anyone do any kind of "drill"?

[Jimmy]

I believe that what you choose not to learn is just as important as what you choose to learn in terms of developing style.

 

IMO Q-bert popularized the idea that you wanna learn every scratch because every one is like a word, and you wanna have the biggest vocabulary possible. I think it's not like that at all... I've heard enough crazy ill DJs who only do a few cuts but have mastered them to know that it's not about learning the most techniques. This is my go to counter example to that theory:

 

DJ Jeff rocks chirps and the same sample for a huge portion of this but it's expressive and funky as fuck. So if he can rock chirps like this with very little repetition, how come kids who know every scratch on Skratchlopedia Breaktannica sound repetitive? Because it's not about learning every cut on the TTM spread sheet and ticking them off. It's about beasting with the cuts you do have.

 

Pekked hitting the nail on the head imo.

[d00ban]

I believe that what you choose not to learn is just as important as what you choose to learn in terms of developing style.

 

IMO Q-bert popularized the idea that you wanna learn every scratch because every one is like a word, and you wanna have the biggest vocabulary possible. I think it's not like that at all... I've heard enough crazy ill DJs who only do a few cuts but have mastered them to know that it's not about learning the most techniques. This is my go to counter example to that theory:

 

DJ Jeff rocks chirps and the same sample for a huge portion of this but it's expressive and funky as fuck. So if he can rock chirps like this with very little repetition, how come kids who know every scratch on Skratchlopedia Breaktannica sound repetitive? Because it's not about learning every cut on the TTM spread sheet and ticking them off. It's about beasting with the cuts you do have.

 

Disclaimer: I'm guilty as fuck for being one of the learn every scratch mother fuckers but it took learning nearly every named scratch for me to realize having 1 variation of 50 different techniques is way less valuable than having 50 variations of 1 technique. WORD.

 

 

Hells yeah, listening to that just makes me want to cut.

[doppelkorn]

I also agree. Chile did this wicked video tutorial a while back with just chirps and babies.

 

 

Think it was this ^

[Vekked]

yea that's what I like about Chile's tutorial and style of teaching... getting the most out of a few cuts, which I think is closer to how people should be learning. Instead of tutorials being like:

Lesson 1 - Baby scratch

Lesson 2 - Chirp

Lesson 3 - Stab

Lesson 4 - Transforms

etc

 

It should be (for example):

Lesson 1 - Baby scratch
Lesson 2 - Different baby scratch rhythms

Lesson 3 - Pitch variations of the baby scratch

Lesson 4 - Chirps

Lesson 5 - Different chirp rhythms

Lesson 6 - Pitch variations of the chirp
etc

I think learning different scratches is cool and necessary but it's only 1 element and doesn't deserve all the emphasis.

[Guest petesasqwax]

Yeah I totally agree - learning how to perform a particular cut is the entry level requirement and involves understanding the technique in relation to what your record hand and fader hand aere doing. mastering it is when you start applying it to a beat, at which point a myriad of possibilities are introduced (especially if you take it into on-beat/off-beat, 4/4 vs 3/4 etc)

agreed totally on Chile's tutorials btw. love em - massively educational and really pretty inspiring too

[Deft]

It's an interesting topic for me right now. After probably 5 years of my turntables being packed away and first getting tables in '97 I've finally got some more space and now have a single turntable and my new Scratchbox to cut on.

But I'll be honest, even though I probably scratched quite a bit from late 90's to around 2006 I never really got very good at it - and I virtually never ever practiced in the regimented sense of the word. The only time I really tried a technique properly was probably flares because they felt weird and non intuitive and I guess crabs / twiddles need some kind of finger learning.

I picked up some second hand copies of Qberts DIY 1 & 2 last week to see what they were like, but although my free time is probably not massive I would like to focus my practice a bit more. I'd like to bring my scratches up a little bit just so they sound cleaner and tighter really. Good enough that I could at least make a normal dj mix and then layer some decent cuts for my own listening pleasure over the top without taking a million takes or cringing every other pattern.

[Guest petesasqwax]

I first got 'tables around the same time - maybe a year later - and I'm in a similar position (although it's not been that long between bouts of cutting, it's been easily that long since I was seriously into it for any particular length of time). I'm not happy with being so-so at cutting and I don't have the time anymore to put in hours and hours every day like I did in my late teens/early 20s - the development of a regime of practice is absolutely vital to me right now, I think & if it can help other people too that gives me a massive sense of satisfaction

[Deft]

Just having a flick through DIY vol.1, have I been doing chirps wrong my whole life? LOLZERZ

[Guest petesasqwax]

That's really quite impressive if you have,man

[Deft]

Well I always thought it had a click at either end, so like a tidied up baby scratch - or repeated forward stab / backwards stab. Weird to find out it only has a click at the transition to backwards from forwards. I started to get the hang of it last night. Kind of interesting that on the Scratchbox you can set the channel faders up so that single-handedly you can kind of chirp and don't have to worry about co-ordination as the hand is the same. Cheers for the looper Wax, saves me some hassle since I don't have a second turntable hooked up currently. I read the .pdf too, some sensible points. I'm definitely going to try focussing a bit more.

[Vekked]

That's really quite impressive if you have,man

 

This! LOL

[Guest petesasqwax]

Hehe - I've tried teaching my kids how to cut and the best way for the to get the chirp seems to be to act as if their hands are connect so that when their fader hand moves to open the fader, the record hand moves forward and vice-versa. quite comical, really

[Guest broke]

Just having a flick through DIY vol.1, have I been doing chirps wrong my whole life? LOLZERZ

 

Haha wow

 

I remember someone on Snatchcon saying they thought it was a click at each end, that might have been you.

At least you're primed to learn a lot of the delayed scratches and swing flares because of that.

 

Back on topic:

 

I always just learned what I liked to hear. But recently I've been feeling a bit limited, like at a particular tempo I'll tend to lean on just a particular handful of cuts. So I've been spending a little bit of time just going back and checking for stuff I like that I missed. Crescent flares for example... I never learned to do those, at least not to the extent where I could comfortably do them fast (and clean) with variation.

 

Also, new ideas come along from other people sharing, things that I can easily incorporate because it's a variation of something I already do. I appreciate it every time someone takes the time to make a tutorial, for example that 4x2 + 1x3 flare combo that G.R.Z.A.N.A. posted. Shout out to Chile too.

[Guest petesasqwax]

lately i've been finding that there are a load of cuts that i didn't know up until very recently, but they're basically all connected and it has made me look at how I'm practicing them a bit differently.

I never knew what the deal with boomerangs was (or autobahns) until very recently. seeing them in the flesh at the Clocktower session made me understand them and then practicing them this week as well as cutting with Bill Gert last night, it all started to totally make sense to me. the way i've been practicing them has been to get the pattern down in my head and drill those for a while, just building up my muscle memory at slow speeds, then increasing speeds until i have them crisp at high tempo, but breaking this up by really getting inside the combo and starting them at different points along it. for example, starting the boomerang on the reverse stab and then doing the forward section and back around to that.

i've been applying that style of practice to all my other combos, too, and getting really deep inside each one has helped immensely when it comes to freestyle cuts. shouts to chile on this because it was his method of really taking all the combos to extremes that really got me obsessed with approach, i think.

also, when dee showed the chirp flare i couldnt understand it because it was 6 sounds and i could only get my head around multiples of 4. so the chirp-flare is 2 sounds chirp, 4 sounds flare, but in order to get my head around doing it to a beat, i needed to even it up to 8 sounds. the obvious thing to me to do was put 2 chirps in, so i did chirpchirpflare. the way i got around that to do regular chirpflares was to start off doing the chirp at half speed so that the sounds were the same length as flare, but that's irrelevant.... what i was wanting to say is - i've been doing chirpchirpflare for serious amounts of years (i did them on the posse cuts track on 2talls first 12"...) but changing it to chirpflarechirp makes a massive difference. and starting the first chirp halfway through is a different sound again... and starting halfway through the flare is a different sound again etc.