There’s that.Īnd that brings us to the fundamental disconnect between the controversy over these large, multi-deck controllers and the real world of DJing. Oh, and on a turntable, apart from digital control records, you can also play music encoded on vinyl discs, which you’ll conveniently find as a major means of distributing music online and in your local record store. (Ahem.) But they still aren’t as good as turntables: they lack the physical feedback and resistance that a full-sized turntable provides. They’ve gotten better – not so long ago, a German manufacturer called Native Instruments was telling me how they had come up with something to do with magnets that made their Traktor controller better. Whether it succeeds or not, the Remix Decks in Traktor and other controllerist machinations have far more to do with DJ history than using a plastic disc to manually cue does.Īnd about those plastic discs. Perhaps, then, beat matching is fundamental, but it didn’t take long for pioneers to move on to new things – Kool Herc, Frankie Knuckles, Grandmaster Flash. Great turntablists play vinyl like a musical instrument, not just a mechanism for mixing tracks. By the 80s, it added drum machines and even more-involved turntable technique – backspins, punch phrases, stuff you actually can’t do on those hulking plastic controllers. As early as the 70s, DJ technique, flourishing in places like the Bronx, had already expanded to breaks, remixes, beat juggling. Reducing turntablism to beat matching is more than a little simplistic. There are some problems with this orthodoxy, however. In the best case, it’s an automatic transmission in a car: sucking the fun out of driving, and not entirely effective. In the worst case version of this world view, automatic tempo sync is simply the work of Satan, the end of music, and the beginning of the end times. The idea is, the essence of DJing, as received from the legacy of playing on two turntables, is manually adjusting the position of a record platter and its playback speed to match two tracks. (Oh, the humanity!) To be fair, this isn’t just an idea espoused by random people on forums some very famous DJs have said the same thing. To the computer DJ, the new controllers are blasphemy for a simple reason: they cement the idea that you might not be manually beat-matching tracks. And now something is something or other something else I’m bored.” Or, no, actually, they’re looking at pictures of cats, so never mind. Those folks, who I will dub in ethnographic terms as “normal people,” just read “Well, that’s a big heavy thing with lots of lights. To people who aren’t armchair DJ controller critics, that last bit may not sound like the stuff of forum flame wars. (EDM = America = trucks?) Secondly, it drops jog wheels and per-deck tempo controls in favor of touch strips and a master tempo control. (It joins various other popular controllers, notably Pioneer’s flagship DDJs, in the same territory.) The 5kg/11lb weight isn’t so bad, but the physical hulk means you need dedicated space in a DJ booth to play it, and transportation is a challenge. There are two design decisions likely to generate discussion. You wouldn’t use the mixer without the computer, but at least it acknowledges you might get audio signal to and from the outside world. And it builds in an audio interface and 4-channel hardware audio mixer for connecting external gear – CDJs, turntables, synthesizers, whatever. It has a hardware layout tailored to the functionality of Traktor – deck controls, browsing, Remix Decks. As NI’s Maschine Studio has done for producers, it uses big, color screens on the hardware to keep your eyes on that controller rather than on your laptop.
TRAKTOR S8 SOFTWARE
It’s hardware made specifically to sell software (or the other way around, if you like). It’s an audio mixer with control surfaces on both sides. But now that it’s fully revealed, the S8 is almost certain to fan the flames of an ongoing debate:įirst, we can at least work out what the S8 is.
You’ve likely seen it already – this may be the most-leaked, most-teased DJ product in history. It’s such big news, you might hear about it outside the world of DJ tech followers. The Kontrol S8 is now standards bearer for Native Instruments’ DJ line.
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