Notes On the Margins

onthemargins.com

This past weekend, I played music at a friend’s loft party in Greenpoint.
It has been a few months since I purchased Traktor Skratch from NI, and this is the second time I would bring it outside of my house. It’s good to take it out because problems arise that you would never face by keeping it safely set up in one place.
The first time I tried to bring it out, everything seemed to be on but the timecode would not get read into my computer. After about 15 minutes, my nerves got the best of me and I reverted to the 15 or so backup records I had brought with me down to Miami.
Little did I know the problem was due to a little button labelled input mode on the front of the box that must have been set to cd or something else. I checked my setup about a dozen times but didn’t think to look at this switch. This was a last obstacle, a stupid oversight… but I’ll know this for next time. There won’t be anymore setup blunders!

I was wrong. I thought I encountered all the difficulties I ever would, but this weekend after making sure the loft would have cd decks there, carefully packing my timecode cds and selecting music (the input mode switch still burned into my memory), I get to the party to find an all-in-one-cd-and-mixer-jammy, with no outputs for my computer to get to the timecode. I winged the rest of the night and played directly from my computer, which actually went pretty well and forced me to learn some shortcuts.

That being said all the djs there had different setups. There were no turntables - I would’ve brought them but I wanted to try to use what they had. There was the all-in-one cd jammy, I was using Traktor Skratch, sans Skratch, and another dj was using Ableton live. I’m trying to think of a comparable field or hobby. It just struck me as funny that we had three different setups.

I’m still on the fence about the benefits of djing digitally. It’s similar to the tradeoffs of owning mp3s, in general. In a way, its faster and more accessible because you have immediate access to your library in your computer, but it feels farther away and harder to get your head around this spaceless, faceless, massive amount of music. Now I’ve transferred this problem to my djing. I spend tons more time tracking down high quality files, making and organizing my playlists (since I can’t recognize an mp3 as fast as I can an album cover) than flipping through stacks of records and dumping them into a bag. Or at least it just feels like it.