There’s never been an easier time to become a DJ, particularly when you consider just how difficult life was for the selectors of old.
Back in the day, you had to have a huge record collection, ideally packed with obscure, exclusive and therefore very expensive tracks. Then you needed to pay a fortune to transport crates full of these discs to clubs around the world. all the while praying that none of them would get scratched and be rendered unplayable along the way.
In the digital era, everything has changed. Instead of spending vast sums of money on vinyl, DJs can purchase tunes for pocket change. And they don’t need to think about shipping heavy records, because you can whack tens of thousands of pieces of music on a USB stick and carry it around the world in your pocket.
But even though it’s theoretically possible to turn up to a party with little more than an iPhone and perform an acceptable DJ set using a three quid app, you’ll need to invest a little bit more time and money in dedicated hardware if you want to turn the hobby into a job.
Allen & Heath lent me its basic Xone:23C mixer, which costs about £300, as well as two £245 AT-LP120X turntables.
This pair of decks can play ordinary vinyl, but they also interface with an £89 piece of industry standard software called Traktor running on a computer.
Traktor lets you assign songs to virtual decks which can then be manipulated using ‘control vinyl’ – special discs which don’t contain music but let you manipulate digital files as if they were a record.
Control records contain one long tone which can be picked up by the software, as long as you’re using a compatible mixer such as the Xone 23C. Move the record with your hand and you’ll skip through the track loaded into a Traktor deck. Press play and the physical record will spin, whilst the virtual song also plays. It’s even possible to scratch without worrying about wearing down rare and expensive records.
Now, I’m realistic about my chances of actually quitting my day job and playing songs in nightclubs. But I found that Traktor made it so easy to mix songs that hours slipped by in seconds and made me engage with the music I love in a new way.
When you put one song on, Traktor will tell you which other tunes in your collection have the same BPM (beats per minute) so they can be blended. It will even recommend music in the same key, so you can mix songs without them harmonically clashing.
The software lets you add effects too, so you can make your own build-ups before dropping in another tune at exactly the right spot.
Allen and Heath’s mixer also sounds really good. Although you can plug it into a computer or even an iPad to play music, it’s pumped through analogue circuits – which means the sound is warm and rich.
It can also be altered using real analogue filters which take away the bass (high pass) or high end (low pass). I found the easiest way to mix two songs was to take away the bass from one tune and then slowly add it in whilst another is playing, using the mixer’s EQ to gradually accentuate or attenuate elements of the music.
I bought a few songs from the websites Bleep and Boomkat, which specialise in vinyl and digital music, and had a lot of fun mixing between them. I’ve already got loads of vinyl, so I was pleased to find the mixer let me play records too.
If I’m being honest, I don’t really think a digital DJ needs two bulky record decks unless they are playing vinyl. But using decks is certainly useful if you want to master old-school beatmatching, which involves manually speeding up or slowing two bits of music so they play at the same speed and can be mixed. Traktor lets you do this automatically, leaving you free to focus on choosing music and then blending it.
I was definitely a bit sad to give back the Allen & Heath mixer, which was built like a tank, looked attractive and sounded great – although I can’t say my neighbours and wife were quite so upset because of how much I used them during my trial period.
If you want to get started as a digital DJ, I’d definitely starting with a Xone:23C and then building up a rig which suits you.
But beware: it’s a slippery and very expensive slope because one piece of audio hardware is never enough. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
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