Vintage "Vintage" – 1st setup

There’s more! Gotta love browsing old – paper! – photo’s 😀

Like this one:

This was the DJ Booth at my first pro-residency (6 nights a week, 6 hours a night), Club Papageno at the Sheraton Hotel in Essen, Germany. The entire booth sat on top of two big 18″ subs. 4 speakers hanging on the roof over the dancefloor complemented the PA. Quite an elaborate lighting setup for the time. The controller in the picture at the bottom right (the guy was the club manager by the way, not me).

Two SL1210s (early models). Had standard Stanton 600-series or something in them. I had them retrofitted with the first generation Concorde’s. A 4-channel mixer and a mic. Brought my own cans (can’t remember brand/model). Current record collection in 7″ and 12 holds, the rest around the corner on a few shelves in the bar storage. It was quite a jump from my previous setup 🙂 .”

From Germany I went on to Kuwait, here’s that setup:

Not quite as fancy. It was inside a “cave”. Acoustics in both the club and the booth were horrendous, no booth speaker. All mixing to be done in headphones. Lots of cuts and drops. The TTs were Technics, just not SLs. Speed control, but nothing as fancy as a pitch-slider, just a little wheel. Sub-standard for pro-DJ-ing at best. Direct-drive but nowhere near the torque of the “real thing”. Still you made it work.

Mixer with lots of channels, and full tone control, but you can see one of the knobs already missing on channel 1. And a cassettedeck! hanging at an angle. Never proved it, but I always had a feeling the tilt was not doing the speed any favors. With the turntables built-in and placed rather far to the back, not the most ergonomically sound setup.

When I got back, I hooked up with my good friend who still ran the Studio One (S1) mobile show. We did lots of regional and national gigs all over the place. We needed lots of storage:

Notice the 4 18″-subs. They were huge. In front of them you see one of the high end horns. Also BIG! Further 4 of our 12″ record crates (there were more and some 7″ ones as well), weighing a ton each.
If you set all this stuff up properly you’d have something like this:

… or this … :

Gotta love a parachute! We needed a reasonable truck and strong backs. Can you imagine stacking the last bit of speaker on top? No ladders, no tackle, just climbing on the subs and hoisting it up manually. We were crazy I think.
Close up of the actual DJ workplace:

Two SL1200s with a decent mixer (we switch to Dateq LPM later). We actually had booth speakers as you can see. The TTs were hung in a subframe that was loaded with bricks! and hung from heavy rubber bands. The system worked like a charm, you could have played from a truck driving down an unpaved road. Only thing that would have been hard was scratching, the tables would move under your fingers :-). You could press it down two inches while playing, release and have it bounce up and down til it found its balance again, without skipping. Amazing. You can also see the one hear headphone their. Many a neck cramp occurred while clamping it to your ear with your shoulder. We had evolved to slipmats by this time 🙂 .

That’s it folks.

Thanks for the kind words Phil 😀

Thought it might be fun and interesting for some to see what we worked with in the late 70s to early 80s. Before a good part of our readership was even born.

Greetinx.

I will have you know I still have a full head of hair, mr. Rizki!

😀