Chuck Van Eekelen

What? Addiction?! Oh no, NOW they tell me!

You might run into me there 🙂

As for gear. Starting simple has, imho, the following advantages:
1) all the basic functionality you need to get yourself started and trained up, without the confusion and lure of all the extra stuff that only distracts.
2) you don’t know what you will really like/need (see your comment on workflow). Buying bigger and better is only wise once you HAVE figured that out, usually after practicing and learning on a starter controller. You develop that workflow, figure out what software you like and start to figure out what functionality you want/need and what things you don’t need/want. Best way to spend your Euro’s, rather than buying the more expensive stuff only to find out that it’s not really what you (thought you) wanted/needed.
3) Should you decide it’s not for you after all, even if you can’t resell it, you can give it to a young nephew or niece and not be too bothered about the money spent on it.

As for music (collection), be sure to read up on the main site and here on collection management. While nice to have a lot of music, when it comes to DJ collections, “less is more”. Guys like Phil Morse have (core) collections of maybe 500-600 tracks altogether. And that is for a reason 😀

<Note from moderator>

Please change your forum name. It’s against posting guidelines to use a company name. You are only allowed to use your own name or a DJ name.

Both over on the blog (main site) and here in the forums the subject has been written about several times. Using the search functionality should get you some articles/posts on how to go about getting gigs.

Think it’s because the R1 was the first controller to utilize RB prepared tracks only in a controller?

Have used DJay and DJay Pro. Both should do what you want, especially in the beginning. The Beatpad is a nice iPad controller that has all you need to get started. As for connecting a controller to a club setup … clearly you will be able to hook up the sound output from your controller to the club mixer or PA in most cases. Using the actual mixer with your controller (i.e. mixing on the club mixer and using the controller for decks) will not work. Some software (like Serato and Pioneer RekordBox as well as Mixvibes Cross for example) will let you hook up Pioneer CDJs and use them as controllers. Be aware that you have very few of the features your controller offers (like performance pads just to name one) on CJDs! The experience will actually limit your creativity if you get all out of your controller.

When you hook up your new (Serato supported) controller, in the software you can connect it and things should go right. There are no hardware specific Serato versions, although the LE versions usually only work with the model they came with. That is not the case here.

So, there should be no problem, provided you pick a new controller that is supported by Serato.