VCI-300 Mk II Traktor integration

Hey Phil, is the extra power cable for gain boost really necessary?

VCI-300 MkII acquired. I recognize that the 380 is the way of the future, but WOW is the 300 a magnificent thing. I’ve been a musician for 17 years and started with the usual stuff (guitar, bass, etc) before moving on to electronic music and have only recently come around to getting serious about DJing in the last couple years. The best thing I can say about the 300/Itch combination is that for the first time I feel like I’m playing an INSTRUMENT rather than using a TOOL. Does that make sense? This rig is simple as a screwdriver (and I mean that as a compliment) and a joy to use. Maybe I’ll want effects again later, but right now I’m not missing much about Traktor as I *finally* can scratch properly. Also, it’s loud as all hell.

The weirdness of how sync works is a little bothersome but not too big a deal. I can manually beatmatch well enough and should really do it more anyway, given my primary genre. Only things I really miss so far are being able to key shift in order to give myself more options for harmonic mixing and being able to hot key crates. These are small things though. And I haven’t even tried the sampler yet.

2 thumbs way up.

And that’s exactly what I’ve done. On the one hand I like that it gives you a little cred with the old school DJs to be manually beatmixing but also it’s the instrument thing again. The experience is much more immersive and enjoyable (and, well, physical, which is important for playing very physical music, I think).

Only real problem I’m running into not having vinyl or CDJ background is dealing with some types of music that I use that have 3+ minute long ambient intros followed by fairly pounding 4×4 beats. I’m finding mixing the beat parts up against each other to keep the energy up while still getting the intro in there to be a bit challenging.

Love this thing though. Very glad I listened to you about it. 😀