DJ Set-up. Can anyone explain?

hook

hook

Active Member
I left clubbing behind about 2 years ago, my week in Ibiza July 2004 being my "swansong" and haven't really bothered since due to a lot of upheavel in my life, looking after my kids, and generally growing out of it (so I thought).
However, I was booking a last minute holiday about a month ago and decided I wouldn't mind having another blow-out in Ibiza. Well needless to say, I absolutely loved it, it just all flooded back and the new look Space was very impressive!
Having had turntables when I was younger, and even CD decks up until not that long ago I'm always interested in watching the DJ's while dancing and was interested to see them all with laptops, yet still mixing with CD's and even the odd bit of vinyl. So I was wondering if anyone can enlighten me as to why they had the laptop? I presume they had their music on there and I heard about Final-Scratch a few years back and sort of got my head around that but they seemed to be changing CD's as well as referring to the laptop.

It's probably a no-brainer for most of you but I'm just interested to know.
Cheers.
 
serato is **** hot im hoping to have this in the next couple of weeks,it has 2 time coded pieces of vinyl that you obviousley put on the decks while the programme runs on the laptop you can have 1000's of tracks on it i.e download mp3 from beatport download into the programme click it and it runs through to the vinyl you can scratch spin back, anything you can do with a normal record but its mp3,the sound quality is outstanding,you have to see it to understand it in the short its mp3 sounds but still mixing using vinyl,ive been a vinyl man for 17yrs, never even entertained cdj,but when i saw this the alround package is for me!
 
Serato just sounds like Final-Scratch. Lots of problems with it last I heard but I have seen Paul Van Dyk using it. But if you use your lap top for anything other than that, the problems start.
I'm going back 2 years here though so the faults might be ironed out these days.
 
your right there has been problems,but my friend who's resident at sankeys in manchester has used it for months now and not had any problems like you say you've got just use the laptop for that purpose only,ive just bought a laptop soley for that so see how it goes.
 
question about Serato:

So you place mp3s in the Serato program and they play digitally through your laptop into encoded cds or vinyl (depending on your decks)? And how expensive are these digital cds/vinyls generally?
 
it plays through to the time encoded vinyl on any decks! 1200's 1210's whatever,its about £400 for the serato package but i know its a lot cheaper from your side of the globe about£280
 
Laptop Use

Quoting from hook:
DJ Set-up. Can anyone explain?
So I was wondering if anyone can enlighten me as to why they had the laptop? I presume they had their music on there and I heard about Final-Scratch a few years back and sort of got my head around that but they seemed to be changing CD's as well as referring to the laptop.

It's probably a no-brainer for most of you but I'm just interested to know.
Cheers.[/QUOTE].


I'm a DJ and some times i bring with me the laptop just to record my DJ set and then burn it on a CD or whatever. Just to have a recording of my work in digital
 
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I was one of the pioneers using mp3's to DJ with exclusively as far back as 1998 on a tower computer using VTT (Virtual Turntables). I moved onto laptops in January 2002 and started using PCDJ. Since March this year I switched to Traktor DJ Studio 3. I DJ with a laptop exclusively, no CD's, no vinyl, just Traktor DJ Studio 3.

Traktor also links up with Final scratch, although I don't use mine this way.

I also have Abelton, which a lot of named DJ's are getting into. It's a half-way house between DJing and production.

But a laptop could also be used simply as a sophisticated catalogue of your CD's.

Last year, at my previous residency, I used to use vinyl some of the time and would mix between laptop and vinyl and back again. There's only one venue in my hometown that has turntables, the rest ditched them years ago.
 
Yes, but, decks C and D I normally use for DJ drops a couple of times per night. I keep meaning to setup some drum loops to mix and mess about with, just never seem to get around to it. I often use looping when mixing between deck A and Deck B though.

You can set one of the decks as a master and the other 3 as slaves. Which means if you change the tempo on the master the others change too, great for mixing.

PS Just spotted you were in Ibiza at the same time as me, shame we didn't get to meet. If you'd been at Plastik or The Orange Corner you would have seen me using my laptop with Traktor. Ah well, next time maybe.
 
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review to follow. i was in orange corner at my mates gig on tuesday night, then underground. had a (great) plastik session on monday also, before CircoLoco afters at Privilege.

review is nearly done, sitting on my desktop as a text file just now. was a pretty mad week so the memory needed a hand. My mate Bartonious has posted what will be a fairly similar review (since we were out most nights together). I just tend to waffle a bit more.
 
fatphilb said:
ps. im planning on using traktor as a single deck alongside 1 cdj and two turntables.
Click to expand...
Hmmm.......that seems a waste.........I think once you get into it you may start using it more than you expected to.

This is an old pic of my setup in my last residency, I've recently added an external USB driven hard drive and now have in excess of 14,000 tunes instantly available. 8O The MIDI controller/mixer in the foreground makes all the difference.

I'll just put the link up as it's a big piccy;

http://www.djsoulman.f2s.com/currentsetup1.jpg

Cheers
 
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