SDStaff Rico writes a fine summery of song mixing , but there’s one omission that I would consider an error.
Rico states, “… the turntables you’re using have two crucial features. One is a speed control, … The other is a felt cover, or slipmat, on the platter… meaning you can manually hold the record motionless or rotate it back and forth…”
That’s correct, but I would argue that the turntables actually have THREE crucial features. The third being a stylus which is specially designed for slipcueing (rotating the record backwards). If you try turning a record backwards on your father’s turntable without a special DJ stylus, you WILL hear the sound. However, you’ll also be gouging a sharp needle into the vinyl and ruining your mother’s precious Nat King Cole album. Chances are, your DJ career would be short lived after that.
More important than the ability to make good “wiki wiki” sounds, imho, is the ability to create peaks and troughs of sound, suitable to a crowd’s tastes. Hence, a diverse music collection, and an ear for musical tapestries, is essential.
You’re both correct. The special stylus is a requirement if you’re going to be doing any serious scratching. However, in Radio, the most important part of the cueing process is simply finding the start of the selection. Hence, back in the Dark Ages of Radio (before 1986 or so), you’d find records that had “cue burn” at the front. or a “swishing” sound permanently marked in the disc by the stylus being cued over the start point too many times.
Reading the crowd and creating those “peaks and troughs” (love the expression, ivan - it fits perfectly!) is by far the most important part of being a club DJ.
djjackd, welcome to the Straight Dope - very nice to have you here. Enjoy your stay.
I’d like to also add that a DJ wants to use a direct drive turntable, and not a belt driven turntable.
A belt driven one takes a long time to spin up, and the belt can slip and wear and stuff. After you’ve used it for a while, it deteriorates in usefulness to the DJ. Direct driven are far better.
I’ve led a pretty sheltered life, and never had hotel keys thrown at me, but even I know it so that the key-thrower and the key-throwee can hook up later in the hotel room.
I was going to add something about that in my post, but didn’t for some reason. Actually, the money is what made me eventually get out…
When my partner and I started up, we made decent money. But then some local DJs lowered their rates and started doing more parties, and we had to lower our rates. Soon we were barely able to keep up with buying new vinyls
I guess I was thrown off by the reference to “several” – how would the DJ know who threw what? – and the logistical issue of how the throwee gets into the room without a key.
And that hotels these days tend to use keycards without the room number visible anywhere on it.
Powers &8^]
I think you meant the thrower getting into the room without the key? They enter with the DJ who now has the key. She stays at the party until the DJ finishes his set, then she shows him where her hotel is.
Really, I think the idea here is back in the day when a hotel room key meant a 4" long oval shaped bit of plastic with your room number on it attached to your key.
And the toss to the DJ is meant to be a casual toss which he can catch, and pass her a wink. And if he’s lucky, he has several other keys and can pick and choose on his way out. This was never me, of course, but I used to hang out with more popular DJs at bigger clubs than I was in and saw what happened to them in the 80s
You have to scratch in order to beatmatch on vinyl. DJs, the good ones anyway can manually drop the snares together in a very short period of time. I have a friend who I once saw take a record off the table, change his mind, throw it back on and let it ride, it was matched perfectly.
