Still one of the best documentaries in the field to date: Scratch, by Doug Pray. I once was lucky enough to see this on the movie-screen at a venue before Qbert did a gig. If you haven’t seen this, get your hands on a copy or view it on Youtube full length below.
What is it
‘Scratch is a documentary film, directed and edited by Doug Pray. The film explores the world of the hip-hop DJ. From the birth of hip-hop, when pioneering DJ’s began extending breaks on their party records (which helped inspire break dancing and rap), to the invention of scratching and beat-juggling vinyl, to its more recent explosion as a musical movement called turntablism, it’s a story of unknown underdogs and serious virtuosos who have radically changed the way we hear, play and create music.The documentary opens with Grand Wizard Theodore (New York) telling the story of how he first introduced scratching. Throughout the documentary, several artists explain how they were introduced to the field of hip-hop and scratch while providing stories and anecdotes of their personal experiences.’(Wikipedia)
Why keep your precious vinyl on your shelves when you can have it on display? The problem with his is typically that you want to play your gems every now and then and it’s a hassle to get them off the wall.. enter Play & Display Flip Frames.
Art vinyl has developed a system that allows you to display your vinyl (or just the covers if you want) on the wall, but still keep immediate access to them. Here’s a how they describe it:
‘The Play & Display design permits the owner to stylishly display one record cover and its contents on the wall. Due to this unique design, the owner can also change over the display within seconds without having to remove the frame from the wall. All it takes is a simple one-finger touch that flips the front of the frame open so that the record can be easily changed.’
Although some might say it’s a bit pricy, the possibilities are endless. You can change contents every day if you like, your wall will never look the same!
Below video is an animation of how the system works in practice. Easy as 1, 2, 3.
Scratch DJs often get asked if they ‘only’ play hiphop tunes. Over the last 10 odd years or so I’ve seen and heard many turntablists, and perhaps their roots lie with hiphop but their playing style is typically quite eclectic.
Here’s some of my picks of different tunes that I like, all quite laid back now that I think of it Some of them are fit to cut over, some not so much.
I read a post on another blog a while back with all t he DMC winners in Audio format. A very cool idea, but as personally I get more visually inspired I decided to extend this thought to, what else, Youtube
So I took some time to put together a Playlist of all the DMC Championship winners to date. I will write some short comments below as well, but in general I’ll let the vids do the talking.
Comments and list of winners so far
If you have any interesting facts on any of these, please comment. For now I just state the year, name (possible crew) and country of the winners.
1985 – Roger Johnson – UK
This one is missing from the video playlist as it has actually not been recorded as far as I can tell from various sources, including the DMC World site. It was the very first DMC championship, held in London.
1986 – DJ Cheese – USA
DJ Cheese was the frist to bring actual scratching into the battles. Supposedly one of the runners up, Orland Voorn, took the mic from Tony Prince and yelled, quote from DMC site, “What is this, a Mixing Competition or a Scratching Competition?”. Rumour has it that Tony kicked him off the stage right after.
1987 – Chad Jackson – UK
Yes, this is the same guy who later came with ‘Hear the drummer get wicked’.
1988 – DJ Cash Money – USA
Helped promote and invent the transformer scratch. Jazzy Jeff is known to be the first one transforming.
1989 – Cutmaster Swift – UK
1990 – DJ David – Germany
1991 – DJ David – Germany
Turned into a somewhat epic performance with the coke-cans and the dazzling b-boy move at the end
1992 – Rocksteady DJs -Mix Master Mike, DJ Q-Bert, and DJ Apollo – USA
Q-Bert and Mix Master Mike (MMM) step on the scene. First year that a crew could actually win the competition. In later years there will be separate team events.
1993/1994 – Dreamteam – Mix Master Mike and DJ Q-Bert – USA
There was only one event in these 2 years.
1995 – Roc Raida – X-Ecutioners – USA
Roc has passed away in 2009, R.I.P.
1996 – DJ Noize – Denmark
1997 – DJ A-Trak – Canada
The youngest ‘kid’ ever to become DMC world champion at 15. Hear how Tony Prince mispronounces his name afterwards as A-Train lol. A-Trak is now Kanye West’s tour DJ.
1998 – DJ Craze (USA)
1999 – DJ Craze (USA)
2000 – DJ Craze (USA)
2001 – Plus One – Scratch Perverts – UK
2002 – DJ Kentaro – Japan
2003 – Dopey – Canada
2004 – ie.Merg – USA
2005 – ie.Merg – USA
2006 – Netik – France
2007 – Rafik – Germany
Probably most famous for the Autobahn scratch haha.
If you can’t get your hands on some old English, grab some champagne and toast on your dead homies and for those of you who haven’t seen ‘don’t be a menace’, have a great 2010, full of new cuts and freestyles!
One thing I have always found a bit strange is that there hasn’t been that much buzz as I would have expected about the Clocktave. This is a very innovative concept by DJ Sjam where the ‘Clocktave record’ can be used to actually play melodies.
Personally I think it’s a brilliant idea, executing it, and the skills needed, is a different thing as always. In any case, Kypski (Producer of the Clocktave) has put numerous clips on youtube demonstrating the power of the Clocktave.
Ladies & Gentlemen…
Introducting the Clocktave, Kypski clocktaving the Beatles:
Above example is more of a lead instrument. Naturally it also works for hooks and basslines. This is how Kyspki demonstrates that with the Rappers Delight Theme:
The Blurb
The intro blurb from their label Supertracks:
“The Clocktave is a turntablist scratch tool, specifically designed for melodic scratching with the newest types of analog and digital turntables.
It’s a scratch tool based on a simple, but smart concept. In april 2004 Sjam told Kypski about his idea of pressing notes, ascending notescales to be exact, on a vinyl record. But not just that, the octaves of the scales had to be divided exactly between one rotation of a record. This way you’d remember the position of every note. You could play melodies while scratching, scratch while playing melodies… scratch melodies…well basically play melodies using your turntable. And all this while keeping the natural sound of the instruments in every single note, without having to move your scratching hand away from the platter to change pitch.
Kypski liked this idea so much that he decided to introduce this concept briefly on Mazturbation Tool, and after that create a whole scratch record entirely around this concept. They named the concept ‘Clocktave’ (Clock – Octave) because the note markers can be read as a clock: every note has its fixed position, regardless of wether it’s in a high or low octave. You could compare it to Q-Bert’s ‘Y Record’, but with musical notes instead of stabs & beats and with way, way more positionings.
And here it is. Superb musicians were hired to play scales and chords on acoustic and electric instruments like electric bass, upright bass, guitars, synth leads, rhodes, clavinet, horns and more…. All in the clocktave fashion. Skipless. In C-minor. Sounding FATASS.”
Tracklisting and where to get it
The record itself is available from Discogs. Here’s the tracklisting:
A1
Tuning Tone “C”
A2
Bass Section
A3
Synthleads Section
A4
Chords Section 1
A5
Electric Guitar Section
B1
Tuning Tone “C”
B2
Strings Section
B3
Horns & Woodwinds Section
B4
Chords Section 2
B5
FX Misc. Section
If you call yourself a turntablist, you have to try this thing out!
I think most turntablists will agree that DJ Qbert is amongst the great tablists of all time. With some guys, sometimes very technical cuts loose a bit of the ‘funkyness’ or the flow if you will. In my opinion Q does not have this most of the time because he is so versatile. I wanted to share this clip with you guys because it has a good bit of ‘talking’ through cuts. Note the part where Q uses the beep-tone to ’speak’.
You might ask yourself wtf does a hamster have to do with turntablism?!? Well, hamster-style is a term that has gotten coined for using the X-fader in ‘reverse’.
A ‘normal’ setup has the x-fader working like this:
Normal X-fader curve
A Hamster-style set-up has it reversed, so the channels will act like this:
Hamster style X-fader curve
Evolution of the hamster
You didn’t really think I would write some Darwinian story here did you – Hamster-style has gotten famous by a scratch crew called the Bullet Proof Scratch Hamsters. They were amongst the first ones incorporating this mixer-technique.
Back then also the line faders were ‘hamstered’ as the way to achieve the reversing of the x-fader ghetto-style is to connect the right turntable to the left phono input on your mixer and vice versa. Nowadays most battle mixers have a x-fader reverse switch (or even a hamster-switch!) that only affects the x-fader.
What’s the difference?
It’s not so much the direction the x-fader has to travel in that is an essential difference in Hamster-style, rather the position of your thumb and fingers. To clarify let me say first that there is no wrong or right in this. It’s mostly personal preference, or even force of habit.
One could say that the benefits of Hamster-style are that you can utilize your fingers in closing the x-fader rapidly, even using the fader-slot to let the fader bounce-back open again. This works very nice with e.g. flares. Personally I would argue here that normal style is possibly easier when doing e.g. transform like scratches.
More possibilities
The Hamster Pwned you!
Some interesting possibilities arise when you have your x-fader reversed though. For instance, as your fader-hand is closer to the record that you’re using, you can tap or rub the record during scratches with your fader hand.
Depending on your mixer and up-fader settings you can also drop some Euroscratch technique easier as you can reach the upfader and x-fader at the same time (again, you can do this ghetto style as well, or maybe your mixer even has a fader reverse switch like mine, but you get the idea).
Euroscratch example
The last bit of this video shows some Euroscratch techniques:
The fader-scene has seen some impressive innovations in the last decade or so. Better overall quality of components, light sensors used in faders (Stanton’s Focus Fader, Numark’s Infinity Fader etc.) and Rane came up with the magnetic non-contact fader. This video shows how you can use their faders wen you’re having a drink
It’s an old vid already, worth posting all the same as the Rane TTM56 is one of the most widely used turntablist mixers to date. All this cutting is making me thirsty haha.
There are several problems you can run into that relate to your mixer. Here I will discuss the most common ones that you might encounter as a (starting) turntablist.
(Don’t expect to find ways to hook up your mixer to your amp and things like that, that’s what manuals are for!)
The sound doesn’t seem to ‘cut’
Several reasons why the effect you’re trying to reach sounds more like a fade than a cut are described below.
X-fader curve
You should put this on the sharpest possible. Read more about curve-control here.
Non-scratch x-fader
Some mixers do not offer curve control but still come equipped with x-faders suitable for scratching. However, most mixers do not. If there’s no curve-control on your mixer chances are that you got a x-fader that’s not able to give you sharp cuts.
Fader-bleeding
When your x-fader is all the way to one side you should be hearing just one line-channel. However, sometimes you can still hear the other channel, especially when you slightly touch the fader. This phenomenon is called bleeding. It normally occurs after a lot of usage. However, if your mixer’s got a faulty x-fader ,or just a bad one, then it could occur after a few hours of scratching (even with a brand-new x-fader!).
There’s no real way of preventing this since it is mostly due to contact-parts that have worn out. On the other hand you should always be sure not to let dust and other crap pile up inside your x-fader since this could speed up the process. Use an old towel to cover your mixer when you are not using it and, if you can get your hand on some, use compressed air to blow dust out of your fader once in a while.
The fader doesn’t glide smoothly
If you feel your line- or x-fader doesn’t glide as smoothly anymore as it did when it was new, here is what to do.
Get your hands on some fader-friendly lube. Cali-lube will do, or some gun or sowing-machine oil. You cannot use any lube or, even worse, oil, since they are not made for fast moving parts and will simply mess up your mixer. WD40 will eat any plastic parts in your fader so don’t use that!
Using a lot of lube to smoothen the way your x-fader glides might seem a good idea at first but it’s not. Dust gets stuck on excessive lube and will only make your x-fader run shittier in the long run. If you really want to re-lube your fader make sure you get all the dust and old lube of the gliding parts (you might have to open up your fader for this). When it’s all clean apply a moderate amount of lube. Done.
Some of them are fit to cut over, some not so much.
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