The 'Sync' button – ADE Conference 2011 Discussion.

I’ve been lucky enough to have started out DJing when I was 15 on vinyl and cd’s and over 10 years I have moved to a purely digital setup (Midi Controllers, Traktor/Ableton Live, Apple Mac). I do think that there is no point in living in the past no matter how romantic it may seem to be seen playing nothing but records on the old ones and twos. But we live in an age where labels are investing in selling packets data down a fiber optic tube rather than plastic discs in shops. The grand majority of what I play would never come out on vinyl or cd so for me it makes sense to use a purely digital setup.

I do use the sync button during my sets to make mixing easier and why the hell not? I can beat match using vinyl, cdj’s and my computer but if i have a tool there that i can used to save me time and enable me to mix better, faster and enable me to sound better for my audience it’ll use it. Once I’ve sync don’t just stand around once I’ve got my tracks playing, I am quite happily dropping accapellas, rinsing the effects, looping and jumping from cue to cue in order to make my sets as interesting. I do this because sync enables me to free up my time to be able to do this as well as the rest of the technology that I use. On the flip side to this, there are two many DJ’s out there that quite happily “play a track, hit sync, fade into the next track, repeat”. Yes this is unfortunately what most kids call DJing…. This breaks my heart as at time I feel that what I am doing isn’t a far cry from what they are doing and when I’ve been called out by my peers I find I can only defend myself so far. But at least I know where I came from and I’ve tried it all.

softcore, post: 9505 wrote: I dont know what goes on outside of Greece, but at least here this is the main reason the original, underground, partying club scene (which wasnt too big to begin with) is slowly dying – if its not already dead. People are getting tired of being fed “sheep” music, even though they dont know it is such, because no one tought them.

I think it’s just the opposite. People here in Australia don’t listen to stuff like house, dubstep, etc… Most of my requests are for the latest Gaga/Black Eyed Peas/Flo Rida song (I absolutely refuse to play Dirty Bit these days). They like being fed the same songs over and over again. When I was living in canberra, the club that most people would go to would play exclusively top 40’s from the last 5 or so years. It got to the point that after going there once a week for 2 months or so, I could tell you the exact order of the songs the DJ would play. All of my rage as well when he did one of the DJ name drops AT THE BEGINNING OF EVERY SONG! Yes, I can understand doing it every now and then in your set. BUT MY GOD, I DON’T NEED TO HEAR IT EVERY 5 MINUTES!.

Unfortunately, most of my friends only wanted to listen to this stuff, and I rarely went to the other club, which played more house/trance/dubstep, and the DJ used more controllerism techniques. University students are stingy and couldn’t be bothered paying the $5 cover fee.

/rant

Ive started to not even bother with Synch to be honest, i’ve mapped a button for each deck to toggle beatlock on and off, 90% of the time they are both on, hit play and the second tune tempo matches and locks the nearest transient automatically – most of the time its perfect especially if i have tapped out or corrected the grids, if not or its a dynamic tune i quickly get it back in synch on the jogs if its out of phase.
Only time i switch these off is if there is a deliberate switch in tempo needed.
Why bother with all this manual beat/ phase matching business?

As an aside, even tho the tunes are beatlocked, before hitting play on the new tune i still adjust the pitch faders to match bpm’s – just so that if there is some kind of disaster the slider and the software are matched and i can take over without drama.. Belts and braces 😉