jeljms

I think Chmielix had a nicer flow overall.

Two djs with really similar cutting styles, making it extra hard to choose between them. But I think Biox just edged it.

Yeah, that is an incredible record - forgot about that one!

Nothing's official yet so don't write off Vestax as completely dead...yet.

Well done to all. Particularly pleased that chin machine and Biox made it through - I thought they were the standout performances but they were all close battles. Roll on round 3!

I went for Symatic - preferred his flow to Jimmy P's.

Oh man - best battle of the round. I'm going with chinmachine but both should go through!

Dopez had a bit more variation.

Redmist was good but Biox killed it.

I remember when the 07 came out and then the pdx 2000 and they were holding their own dj championships as well - they were on top of their game then. They also made the best controllers but I thought something was up when they stopped releasing new gear and just different colour versions of their controllers.

Sounds like a good idea but I reckon top 8 would be fine with this as I don't think there would be as many entrants as the scratch battle - it's just a more specialised skill and would require more prep to enter.

From the earlier days of uk rap, battlecreek brawl by Gunshot was phenomenal as was airwave hijack by hijack (as well as pretty much any London Posse track from that period) but the tracks that really got me into the next wave of uk hip hop in the late 90s were Earth Rulers by Phi Life Cipher and Twilight of the Gods by Skitz.

For me, golden age of hip hop in the US was from 1987 (starting with Paid in Full and Criminal Minded) through to the early nineties. By the mid 90s the consistency started tailing off and the underground hip hop that represented the next wave in the late 90s and early 00s just didn't have the same energy or imagination that the first 13-14 years of hip hop on record had. There was still quality stuff being released but you had to work harder to find it. I don't even bother with hip hop today - it's not worth the effort.

What an unusual and hilarious way of doing the round 2 draw! I just assumed that you'd just take the eight names and put them in a hat and someone would pull them out at random but your way was far more entertaining!

A questionnaire seems like a good idea. Running with Tags' idea for a minute, maybe the samples could be the same from round 2 onwards. Then you wouldn't get ahh or fresh overkill. But I really enjoyed the mix of beats and samples in round 1, particularly with so many entries it allowed DJs to more easily stand out and differentiate themselves from the pack.

Yeah. That element of the battle isn't going to change. It's not about giving certain DJs exactly what they want in every round. They'll get that in some rounds, then in others they won't. Does this scratching suck cos it's not double-time over a slow beat or single-time over a fast beat?..... That beat is only a few BPM faster than the one in round 2 of the battle. I didn't think there was anything wrong with the round 2 beat - it was just a comment about a preference for slower beats (60 - 80 bpm) that a lot of djs have. I personally prefer something uptempo to listen to but mixing up the tempos from round to round in a battle makes perfect sense.

Is the idea to get djs through that have similar cutting styles, though? I think mixing it up makes the competition more interesting so I'd like to see a faster beat rather than the ultra slow ones that a lot of djs seem to prefer to scratch on.

Maybe change up the criteria a bit - 70% for technicality/flow v 20% originality seems a bit uneven. I'm not even sure technicality and flow should be together either. I ended up choosing the ones that stood out as being a bit different as a lot of the more technical entries (often performed to slower beats) sounded too similar to each other. I'm hoping that there are a good mixture of styles that make it through to the next round.

Damn, that was hard! Getting it down from about 20 to just 8 was painful but here's my final selection; 1. Tieno 2. Akiko Luv 3. P-Nuts 4. Chinmachine 5. Mighty Atom 6. Select 7. Backtrack 8. Waxdestroyer Jel

Hi, I'm Jel. I live in the UK and have been into scratching since about 1998 in terms of just following the turntablism scene out of my own interest but without doing it myself. I finally started when I bought tts in about 2007 but don't get a lot of time to practice now as I have a young family who take up most of my non-work time. Still, I like to scratch now and then just for fun and would like to improve my skills a bit.