffirming that scratching was invented by Grand Wizard Theodore. If you want to reach, William S. Burroughs recorded manually moving a tape of his voice back and forth in like the 50s or something so it was baby scratching of sorts, kind of, but not on turntables. The super relevant historical thing that most skeptics overlook when saying "somebody HAD to have scratched before GWT" is that most needles at the time were Elliptical because they sound better, and they couldn't play the record backwards, so even if someone had the idea, they couldn't do it. Spherical needles came about for radio DJs who needed to have tracks cued up right after advertisements so being able to pull the record back was an asset. However they were generally cheaper/shittier needles so anyone buying needles to listen would still get elliptical ones, unless they didn't have the money. However a lot of poor up and coming DJs would get them cuz that's all they could afford/get their hands on. So it kinda makes sense why it took so long with turntables being around before scratching was "invented". Aside from that, even if somebody else pull a record back and recorded it before GWT, they didn't invent scratching anymore than the first person to pluck a stretched string invented guitar, or the first person to put coloured liquid on paper invented painting. The actual art and the concept of developing it into a way of playing music like we do today can be traced directly back to him.

awesome dude, huge congrats!!

Was thinking of music rights/ownership and how sampling really confuses things even if it's legal. Say you make a song from a sample pack and a label picks you up and wants your song. They own the master recording of that song, but they can't really own the samples from it because they're not yours although you have the rights to use them. Say it's based off of a melody that's a straight 4 bar loop, they can't really own the recording of that sample or the melody. How could they stop you from just using the sample and melody again and doing whatever you want with it? I think music and composition "ownership" is kind of a wack concept anyway but thinking about this made me wonder how it would be enforced. Like what if artists sold the stems of their songs to themselves as a royalty free sample pack then signed to the label, how could the label stop them from re-using it however they wanted, including making a virtual cover of their own song? I dunno if I'm making sense, but I feel like recording and song writing rights are really tough to apply to sample based music where neither the recording of the sounds or melody are necessarily owned or made by the song's artist, and some samples and melodies are "un-ownable" by nature with things like creative commons and royalty free options.

I think it depends on the country, each one is slightly different with defending. 2nd has defended in Canaada before, but I can't recall 3rd defending something.

Tbh I think a lot of the issues in current DJ battles ARE because of lack of experience. Not with running battles in general, but with running battles in the DVS and Internet era where the landscape is much different. And I agree issues like you mentioned are a bad look for battling, but I disagree that somehow they make battling itself obsolete.

There's definitely budget issues with nearly every organization. Where exactly are any of them getting profit from? Barely any equipment company is giving money for sponsorship anymore and organizations can't live off gear. Now, whether their lack of $ and budget is ultimately their own fault or not... that's a different question. I think they could be making money if they took notes from rap battles/b-boy battles/etc. I don't see how DJ battles can be at their highest level of popularity but not have a bright future. DMC isn't battling, IDA isn't battling, and Thre3style isn't battling. They're all just organizations, and if they run themselves into the ground, other DJ battles organizations come up. It happens in rap battling and b-boy battling way more frequently. There's no other hip-hop battle organization that has been around as long as DMC (as far as I know). I see a lot of problems with current battling and organizations that I dislike... but the problems you listed aren't them. How does Q-bert not handing in his results in a battle affect the future of battling? Or a DJ battler cheating, getting caught, and stripped of his title? Or an organizer miscalculating the votes and then correcting it? Of course these things all suck, but unless any of them start happening regularly I don't really see the long-term consequences of 3 unrelated problems that were all solved. ...and the IDA/Q-bert thing isn't much of an issue at all IMO, I feel like this happens a ton in online battles has the same problems with judges turning in results including DMC Online, WSTC, and even in my experience running a few tiny online battles over the years. DMC Online has a judging pool of 50+ DJs and I know there are times they struggle to get 3 judges to turn in results for a prelim round when the deadline comes around.

Depending on headliners and such the DMC when it's at the Forum generally sells out, and IDA world also generally sells out, both around capacity 1500-2000 venues, I think. I don't think they would have many more people than that at a bigger venue still.

Hasn't it always been this way? Compared to DJ battles of the past, these current hiccups are nothing. ITF brought out some super classic sets from a historical point of view, but I've heard so many stories about how it was a huge shit show. -One year the team world finals were held in a hotel room. -Infamous was announced U.S. champ over Develop and they had to fix it. -Lil Jaz won ITF Worlds by default because they messed up DJ Shine's flight. -Some of the epic world final battles we see with A-Trak, Craze, etc had crowds of <50 people. I'm not sure why mistakes by organizations being negligent to some degree make battling obsolete either. I'd say they're more relevant than ever given that 2 of the most viewed battle routines of all time came out last year and this year. I've gotten booked for festivals all my DJ friends have been trying to get on for years based purely on my battling accomplishments, and try getting an equipment sponsorship as a newer DJ/non-legend without any battle titles. I'd chalk up most of the recent issues as being a result of 2 things: 1) Organizers being negligent because they're not DJs and have a detachment from the needs of battle DJs. 2) Organizers having good intentions but not having the budget to do things properly. I would say that most judging issues are a result of this... they don't have the money to fly a quality judging panel in for live battles, or pay them for incentive to judge properly for online battles. What do you do in IDA's shoes if Q-bert isn't giving his results? I guess you could replace him, but then you lose the appeal of Q-bert being one of your judges.

Yes it's illegal (in most places at least), and there's a "risk" of getting sued in the sense that theoretically you could... but think of it like this (disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer): it costs 1000s (maybe 10,000+?) for a label or something to sue you, so unless you're making that kind of money they're not going to lose money to sue you to prove a point. So even if you somehow got on their radar for selling your mixes. they'd have to actual put the time and money into suing you as well, which is very unlikely. This is just the general advice I've gotten from any veterans I've talked to about music copyright in general. Unless you're making real money you don't have much to worry about. The only person I've known of getting into copyright issues of all the people I've met so far is someone who actually looped a relatively well known song for a beat and submitted the song to a song writing competition thrown by the organization who is in charge of distributing music royalties. In other words, it took them being about as shameless as you possibly can be in order for them to get caught.

Might be unpopular opinion but I think Woody is quickly becoming the best... Nearly all of my old idols have fallen off hard, whereas Woody just keeps putting out dope stuff and getting better.

Not so soon... I'm gonna call it right now that VR arcades are gonna become a thing. One just opened up in my city and I was skeptical but decided to give it a shot and it's pretty damn fun, it seems like it's doing well too. Thinking about it, it kinda makes sense too where the average casual gamer (and even some hardcore ones) can't really afford a full VR setup, let alone one they can play with friends, so it's sort of the same reasons that I think regular arcades flourished at one point... Technology wasn't at the point where quality gaming was cheap and accessible to the masses. So I think until the price of VR stuff goes way down and multiplayer home VR becomes really accessible VR arcades are gonna be a thing. Of course eventually it WILL become cheap and accessible but for now not many people are investing in 4 x PCs, headsets, controllers to play with their friends.

Watch if you hate your life. More parts here: http://www.pyramind.com/training/blog/2016/8/4/elite-session-with-dj-vekked

Yea they addressed that. Not only that, but Thre3style has access to all the angles in full, not just the final edited one, so the decision makers got to sit down and watch angles that the public doesn't have from beginning to end. Hence why they know that his SP-6 volume was cranked when his gains were down (which means you would have a huuuge discrepancy in volume at the beginning when he uses th SP-6 and mixes into it), and they know that he wasn't hitting the hamster switch every time that he went between cutting and mixing, etc. So I don't really know what his goal is at this point. And he apparently isn't giving back the prizes/trophies/etc.

It's Stickybuds - Can't Deny It remix, or Deny It remix or something. It was released on vinyl a few years ago I know for sure, and I got it from the man himself, but I'm pretty sure it should be available somewhere. If not I can ask him if it's cool to shoot you the mp3

Haha, overall yea I put a lot of time into it, but when you put it in perspective some of the stuff near the beginning is from my 2011/2012 routines, so it's a bit less intense when some of it starts 5 years ago.

In case anyone wants to see me mix for some reason: https://vimeo.com/171126247

The Fresherthans

Just reading the last page of posts it seems like I pretty much just said stuff other people said lol

Took the Jesse Dean for a spin yesterday and met the man himself. I think it's pretty much as good as you're gonna get for a passive portable fader option (the bigger/battery powered options might be a different story when they drop). It's a lot looser than Raiden/Frisk, feels more solid, and the cut is nice. It actually feels more like a real fader instead of a toy, obviously not Innofader Pro/Pro-X/Rane fader quality, but probably would hang with the innofader mini, or solid analog faders in terms of quality. It pops slightly (as any passive fader is going to) but it's heaps better than the other options. He went into the science of it and said for best results you want to cut over a beat hooked through the Aux input to decrease the popping, rather than cutting over an external beat. Something about the audio input affecting the way the fader cuts and zero-summing... I'm not technical enough to understand, but I heard it. So that's just a heads up for people who hear more obvious popping when cutting acapella. Anyways, that's my review. No clue about durability or anything long-term obviously, but it's a big jump from the other 2 passive fader options out there at the moment.

There's variation in them. All vinyl has different feels even, and I notice DVS vinyl feels different even depending on the colour you get, or special editions or whatever... For ages I stuck with transparent purple cuz they felt best to me, but they stopped doing them, now I've been all over the map looking for them. I think the green Hifana ones that were vinyl on 1 side, Serato on the other were really light too... you just gotta try different pressings and see.

Yo did Vajra tell Monster Energy on you or what? Lol

So if it was SSL and we are compare it with actual SDJ with pitch'n time we could find some differences... Knowing the setups (hard/soft) to find what was making it "best". Sad to know Pitch' time fucks scratching. Thanks for point it to me, I will share the knowledge next time Yea it's REALLY good at keeping music in key and time stretching, but it tries to also correct the pitch for your scratching aggressively, so you get weird pops and glitches a fair bit. You wouldn't notice for cuts during mixes, but you would for hardcore cutting or routines.

Pitch n time only hurts scratching, that's def not the problem.

Make sure in the calibration you don't set it too far to either side. Too far to the right (I think, maybe left) will make it so as soon as you do a drag, the signal cuts out and the sample stops moving. Too far the other way causes the sample to slowly creep around and move even if you're holding it still because it's too sensitive and picking up room vibrations. New SL boxes I believe have the same guts as the 62 so should perform similarly.

Totally. That was the entire goal of him entering. Brace is a straight up award-winning musician outside of the DJ scene, and after last year he said he might try DMC Online, and I was like do it, but do it YOUR way. He's not just using the fretless fader and Controller One as a gimmick for the battle, that's how he makes his music and performs live. Too many guys try to pander to a "DMC style routine". I think a dude should be able to come in with 1 turntable and a loop station and win if he rips it harder enough. Routines like this one really help to highlight the fact that insisting on Technics is holding DMC back a bit. If Brace wins, do you think he'll compete in London with a routine that's been 'translated' to 1200s and no pedals/fretless? Or will he showcase? Yea we talked about that because obviously a decent amount of his routine won't really translate well to 1200s... Like the last routine would be pretty worthless if he can't use the fretless OR cut both decks through 1 side. Probably gonna decide when he crosses that bridge.