"Arfa Daily" wrote in message ...
"Phil Allison" wrote in message
...
Trevor Wilson wrote:
Phil Allison wrote:
** Crikey !!!
AD must deal with a whole different kind of "DJ" to the ones I come
across.
Words like "tight-arse", "con-artist", "hassler" and "whinger" cover
most of them while the rest are straight out crims or drug dealers.
**That has been my experience with these scum too. When I've dealt with
them, I have felt an uncontrollable need to check my valuables and have
a good bath.
** Back in the mid 70s when disco took off in Australia, I had quite a few
customers who hired out DJ equipment - some of these systems were large
enough to double as a PA for bands.
The failure rate of the amplifiers was very high and so I got plenty of
repair work on SAE 2200s & 2400s, Phase Linear 400s & 700s and Yamaha 2200
power amplifiers and many others.
I even designed a good quality DJ mixer that was produced in quantity and
sold as JAI Sound.
When the disco craze started to wane in the late 80s, things turned nasty
and a lot of crims entered the business - mostly as DJs who has bought
their own gear.
One of my regular customers disposed of all his DJ hire stock cos he was
getting constant death threats from competitors. It was that nasty.
Disco use is the hardest use of amps and speakers I know of - add take
away hire to almost anyone and you have a disaster looing for somewhere to
happen.
IME, DJs are equipment wreckers and thoroughly nasty people.
.... Phil
Wrong type of "DJs" Phil. The proper pros are not part time 'record
spinners' in discos. They are entertainers that create tracks 'on the fly'
and inhabit the club scene. The mixers that they use are altogether
different from the sorts of items that are used by bands or disco DJs. The
Pioneer CDJs are nothing at all like a conventional CD player, or anything
that a disco or birthday party DJ would use. They have buttons and features
that I wouldn't pretend to understand properly. Some systems even make use
of time-code CDs that drive external software to allow digitally recorded
material stored as MP3 (or whatever) files on the computer to be scratched
and mixed and beat synchronised as though they were physical media -
specifically vinyl records.
You are even out of date - at least in this country, anyway - with the way
that the disco scene that you are talking about works. Most 'proper' DJs of
the 'record spinner' variety that work the mobile disco scene for parties
and weddings and so on, are these days older people, not kids or drug
dealers. The better ones don't even use CD players any more, let alone
conventional phono decks, which are of course still used by the pro club
DJs, Technics SL1200 series decks being the norm for that work.
I have a colleague that has been doing mobile disco work for more than 30
years. All of his source material is now carried on a laptop, and is
controlled by very expensive professional software that was originally
written for use by radio stations. He can compile playlists off-line based
on what the client requests in advance, and the type of gig that it is -
birthday, wedding etc. When 'live' requests are made, just like when people
phone in to radio shows, he can select the requested track from the massive
archive that he has, and drag it into the playlist in seconds. It's all way
way more sophisticated than it was back in the 80s and 90s.
Arfa
You're not wrong there Arfa.
I am the Sound Engineer in a club in London. The main DJ now has his 8
hour sets on hard drive, using a rack mount hardware controller to select,
start and stop each track.
(There are two identical drives and 2 controllers in case something breaks)
We also have DJ's come in to play a small chillout set after the main event.
The majority of these now bring a Laptop with their music onboard, and
Traktor installed to play it.
The CDJ's and DJM's do indeed have a lot of features, particularly if you
want to Scratch, and add the onboard effects and filters, and have USB and
SD card sockets to read your entire music collection from a card, stick or
hard drive. Or you can actually put a CD in if you're really old skool!
(Could be a CD of mp3's, meaning a lot more than the 80 minutes of music
available on a CD)
Our club doesn't really play that kind of Scratchy stuff, so we don't have
CDJ's, but when we put live acts on, we will hire some in if requested along
with the digital mixing desk and wedge monitor system.
I control the desk with an ipad - that is well cool and a damn sight quicker
and easier than navigating the layers, controls and parameters on the desk
itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0hOXqMgcAU
Gareth.