New DJ Questions

Hi Amp

The NDX800 is apparently natively supported in Virtual DJ so you could download Virtual DJ Home and try it out (you get 10 minutes before it reverts to mouse/keyboard operation, you then need to restart the software – buying the full version unlocks this). You’d plug both NDX’s into your laptop. You can use the DJ i/o as your soundcard – you plug the two outputs from it into separate channels fo your mixer. Then you’re using Virtual DJ as music library/transport, but not as a mixer or for EQing, as you’re getting those functions from your external mixer. You could look fot Traktor mappings but I’m not aware of them.

Macs are more reliable in the real world – a good thing for DJs – and aren’t as fiddly with drivers etc for music use, but you can use a PC laptop fine.

Ableton Live is the most popular DJ/producer software because it is most DJ-centric. Any keyboard is fine, you can get a cheap M-Audio Midi keyboard for very little. It’s only for entering ideas – I wouldn’t even bother if it were me. You can get away with your laptop’s keyboard at first.

We are the best place for beginner DJ advice; for production you can try sites like Audiotuts+, or Rick Snowman’s legendary Dance Music Manual.

Good stuff! Let us know how you get on.

If you are planning to focus on DJing then you don’t really need to splash out on expensive monitors (studio speakers). Despite the fear of raising angry disagreements I would go far enough to say that your logitech speakers are fine for DJ practising in your bedroom.
If however you are planning to produce your own music, things get much more complicated. There is a huuuuge market (and budgets) for studio monitors and NOBODY, absolutely NOBODY can tell you what the best monitor is: and the reason is that even if I suggest to you a pair of monitors in the price range of 6.000 euros, there will always be someone suggesting a better monitor (probably costing twice as much). Soooo, coming down to earth, I’d say from my own personal experience that in order to get a pair of – at least – decent monitors prepare for a budget of 500 – 600 euros, (typical price range of 8 inch active monitors from known manufacturers’ low-budget monitors). Again, my perosnal opinion is that these are required ONLY if you are planning to compose, synthesize and create your own music.

I use headphones when I produce as I do a lot outside of the studio but thats just me… windows v mac is all down to you… Ive used macs but prefare my windows now the windows 7 is a lot more stable and a lot more plug and play friendly. if you are one of these people thatd download loads of shit and go on bad sites (porn, torrent sites) I recommend mac since they are a bit better at handling this (viruses are getting more common on macs though). if you are sensible with what you do though (basic web use and mainly music) I recommend windows since for half the price you can pick up something twice as powerfull as the basic mac model. Im running a samsung rv511 at the moment which was half the price of the crapist mac model and came standard with 6gb ram, 640gb hd, I5, windows 7, real good sound and video card and a few other nice treats ;).

for software its all down to preference… for edm I recommend fl studio for anything else ableton seems to be the go to software but has a steep learning curve and price curve.

thats good then, if you have any questions feel free to ask, for composing house music all I use is my headphones, a small korg controller and fl studio

AMP, post: 8783 wrote: Sweet! I use windows now, and yes I’m very sensitive with what I see and download on the net. So I guess I’ll go with windows.

I use windows as well, and haven’t had any issues. I do dual boot, with one OS for daily use and the other that has Traktor, and various other software for music manipulation. Makes it faster and much more stable.

Arbite, post: 8786 wrote: I use windows as well, and haven’t had any issues. I do dual boot, with one OS for daily use and the other that has Traktor, and various other software for music manipulation. Makes it faster and much more stable.

I’ve been thinking about doing this aswell for a while now 🙂