In the river of mp3 watches, crazy frog mutations and the white noise of over-abundant music choice, floats the DJ species, but are they flowing forward with the tide, or being washed back out to sea? A few snapshots from the DJ interface frontlines.
Givin’ it up For Ye Olde Turntablism
Aside from the more obvious manipulations of time, tone & rhythm made possible with scratching back ‘n’ forth the wheels of steel, it was a DJ Krush gig a few years ago that really opened my eyes to what a versatile instrument the turntable was. Or being a laptop kid, I grasped a bit more what a really great interface it was, allowing such fine and dextrous control, and ability to morph and smoothly shape sounds, the finesse of control partially made possible because of it’s sheer size ( compare the width of a record to that of a laptop scratchpad ).
Evolution towards ‘instrumentness’ seems a common desire amongst electronic musicians, and within turntable circles, this mostly seems to involve minimal modification to the size of that well functioning interface, but instead considering how the music itself is stored and delivered to the interface ( inevitably more and more music is stored on less and less, moving from crates of records to mp3 players, hard drives and even mobile phones ), and perhaps how that music signal might be processed ( effects in mixers, laptop software).
On the other hand, items like mixers which allow 2 mp3 players to be inserted in either side of a stand-alone mixer, chase novelty rather than decent interface control, or instrumentness. Inevitably music collections will keep expanding in scope and shrinking in storage size. Final Scratch shrinks record crates into becoming small hard drives, but the music and interface remains the same, new flexibilities of technique and effects introduced along the way. Ms.Pinky offers a cheaper alternative, an encoded record which when detected by a computer, translates turntable motions into actions on the music files chosen within the computer. And once in data-land, that turntable may be manipulating video ( or 3D animation or virtual fish or ) just as easily as it is music, the audiovisual possibilities here, as with DVD turntables & mixers, marking one large area of exploration.
See where it can go: www.v-scratch.net
I’ve had this recurring dream in which I’m controlling a giant mecha robot with an array of Ms. Pinky records. I’m certain this would be in the realm of the possible.
Cute! – though who has the array of mspinkys? you or the robot? send photos when you’ve made it…