gender wrote:seems to me like a bunch of people learned to mix on wax and are bummed out cause people with a laptop can do it easier.
such snobbery on this board, some genuine elitists on here. who gives a fuck what you're playing on??? people saying "if you ain't on wax, you ain't a DJ" i think you're missing the point... i think that people saying that in the DJ community and in your little scene you have to spin on wax to be "legit" or a "proper DJ" is silly. its like a little gang... "you gotta do what we do or you ain't in our gang".
like i say... the point is being missed. DJing isn't about turntabalism, or scratching, or juggling or whatever... that mentality only exists within a certain group of (very snobby, and fucking stupid) people and is compltely irrelevant outside of it. Your job, as a DJ, is to play tunes for listeners, and i think people forget that. From certain peoples posts in this thread it just seems like DJing is seen as some kind of circle jerking session, where if your methods dont match the standards and tastes of the "true wax DJ" then you're nothing. and its bullshit.
RESULTS > MEDIUM.
big ups to all the people who started spinning on wax cause its all that there was to spin on.
this^^
Actually, I did the complete reverse - learned to beatmatch on an early version of Traktor, started playing out with CDs and continued for a few years, but now I only ever buy vinyl.
IMHO, the most important factors are
quality of musical output (mixing, track selection, flow, etc) and
artist integrity. By artist integrity, I mean working your medium in such a way that you're earning the respect that you get from the crowd (and let's face it, in 2010 DJs get much more kudos than they really deserve for mixing two records together). I don't mean spending shitloads of money on vinyl, necessarily. I wish this debate would turn into "passion vs not passion", because that's really what this is about. I'm talking about giving a shit about your music, not being lazy, genuinely living for what you do, not getting the computer to do everything for you, etc. On a basic level, the medium is not important at all; it's your approach to it and what you achieve with it that counts.
So yeah, I believe that you can achieve great things with more or less any medium. However, for me, I found that both of the above levels were significantly easier to maintain when I started playing 90% vinyl. My reasons for migrating towards vinyl and sticking with it are threefold, and not really that related to the actual handling of records:
1) QUALITY CONTROL, AVOIDANCE OF MEDIOCRITY, OWNERSHIP OF A REAL OBJECT
I come from the techno and house side of things, which is even more overrun with mediocrity than the dubstep scene. In techno, 99% of the digital releases are unbearably boring, and that's 99% of an absolute SHITLOAD of releases. In order to keep up to date with everything coming out on beatport you'd need to be listening to utter tripe at least a couple of hours a day. Don't get me wrong, I love crate digging, both in the real sense and online, but 3 hours a day of the same drum loops with a different sax sample on top started making me want to burn off my own ears. Contrast this to, say, going into Hardwax and asking Shed or DJ Pete what's come out recently that they've enjoyed, and you'll find that there's just no competition. I actually enjoy buying music now. Sure, there's loads of shit coming out on vinyl too, but there's so little money to be made in dealing with wax that the quality control tends to be higher at various stages in the chain (eg labels, shops, distribution). There's still a bunch of stuff that only comes out on 12 and not digitally.
There's another side to this - if you're spending 8 euros on a record, you're gonna be keen to make sure you're not buying a load of shit. My Beatport folder is just chock full of rubbish where I listened to 10 seconds of the shitty quality sample, thought "yeah, cool, this'll fit well into a set" and clicked BUY because it was only €1.39. That, IMHO, is not a good way to collect music. I'd much rather have a smaller collection of REAL, physical objects with nice artwork etc, than a hundred gigabytes of assorted crap that I'd picked up here and there, most of which I wouldn't be able to hum the melody from if you asked me "what's this track like". I also find I know my vinyl much better than I ever knew my MP3s, partially because I have much less of it. I don't really care about having every single new release and routinely play out stuff from 2, 5, 10, 20 years ago, so for me this is much more important than being able to acquire lots of new music cheaply.
2) I (PERSONALLY) HATE PLAYING WITH A LAPTOP
I'll preface this by mentioning that I actually work as a Traktor developer, and am clearly not anti-laptop-DJ. I think the "laptop DJs look really boring" argument is bullshit, to be honest. There's absolutely no reason why you can't look as animated and engaging playing on Serato or Traktor as you can playing wax. I've seen some pretty dull vinyl DJs play and some pretty entertaining Traktor DJs play; the argument is basically moot because the whole POINT of scratch DVSs is that you don't have to look at the screen very much.
However, for me, the key difference, and the reason I hate playing out with a laptop and avoid it wherever possible, is the browsing. I HATE using a trackpad to scroll through Windows or Finder or some file browser in order to find my next track. Hate it. Live sets may be a different matter, but as a DJ I'd rather feel like a selector and a musician than a technician, and I simply don't like using computers in a club. BUT, if it works for you, great.
3) THE FACT THAT LOADS OF TRAKTOR DJs ARE REALLY SHIT
For me, I think this is the crux of the whole debate. I live in Berlin and it's CERTAINLY true here with NI having such a big market share, but I'd imagine it's the same everywhere else --
there are lots of really boring DJs playing really shitty music with Traktor (sync'ed or otherwise), and it's very easy to extrapolate as far as saying "Traktor's really boring". It's a totally bullshit argument, but I'll readily admit that vinyl does have quite a vain attraction in tending to give off the impression that you spend a lot of time, energy, money and love on your music collection and music as a whole, whereas being a laptop DJ opens up the possibility to onlookers that you might just be some bratty kid with a cracked copy of Ableton and a Rapidshare Premium account. The increasing disposability of art, culture, creativity etc has been a running theme for as long as popular culture has existed, and to me, although DVSs open many doors, I can also see that there's quite a high correlation (NOT causation!) between laptop DJs and bland selection and mixing. I definitely don't think that laptop DJs are bad DJs, but I do like how playing vinyl does (at least to a certain extent) distance you from the cheapo cracks'n'mp3s image that's very easy to acquire.
I very rarely wade into these debates but figured I'd offer my 2 cents as I don't think I've ever really written down my views on laptop DJing in full. Sorry for the essay!
TJ
