(sorry for the bad English. Corrections and competent criticism are appreciated, drive-by comments will be deleted without mercy)
I approached the DJ world in the early ‘90s, when I was 14. As a fourteen years old, I was quite moneyless, and my only resort was to use the equipment of people who were less broke than me. This meant sharing a pair of crappy belt-driven Monacor turntables with pitch control.
They sounded wobbly as fuck, and tempo drifted all the time, so you had to correct that by pressing your finger on the record (to slow down the playback), or accelerate it with a circular motion on the label area (to speed the playback up).
I learned to beat-match on these abominations and, believe me, I hated them. What I immediately thought was to develop an application – written in x86 assembly and so be it – to beatmatch records automatically. I would tap the tempo of the live and the pre-listen records on the spacebar for a few bars, then the application would do the math and spit out the correct position of the respective pitch fader on the turntables. Tempo would drift eventually, once the faders were set, but whatever. I never had the chance to use that application in practice, so I said “fuck that” and I moved to other teenage interests.
About ten years later, I used to organize gigs in my spare time. One thing leading another, I started mixing in real clubs. I never pre-compiled my playlists, partly because the audience never responds well to pre-canned sets, no matter how you thoughtfully craft them, partly because – at the time – I really liked the songs I played, and I liked the way one song lead to another as I listened to them during the set. It was like re-discovering old songs, with the incognita of the audience reaction. So, I fundamentally had to improvise sets using CDs.
I found the whole process boring, repetitive and, ultimately, a pain in the ass.
You had to find the CD, skip to the song, pre-listen it, beat-match, mix. You had to remember all the soft-spots in both songs to mix them optimally, so playing a new song you haven’t listened to carefully often lead to awkward mixes. You had to organize your records in CD compilations. You had to burn them 2x or the CDJs won’t read them, or, worse, would read them and then start skip randomly while you were playing. Even burned carefully, they would eventually fail, sooner or later. Sometimes you had to work with broken CD players that scratched your discs and you constantly had to rebuild your collection.
Club owners, you owe me a lot of these
Long story short, I migrated to Traktor 2.6 (the 2005 Traktor 2.6, not the 2011 Traktor 2) with an Hercules MKII sound card / controller. I was amused to see my teenage-years “tap to find the tempo” concept implemented in Traktor (even if it was the last-resort, most imprecise beat matching method). I manually adjusted the songs Traktor was incorrectly beat-matching. Now I could put my labels on the mixing spots, directly on the waveform. I could pre-listen more than one song. This meant I could change my mind in the last twenty seconds with less risk. The toy-like MK2 faders were made of cheap plastic, the pads were extremely sensitive and always in your way, so you had to deactivate them in Traktor configuration. If you forgot to disable the Traktor auto-beatmatching algorithm and it didn’t like the songs you were trying to mix, you’d end with catastrophic results. That surely wasn’t the optimal setting (I haven’t found a truly optimal setting in all these years) but the overall performance was better, I was experimenting and I was definitely having more fun.
Except that there was a lot of other DJs unhappy with this particular new kid on the block.
Nowadays, it’s considered normal to sport a laptop at a DJ set. Even vinyl-obsessed DJs bring a laptop for fallback or actively use it with timecoded vinyls.
In the niche scene I was in, particularly in 2005, it was less common. Self-appointed “old school” DJs gave me shit because I was using a laptop and a MIDI console. Back in their days, they said, you had to carry heavy bags full of vinyl records in the DJ booth. You travelled far to buy said rare vinyls from other aficionados. You spent a lot of money to order them in the USA or in Japan, and you waited for months while the infamously slow Italian postal service digested the expedition and sent a one-armed, old postman to your house. O the joy when you received them! Now, these newbies download entire albums with this devil-thing Soulseek, and use these wizard-programs on their laptops that do all the work, while they arrogantly sip their unfairly-gained vodka lemons.
Pictured: the Devil (in its 2005 incarnation)
One of the most heard arguments against music software was (and still is) perceived sound quality. Many of the people frowning at Traktor and its digital cousins also felt that the digital counterpart of a song, played on a laptop, just didn’t sound right in a DJ set. Which might be very true with poorly encoded files in an optimal listening setting, of course, but not in shitty clubs where the sound engineer was the elderly owner of the place, the speakers were crappy disco stuff from the ‘70s and the final output was routed through a low-quality limiter, installed and sealed in place by the Regional Environmental Protection Agency to limit sound pollution (yes, in many Italian clubs such a thing was – and still is – a reality).
Hi, haters.
In my early DJ days the places we worked in were often so fucked up that we had to take the booth monitor and move it outside the console, towards the dancehall, to make the customers enjoy a decent volume. The final stage, where a final stage was present, was operated by an uninterested owner or by some drunk-ish kid with a 12-hour course certification in sound engineering and no sense of hearing, and I can still remember those out-of-control high frequencies leaving the ceiling-mounted speakers to cut your face like blades.
But alas, the problem seemed to be the VBR MP3 encoding vs. the CD PCM encoding, the Echo Indigo connector plating vs. the CDJ-100 outputs, and so on, in a crescendo of pseudo-technical bullshit.
In bigger and better venues, where sound quality issues somewhat counted, critics could never be satisfied, no matter what you did. You could carefully encode content from original sources with lossless encoding algorithms, but it always sounded “too artificial”, despite the fact that the very fucking bytes were the same.
One night, during a show that must have been very boring, I had a bunch of random vinyl records at hand, forgotten by some other DJ, and a couple of turntables were lying on the console desk, unused.
For the sole purpose of trolling, I hooked a pair of instances of iZotope Vinyl to the virtual decks of the mixing software I was using, and pretended to be DJing with vinyls all night. I put said records on and off the turntables at the right moments, while I was actually doing the mixes on my laptop and console, covertly.
Set this mofo on “1970″, and see the hipsters dance.
I received praise. Now that everyone had seen me handling real records all the night, no-one could distinguish the “artificialness” they had sworn that was obvious. No lossless encoding, no careful frequency adjusting in the world could have deceived them, but a cheap prestidigitation trick did. Now, I don’t really want to start a vinyl-vs-CD debate. There are competent advocates on both sides, with compelling arguments and respectable knowledge. But from that night, I always tend to stay clear of people who have a black-or-white, simple and surefire opinion on the endless sound-quality debate.
Some months ago, I was watching a tutorial on Youtube about the ancient (but glorious?) FL Studio Wave Traveller. Someday I will release a wave traveller plugin, and, not having a copy of FL studio at hand, I wanted to see how their plugin, that I used in the olden days, worked.
I took a look at the comment section of the video, which was the usual Youtube flamewar hell. The flame originator was a guy that looked very pissed at the mere thought that someone could have conceived the idea of implementing a wave traveller, and really apeshit at the fact that someone took time to explain how to emulate a DJ scratch with it. The reason? You could “make it in 5 mins” with “real equipment”. This was enough to utterly negate the possibility of doing stuff in another way, or – God forbid – make tools to facilitate the task.
This reminded me all the bullshit I was exposed to during these years. The acquaintance with a shitty band who had the luck of open for a real band, and told me he felt the real band’s success was undeserved, because they used pre-recorded samples in their performance. The sound engineer friend who had to pretend to actively turn knobs and press buttons on museum-grade analogic equipment (which was not plugged in, by the way), because a band he was recording felt that using Cubase was “too digital”. The endless stream of people telling me that digital DJs were fundamentally useless, because “you press a button and Traktor does the mix, everyone could do it”. The countless promo tracks I was exposed to (in the hope I could promote a live gig), proudly recorded “without any digital aid”. Tempos were drifting like the performers were severely drunk, mixes would sound muddy like swamp soil, but the technological beast was defeated as it was ignored – with pitiful results, and those people felt they need some recognition, if not praise. How arrogant could one be?
Let’s be honest. If you’re annoyed at technological advancements because back in your days you suffered and struggled and these kids must suffer and struggle like you did, if you see progress as some sort of cosmic injustice because you couldn’t enjoy it back in the days, well, let’s be blunt, you might be suffering from some form of sociopathy and be in need of some mental counseling. Or you might be a simple asshole. In both cases, you should take care of yourself or risk ending your days like a stereotypical grumpy grandfather shitting his pants while yelling at kids to get off his lawn, angry because they didn’t experience the privations of the Great War.
You will never be this cool.
If, instead, in the deep of your heart, you’re scared of technological advancements because they bring competition to your field, you have a serious skill problem. In other words, you suck at what you do and you shouldn’t be doing it or, at least, you should try to be good at it.
If you are a pro, you should look at technological innovations in your field of work as potential blessings. If you are a pro, you shouldn’t worry about the wundermachine that beat-mixes automatically, takes steadier photos or plays chords for you. In the best case, it will improve or speed up your work. In the worst, you could leave it to the newbies, confident that your superior set of skill, matured with your invaluable experience, will pay in the long run.
If you feel that the wundermachine will hurt your business, if you feel that anyone now could do what you do (or not quite yet, but people are too dumb to tell the difference – the favourite point of the delusional), then you’re doing it wrong. You are metaphorically tweaking the records with your finger on that shitty, wobbly Monacor turntable from my youth that only you can use, hoping that nobody will throw it away to eventually replace it with a brand new Technics equipment.
As a developer of music-related software, I’m sick of the flak the whole music software world constantly gets. It’s time to admit that yes, if anyone could do what you do (despite the years you spent trying), you should stop whining and consider a career change.
