I agree with Phil, most oldskool vinylists argue that laptop DJing is all about hit one button and it all happens automatically..
Playing out one night, there was myself, my mate who is learning ableton – who has done a few sets for his own amusement at my house with my midi and Virtual DJ/ Traktor, so he was fairly conversant and can more then hold his head above water, and 2 pure vinyl DJ’s
After my last set of the night, and getting dirty looks from one of the vinyl lads, i let him have a go, there was only us and our wifes present by this time so no pressure.
Gave him a quick rundown, – “its essentially set up like a pair of CDJ’s with the tune database on the laptop, i know you have used CDj’s before so its the same principle.”
The house mixer was a Numark so that closely resembled the Omnicontrol too apart from rotary knobs for cueing the phones instead of sliders so i quickly briefed him on that.
Trainwreck doesnt even cover it. I even turned on some of the auto features like smart play and beat lock so the software would line up the beats and bpms.
The tracks he was using was from my set playlist so all bpms were tapped out and beatgrids all correct. At that point it really should have been as simple as hit play at the correct Bar and bring in the tune with the mixer
This guy had just played a 2 hour vinyl set without dropping a beat. Even with Virtual DJ doing a lot of the work, mixing digitally every drop was terrible. Was he being obtuse for the sake of it or just plain thick, i really dont know, but there is at least 1 vinyl dj out there who knows that Digital does everything for you, really is a myth!
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