As endorsed by Grandmaster Flash

For the past few years I regularly recorded DJ sets at home and then stuck them up on my website for people to download. Unfortunately this joyous activity was put on hold during most of 2007 while I encoded my entire record collection and then moved to Berlin. In the moving process I sold both my old mixer (an Ecler Smac Pro 4) and my old studio monitors (a pair of Alesis M1 Activ MKII active monitors) to two lucky people who now own a piece of skkatter history!

Currently my 1210s are still in my parents house, the shipping of all my stuff from Ireland to Germany won’t happen for another month or so by the looks of things, but over the weekend I ordered a brand new Rane Empath mixer from Thomann.de, a process made slightly tricky by me using the German version of their site and not knowing a word of German (I’m starting my lessons as soon as money permits, I should probably stop buying DJ equipment then eh!?). You may have heard of the company Rane before, they’re the guys that make Serato Scratch. The reason I chose the Empath is because despite not being a scratch DJ, I’ve always preferred the crossfader on scratch DJ mixers. I’m a big fan of quick cuts and chops and things when mixing techno and electro, and I could never really do this properly on the Xone and DJM mixers I’ve used (maybe I’m just a crap DJ!). Also, the Empath’s over 450 Euro cheaper than a Xone 92 and 370 Euro cheaper than a DJM 800, I’d probably never use the fourth channel of either of those mixers anyway.

So that’s all my mixer related news for you! Currently I’m living in an empty apartment, with just a mattress on the floor to keep me company which is obviously driving me a bit mental. Can’t wait to get all my stuff shipped over. This weekend Zip, the owner of Perlon Records, is playing at Watergate alongside Sammy Dee (also from Perlon and one half of Pantytec) with a life set from Bruno Pornsato, I haven’t heard much in the way of good house music here yet so I may just amble along to this.