Dingadil!

I finally took the plunge and ordered Traktor Scratch, mostly because I'm about to transport some records down to the parents house in Mayo for storage as I'm running out of space in the apartment. Most of the people I know who use "digital vinyl" thingies own Serato, but I decided to go with Traktor Scratch for a few reasons, one of the biggies being the way that the audio interface connects up, they have these special cables which mean you don't need to have your laptop or even the actual audio box thingie plugged into the DJ mixer to play normal records with the special cables plugged in. Makes sense? No? In a nutshell, if somebody has Serato hooked up to a DJ mixer and they turn their laptop off then you won't be able to play normal vinyl on the decks unless you unplug the Serato box and put the decks back in as normal, but with the Native Instruments set-up there are these fancy cables that get around this.

Anyhoo' the next time I DJ out I'll probably be using a mix of regular records and Traktor, sure we'll see how it goes. I just ordered it so it hasn't actually arrived yet, but when it does I'll give it a proper review and let you all know what I think. I actually just had a chance to try Serato Scratch for the first time recently, it was good fun, definitely very close to the actual feel of vinyl but obviously a bit different. It has its pluses and minuses, a big plus would be that technically you can cue up a new tune a lot quicker. In Serato it's just a click of a button, compared to taking the record off the deck, stick it back in its sleeve (or throwing it on the ground!), grabbing a new one and slapping it on. One thing I didn't like was having to remember the names of tracks, a lot of the time I memorise tracks by what the label looks like, now I'm going to have to remember a lot more track and artist names! I'm looking forward to giving Traktor Scratch a good working over though, I suppose the next DJ mix I upload here will be a Traktor Scratch one, so keep an eye out, it should arrive next week!

In other news, I'm selling my DJ mixer and buying a new one! (Yeah I'm going on quite the spending spree here!) Here's your chance to own a piece of skkatter history, I'm selling my four channel Ecler Smac Pro 4 mixer which I've recorded all my mixes on! It's a great piece of equipment that works perfectly and is in amazing condition, I bought it back in 2003 for around 700 Euro but I'm selling it for 250 Euro. There's an ad and a picture up at Adverts.ie so click over to there if you're interested! The reason I'm selling is that I think it's time I traded up towards either a DJM or a Xone of some model. I'll miss the Smac Pro 4 though, we had some good times!

PS: Thanks to everybody that came down to Wax to hear me play the Thursday before last, I had great fun and thought the set went really well!