Dizzle

Free entry, guest list for friends, meeting international touring Djs, but most of all putting on one of my favourite tracks and watching the crowd go wild!

That’s too bad mate. I’ve been living in Thailand for a few years and have friends living in mainland china not far from HK. We both agree that many of the cultures here try to avoid confrontation and hate “loosing face” more than anything else. Maybe the fake dj incident happened because you called them out on their fake dj and they lost face?

That’s from when he was first starting out…. see? we all start out at the bottom and work our way up

It can cause people to stop dancing. As a Dj you’ve practiced being able to pick out the two separate vocals in your head and make sense of them. To the average patron, it will just sound jumbled and will probably mess up their rhythm haha

Whatever reggae you play, try not to make it all sean paul & bob marley tracks haha. Reggae Hits has at least 30 volumes of popular tracks from as far back as the 80’s cherry pick a few tracks from that.

I’ve only ever owned Serato gear. I started out with a Vestax VCI-300 and Itch and upgraded to the 380 and subsequently Serato Dj. A few of my mates use Tracktor…mainly those that went with the S2/S4 to start their digital djing. Most of the Djs I work with use CDs or a Serato box. I’ve used Serato with a pair of technics and tracktor with a similar setup.

I feel more connected to my library and tracks that are playing in Serato. Trackor makes me feel less connected to the music “on the platter”. Trackor has a more powerful and expansive feature set, but I play mostly hip hop & reggae at most of my paying gigs so most of those features are not necessary to me. I also love how Serato is plug and play, no configuring sound cards or midi mappings. Just plug in your rane mixer or serato box and go.

It’s kinda like comparing Windows vs OSX:
Windows (Tracktor) is very open ended. you can configure it almost anyway you want and it’s built to work with many different setups.
OSX (Serato) is a much more closed ecosystem. You have less choice with customization, and can only use it with a handful of systems.

However, I feel that it is a benefit to Serato as they only have to write the software to work with a few systems. Which allows the software to have tighter, more responsive controls that are prone to less random glitches. The introduction of Serato Dj to the Vestax 300 series controllers further confirms my theory as I’ve had more random crashes and glitches using Serato Dj as compared to Itch, which I used for a couple years with almost no problems at all. Serato Dj has to work with a much larger selection of midi controllers from a wider variety of manufacturers.

So to sum it up. If you’re playing lots of loops and samples that you want to “play live” in your sets a la Tracktor remix decks, or you are pursuing a controllerist style of Djing, tracktor might be the software to go with. But, if you play songs that were made before DAWs were around to keep the BPMs static and the most you plan to use for loops are a few bars here and there, or maybe loop roll then Serato is where it’s at. I’ve seen some videos online where DMC champs compare the DVS performance of the two softwares where they claim there is no discernible difference. However, in my experience Serato is the better option for me.

Adjusting pitch with keylock will result in the choppiness/distortion you speak of. It’s most noticeable for me with pitch shifts of 5+ bpm (70-135) or 10+ (140+ bpm). The dj software struggles to adjust the tempo wile reproducing the same sounds. I play a lot of bass heavy music (dubstep, trap, d&b etc) and have experienced the same problem.

My solution was to stop using keylock for electronic music. For hip hop and other more conventional genres, I still use keylock from time to time as the tempos of the tracks are all over the place. There was an article referenced here or on dj tech tools that argued that no one should use keylock as it will degrade the sound quality. If you turn up the volume or have big speakers you can hear the bass stuttering on my most recent mix on soundcloud. I recorded it back in November and since January I stopped using keylock for my electronic music sets.

It looks like the the track on the right has been compressed quite a bit and the output gain has been reduced.