Jam Burglar

I would say my natural ability on the cut is mediocre at best. I would put my overall skill at scratching at slightly above average based solely on consistent practice over a long period of time. One thing I don't hear a lot of people talk about is many hours of practice crammed into a small chunk of time. It's these guys who practice 5 hours a day for a few years that really seem to take off. I've definitely seen glimpses of that in my progression. In the early 2000s I was maybe doing 1-2 hours a day and that lead to speed and tightness that I don't get from my 15-45 minute sessions these days. I'm maybe in the minority in that I almost never go more than a few days without touching the decks, and I've been scratching for over 2 decades. I've steadily progressed overall but if I dedicate a lot of time in a short period I can hear it in my cuts. If I stop, I lose some of that speed/tightness/smoothness.

My attempts at making scratch music are still pretty raw, and I get why it's not everybody's cup of tea, but making scratch music and recording for production are where find myself I pushing my equipment the most. For turntables, I like the Controller 1's pitch shifting functions and I wish there were more options out there for note shifting turntables. Right now, the reloop has been the only one but I don't think those pads are as well laid out as the buttons on the C1. I'd love to see a company one-up the C1. Something as simple as a button to switch octaves would be helpful. For mixers, my main issue is the lack of routing options to integrate outboard effects and other equipment. It's becoming very hard to find a mixer with an effects loop because everyone is trying add digital effects to the mixers. I wish somebody made a 3 or 4 channel mixer that's as good as some of the 2-channel mixers out there to add drum machines and whatnot. I'd like to see more built-in looping functions on mixers too. I'm in the minority but my default mode tends to be pretty mad scientist and that usually involves hooking up a lot of shit to a mixer and trying to make it work together. I feel like my equipment never quite does what I want it to do.

That SUCKS! They sold out so fast. I was able to get on some sites Shadow never linked to to find mine, but that was weeks ago. I think I saw the 7" available as recently as last week on Amazon. These limited runs kind of annoy me.

Totally agree with what DSwift (RIP) says above. If you can't hear a difference it doesn't matter and there are different levels of control you're going to get depending on how you execute things and what combos you are using. For what its worth, D-Styles is a big proponent of the pinch/wrist style due to control of the click placement. Speed is one thing, but when you're using the pinch/wrist you can more accurately place the clicks for different sounds. Also, a lot of the scratch combos that have evolved since 2005 require discipline with your clicks, where you're varying up the number of clicks instead of just orbiting. The pinch method is going to be a lot more conducive to those types of cuts.

Don't know how I missed this. Dope Dan!

I felt very similar and that's one reason I joined. Just trying to break out of the box a little bit.

Oh crap. Sorry JHouse. Don't know how I missed this. I paid $360 for a 1-year subscription ($30/month) for the record pool and beat junkies TV. They do 2-for-1 deals like that pretty frequently and it's the cheapest way to get the beat junkies TV subscription. If you're on IG just message D-Styles and he'll give you the info. Apparently Babu was breaking down reverse autobahns the the other day. D has been breaking out these longer combo patterns. Lots of "mirror" and "reflection" patterns. There's some larger conceptual stuff he goes into on occasion where I'm like "damn, I never thought of that!".

My understanding is that Atmos was designed specifically for in-ceiling "height" speakers. They are dedicated channels, just like a surround channel or a center channel that are supposed to be assigned to separate speakers that fire downward from above. Some floor speakers and soundbars try to "cheat" around the need for true, in-ceiling speakers by firing sound upward to get bounced off the ceiling. Whether that works well depends on the room so your mileage may vary. Soundbars do a similar thing with surround by bouncing sound off of a back wall. If you don't have a back wall, or your back wall is filled with your stuffed animal collection, those reflections are not going to happen. So, if you're not getting good results, it might make sense to turn off the features that try to make the soundbar do that type of thing. Most gaming systems/TVs/receivers allow you to adjust stuff like this in the setup. DVDs and BluRays often have sound settings too. It's possible the soundbar even has its own settings.

My homie who designs audio systems for Crutchfield says they are a good alternative if you can't have/don't want real, separate speakers. Obviously, they're never going to be up to par with a true 5.1/7.1/atmos setup.

Oh, and Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince "Just Rockin'"

Crash Crew! "On the Radio"

Qbert put out a DVD a good while ago that has lots of techniques but I could never get into it. I think it's called "Scratchlopedia Breaktanica" I highly recommend joining Beat Junkies TV. They have tutorials on tons of scratches but the classes have even more. They hold classes 7-days a week and you can watch them on replay. I've been taking scratch lessons from D-Styles for about a year now. I've learned so much stuff.

D-Styles is a big fan of them.

If I were you I'd look for a Stanton STR8-150.

I always liked the consistency between decks for doubles in the middle of a mix set. With the M5G if a record is on +3 or something I can throw on the double, set the pitch at +3, and I'm pretty well set. With the M3D it could be off at times. Not that it matters all that much but the consistency is nice.

Like Deft, I tend to do some really long blends. I'll do that with all types of tempo ranges though. I've never been much of a house/techno guy so the pitch ranges I use are much more likely to be 80 - 120 bpm. And I'm not one of these people who just mixes for hours and hours either, but when I make mixtapes, I tend to do some longish mixes and I am relatively picky about making sure my mixes hold. Anyway, I had Technics 1200 MK2s, then went to 1200 M3Ds (which I still have) and then to the 2010 M5G. I had no issues coming from the fully analog M3D to the M5G (which was some type of hybrid if I remember right). The only real noticeable difference I found was that the M5Gs were always much more consistent as far as the amount of pitch change you would get along the fader and with each other. With MK2s and M3Ds, you would frequently have a situation where +3 on one deck was the same as +2 on the other. This could be really drastic at times. Back in the day we used to try to get decks with really close serial numbers so that they were "matched" better. At some points along the pitch slider they would more or less match up (typically +/-8% and a few other spots), but in other places they'd be considerably off. My M5Gs, on the other hand, are much more consistent as far as the keeping the same amount of pitch adjustment as you move up and down the fader, and also are more consistent with each other. Somewhere on youtube I remember seeing somebody showing how one of the newer technics don't hold the pitch as well. I can't say I've personally noticed that issue but it's always possible. I've even gone as far at times as to record a mix and then go back and look at the wave forms to see how the transients are matching up. I just never had any really issues with pitch-hold. Maybe I'm not mixing on the level of some of these techno guys, but that's my perspective. My thinking is that you have 3 variables: 1) Consistency from deck to deck 2) Consistency of the amount of pitch change as you go up and down the slider 3) Ability to hold pitch I imagine 3 is the most important and that's what I suspect people are complaining about but I've never had a problem with the M5Gs in that regard. The dope thing BY FAR with the M5G is the +/-16% pitch range. For scratching/turntablism they're way more versatile.

I'll tell him you said that!

Back in the day there was an East Coast DJ Crew called "Muzik Fiendz". There were a bunch of members but the ones I remember were DJ Gutter, T-Dawg, DJ Ragz, Shiro and DJ Select. I have known Ragz and Select since the late 90s. These guys are pretty much contemporary with the 1200 Hobos (Mr. Dibbs, John Doe, Buck 65, Sixtoo, etc.) Most of them have been cutting since the late 80s and early 90s. Gutter (who now goes by "Gold Voltron") created the modern day slipmat for scratching (2-part mats with a slick side on the bottom and thin felt on the top). He called them "sewer slimes". Qbert and Yoga stole his idea and came out with "Butter Rugs". Ragz used to battle a lot and has been involved with all types of stuff. Ragz and Mudd started Jazz Addixx, with Ragz doing the scratching and Mudd doing MCing and the lion's share of the production. I had heard about Ragz DJing for "Jazz Addixx" for over a decade but had no idea how dope the album was. I finally got Ragz to get me a copy of Oxygen Refreshed (got his last one) and I was like "WTF! This is dope! Why didn't I know about this!?" Ragz says they went to Japan and the Tower Records there had a whole "Jazz Addixx" display and everything. Half a million views on Youtube and I'm sure they hardly made any money off the project.

I went to watch "Beastie Boys Story" in Philly (they did 3 shows, one in Philly and 2 in NYC to film the Apple Special). They had this bit where there were huge stacks of boxes full of Paul's Boutique LPs that went unsold. At the end Mike and Adam got into a physical fight and Adam pushed Mike into the stack of boxes. Funny shit but it didn't make it into the special. There was also Adrock's story about the ring prank that MCA played on him that didn't make the cut. At the very end they even brought out the hydraulic dick from the Licensed to Ill tour, which they had in storage in NJ ever since that tour ended.

Jazz Addixx - Oxygen Refreshed

Meanwhile, dumb mofos have been trashing CRTs in arcade games to "uprgrade" to LCD screens for over a decade now because they're too lazy to recap the monitors. All the while the price of monitors has multiplied.

I've been using Musicolet. It plays well with my car system and it's relatively simple and clean.

What Dirk is saying is right. You get all sorts of issues when trying to convert an image that was built to be played on a CRT displayed in an newer, non-CRT monitor. The old systems tend to run and look better on the CRT monitors. The image size doesn't get distorted, the black levels tend to be better on CRTs. Lag time is another reason a lot of gamers like to use CRTs because they don't introduce any noticeable lag. Then you get into optimizing the images beyond how they were back in the day by using s-video, RGB output, etc. It's a whole rabbit hole. The Sony PVM and BVM models are favorites for gamers because they are commercial grade and some will do RGB input. In the realm of actual, commercial arcade games, the vast majority of serious collectors wouldn't ever think of using anything but a CRT monitor. Almost all arcade games used RGB signals and that's one reason they looked better than the home systems, which all used composite signals. So now you have people modding the home systems to try to get them to look more like arcade games and converting the composite to RGB definitely makes and improvement. It gets pretty deep. The other thing you can do is get a system that plays old-school carts but outputs a high-res digital image. I recently picked up an Analogue NT and that makes my classic NES games look soooo much sharper and cleaner than they originally looked on a CRT. The only thing is they cost like $500. The die-hard gamers still seem to prefer the CRTs though. What it really comes down to is, how much do you care? It's very cheap and easy to hook your Atari or NES up to your modern TV as long as you can live with the picture looking kind of wacked. Once you start trying to get the best possible image out of the system, things get crazy. I tell people the same thing about arcade games. If you want to play Donkey Kong exactly how it was in the arcade, then you can't beat a real machine. Emulation is not duplication. But if all you want to do is casually play a game or two of Donkey Kong once in a while and want to be able to do the same with a ton of other games, then just play them on your computer for free.

Yeah, these past few years have been rough on hip hop. I keep thinking about Biz Markie and wondering how he's doing.

Like the Chase HQ reference!!!