DJRidm

An idea would be to try and perform whatever scratch it is your trying to do on the line faders, slowly and record it into a sampler. Then speed it up in the sampler and listen to hear if your executing it right. Because if you are then all your really lacking is speed which you can build using one of the 'tempo increasing' speed tools where the tempo of the beat goes up 2 or 3 bpm every few bars. Another thing i've noticed when performing cuts on the upfaders - not that i'm that good at it - is using tears to break up each movement and cut, as the 'break' you get in the record movement as you do a tear, if you can combine with the cutting with the line faders can sound really cool and gives a much clearer and solid cut. Maybe thats cheating though.

DJ Klever has some crazy upfader skills too. I read a comment on a video of him practicing with Chris Karns where Chris Karns left a comment like "Klever broke 2 of my faders that night". I think Klever and IQ, Noize and these guys are so good at those upfader cuts because they are so sharp and quick, it requires a sudden burst of movement because of the longer throw which you have to experiment with and try to create, its like a popping of muscles suddenly. What also helps is to set the fader curve a bit less even from start to finish and have most of the volume come on at the top (if you do this too much, it's effectively cheating). Even on the older mixers like the 06's, the faders inside should have a black switch on them for fader curve to assist with this also. Another thing to consider would be if your someone who uses the fader 'regular' not in hamster style, you have a massive dissadvantage for performing 'line fader cuts' over someone who uses 'hamster style', because the hamster style movement for a cut is the same for the crossfader and the line input.

Yeah great video, i've wished I learnt the importance of what your talking about from when I started. I find with a lot of scratches as well like the 'Tips' scratch, it's better to understand that as a baby scratch - not a separate scratch - as it illustrates what exploring even the first scratch you learn can lead to if you play with it. Another thing I wish i'd learned to do with every scratch as I learned, rather than going back through each one was to do it in the opposite direction/in reverse. I think if your a complete beginner, learning a baby scratch with a forward release at the end, into an immediate reverse baby and drag back, would be a great thing to learn and gets you thinking about that one scratch from two different starting positions. Again then when learning the chirp or stab scratch as the next step, learning both from the forward movement, and from the back, when your a total beginner will be possible and you will then grow both forward and reverse variations of each scratch at the same time and not have a dominant 'forward leaning' style. I feel when it comes to starting to put combos together, different scratch techniques or patterns your doing, end in different ways and positions and if you haven't got the 'reverse' ways of executing each scratch, your limited by where your at in the sample