October 25, 2001 The D.J.'s New Mix: Digital Files and a Turntable By BILL WERDE
ON a recent Wednesday night at Centro-Fly, a trendy Manhattan dance club, Richie Hawtin was using two turntables to play the latest and best techno, a crisply syncopated hybrid of dark, electronic drum rhythms and metallic high-hat and snare effects. Like so many other celebrity disc jockeys on the international circuit, Mr. Hawtin was mixing records together to imprint his style on the night's music: he played two records simultaneously to blend the drum kick of one song with the melody of another, waited about 45 seconds before replacing the drum sounds with a new album of more pronounced bass sounds, and manipulated audio effects equipment to further tweak what clubgoers were hearing. So it went for hours, Mr. Hawtin adding and subtracting sounds and the crowd of about 600 dancing and cheering when they heard a mix they liked. The scene was typical for nightclubs across the globe; the records Mr. Hawtin was placing on his turntable were anything but. Mr. Hawtin uses new technology called Final Scratch from N2IT Development, a Dutch company. The vinyl records he places on the turntables may look like normal albums, but they work as conduits for the 900 or so digital files he has stored on his laptop computer. If Mr. Hawtin places the stylus on the three-minute mark of the Final Scratch vinyl, the technology interprets that as a signal to play at the three-minute mark of the digital file he has selected. Final Scratch is not the only music or technology company looking to help a growing D.J. culture embrace digital music. A variety of software programs allow D.J.'s to use laptop computers to mix digital files without turntables and include perks like sonic filters, synthesizer emulators and samplers that can add well-laced loops of additional music or vocal snippets. Traditional audio companies are making equipment that allows D.J.'s to mix and edit digital files from compact discs. All of this gives D.J.'s new freedoms, both pragmatic and creative. Before the onset of home studios and CD burners, D.J.'s who wanted to play a new track would have to secure studio time, then make a dubplate, a fragile vinyl pressing that costs about $50 and provides 15 or 20 plays before deteriorating. CD burners allowed disc jockeys to make a track at home, then play it on a club's CD player that night, but D.J.'s couldn't manipulate the music as they could with vinyl. A breakthrough came in July with the release of the Pioneer CDJ-1000 Digital Vinyl Turntable. Featuring a touch-sensitive jog dial that can be manipulated the same way a D.J. does with vinyl - dragging a hand on the dial to slow the tempo of the CD, using a finger or two to push it faster, or "scratching" the CD back and forth, creating a myriad of potential sounds through friction - the Pioneer machine made believers out of many analog purists, including New York D.J.'s like Aaron Albano, known as Ming, and Freddie Sargolini, who goes by FS. Ming & FS recently released an album of hip-hop and techno beats called "The Human Condition" and have promoted it with frequent D.J. appearances. "You touch the plate and it reacts like you're touching vinyl," Mr. Albano said. "If you run your finger on the side of it, it slows down the platter, just like a normal turntable." The pair still spin mostly vinyl, but they experiment more than they did before. "If we make a track now, we might do three or four different versions," Mr. Albano said. "Maybe one will have more bass, maybe one will be faster, and we'll play what's right for the moment. If we hear a funny sample on the radio or television, we might grab it and use it. We don't have to go out and get records made. It's sped up the creative process immensely." Audio companies are rushing to embrace the fertile intersection of two exploding markets: digital music and D.J. culture. "Except for the engineers," said Brian Buonassissi, marketing manager for Pioneer's pro audio division, "everyone who works in marketing and product planning are all D.J.'s." (Mr. Buonassissi himself spins discs as Granmasta B in San Clemente, Calif.) Because of the Digital Vinyl Turntable's price - $1,299, with a street price of about $1,150 - "we expected we'd only sell to professionals," Mr. Buonassissi said, but the audience has proved to encompass "everyone from home users to gearheads in search of a new toy." If the gearheads are excited about the CDJ-1000, they may flip their propellers at the thought of Final Scratch, a $3,000 hardware-software package that went on sale last week. The software is loaded on a Sony (news/quote) Vaio laptop computer that is connected by a tiny processing box to standard turntables. (A version without the laptop will go on sale early next year for about $600.) Conceived at a hacker convention in Amsterdam when some programmers saw a D.J. run out of records after an hour or so, Final Scratch allows the mixing and scratching of virtually all formats of digital music to within a millisecond of precision. And as those at Centro-Fly could attest after hearing Mr. Hawtin's mix, it is impressive when put to the test of an enormous sound system. Mr. Hawtin says the best part about Final Scratch is that it is all contained on his laptop. "I don't travel with a CD burner, and if you start burning a lot of CD's, you run into an organizational challenge," he explained. Mr. Hawtin's 900 files are stored within the Final Scratch software, broken down by subgenres and easily cross-referenced by a variety of search categories. With his frequent travel, having his whole set available on his laptop creates time, in a matter of speaking. "In May, I flew to England on a Saturday," he said, "played a gig, flew back Sunday morning and had a gig that night in Detroit. I had eight hours there and back. I went through all my records, sorted out what I wanted to play in Detroit, what I wanted to play in London, picked a couple of tracks, re-edited them to create some special versions and played them that night." Mr. Hawtin is quick to praise the freedom and spontaneity granted by the digital realm. "This lets us evaluate what's happening in the world as quickly as possible now," he said. "I can take a snippet of some news or a popular record and throw it in the mix in a completely different way." At the same time, it is important to him that Final Scratch works through standard turntables. "It gives me the advantage of a physicality that not only I understand, but the crowd understands," he said. "People understand what a D.J. does now. It's just like how people became accustomed to freaking out when someone did something cool with a guitar. We don't lose that, but it opens these floodgates to a whole new potential." Some of the greatest potential revolves around much more mundane issues than digital revolutions may inspire. Mr. Hawtin carries two crates of records to his D.J. sessions, each holding about 100 albums. "I'll be down to one crate by the end of the year," Mr. Hawtin said. "The only reason I'm carrying as much music as I am now is that there is a time lag between when I get a record and when I can digitize it. I have plenty of room in my laptop for tracks I may only play once a year, but that one time I play it, it will make the night." Reducing the number of albums may turn out to be the greatest advantage of all. "Do you have any idea," Mr. Hawtin said with a laugh, "how much a crate of records weighs?" --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
