Terry_42

Big welcome again from me too, already some nice posts by you.

Hey Yan! Welcome to DDT forums 🙂
Always nice to see someone from Bulgaria. I have been studying in Sofia in 1995 for half a year, it was really awesome and I loved the Bulgarian crowd and students and of course the yoghurt 😉

Maybe check out Phil’s video on software selection, it is totally free… just go to youtube and search for “digitaldjtips software”.

The software packages are totally different in every respect. From my experience:
Traktor: It is very tunable and caters a lot towards the controllerist crowd. But it can be very complicated and it has some limitations that especially I do not like (some others love them).
Serato itch: It is very simple and is extremely easy to get into and has extremely good quality when working together with a controller. But you can only use Itch with certified controllers and nothing else.
VDJ: Is the most highly configurable Software. It is very loaded with features and you can customize EVERYTHING. I personally love this freedom it gives me. However it has the current downside that the Mac support is not as good as the PC side, the basic EQ is crap (you can change that by tweaking it) and the sampler section is limited. However VDJ 8 will change all of those things massively…

Nice view, but nothing new. It reiterates that the magic happens in production and sometimes even earlier in song writing.
Why do you still go to live events: For the feeling and celebrating music with others.
Also this is not exclusive to DJing at events or “live shows”, you do not think that The Edge is playing 20 overdubbed guitars for some of his songs at once on stage? He plays the main part, the rest is a digital button pusher behind the stage…

Well I think of myself as a DJ and I totally agree with you. The real magic happens in the production part. If you just take samples from another source and put them in, you are DJing with samples… sometimes to an extend where the samples take over and I do not actually like that.
I am however also producing, but mainly songs for artist friends of mine (and sadly none went to the charts yet hehe.) and I think if you are a good producer you can become a controllerist. Like moldover I also play guitar and sing, but I would not play my guitar on a controller…

You can check out this song I put together, it is 100% sample loops, some I took and some from Logic sample packs…
http://soundcloud.com/terry_42/honkytonksitar
I am sure I could take all that samples I used, arrange them on a button box and improvise the song more, but I do not think it would sound as good…

I have mixed in key and have my collection analyzed and it totally depends on the situation if I use it.

In a club or a bar with dancy feeling: I use it when I can, but song selection is more important and my energy rating comes first as it is about “controlling emotions”.

At a wedding: Totally ignore it. It is the happy day of the bride and groom, so I play whatever I can see makes them happy aka song selection will always win.

In a lounge type bar or sunday afternoon chillout session: Especially when I play deep house / belearic / italo house I mix in key. As I saw it is more harmonic for the audience. I still get them to shuffle with how I arrange the key changes, but being “harmonic” does mean I do not disturb their conversations etc. with a hard crossover…. in this environment I also mostly “blend songs” as nicely as I can and use very few tricks or effects and almost no samples. So it is kinda minimalistic mixing in key.

Hey mate,

thanks a lot for that insight into the scene of India. I have to check out the pages, as I am eager to go to India. Wont happen this year as I am luckily almost booked out and have a trip to Korea upcoming, but hopefully I can make it next year, that would be totally awesome.

Cheers
Terry 42