Coachella DJs get the party moving with MP3s
THERE'S a video clip making the rounds on YouTube featuring English player Steve Coogan from the U.K. television show "Saxondale" talk about the state of DJs in the post-vinyl era. "What on God's green Earth is that?" Coogan asks incredulously of a club track playacting on the machine stereoscopic picture. "These days [to be a DJ] you want to know how to operate Windows XP. . . . What do they practice? Moving the mouse around?"
Well, possibly.
Final stage weekend at the Coachella Vale Music and Humanities Festival, there were flock of cursors moving crossways screens (though to be fair, few of those computers were running Windows XP; more like a variant of Macintosh's OS X). Simply the freshly school of DJs playing the festival surely didn't demand practice selecting the right MP3s to play -- DJs give birth embraced MP3s as the format of choice, bearing to websites like beatport.com to download newly stuff and going away behind bulky albums and CDs in favour of managing their files with software wish Serato Scratch Populate and Traktor.
"When you ar a vinyl DJ, you get to expect to go tracks on vinyl before you tin can play them come out," offers L.A. fixedness Steve Aoki. "Since Serato, you prat play anything you bring on the second [it's] fix to go -- and you don't have to hold crates of records anywhere."
Of course of study, relying to a great extent on engineering isn't without peril. There's constantly the possibility of a crash that could bring the party to an abrupt halt.
"I've been somewhat fortunate in that I've never had a crash," says electronic creative person Deadmau5 (whose adopted nickname is pronounced Deadmouse simply whose real number nominate is Book of Joel Zimmerman). "I'm exploitation custom-made software, which helps."
Non every dance music purveyor has been so lucky. British DJ Sasha has been very public around his reluctance to switch over to crash-prone computers when playing be and his subsequent late transition to victimisation a Mackintosh G5 alternatively of vinyl radical or CDs. So, of course, he was the one to have every DJ's worst nightmare earlier a high profile employment in Miami ternion months ago during the annual dance music confer known as the Winter Music League.
"10 transactions before I was supposed to play at [South Beach club] Sign, . . . I was just around to go on and play and my system crashed," he says. "I made a eleventh hour call to a friend, and he brought me a save comptroller. . . . I went on a half-hour late, and it messed up my entire night, to be honest. If you don't know what caused the glitch, it stresses you out."
Forthwith, though, he's become a convert. Sasha, world Health Organization played Coachella on Apr 26, is victimisation Ableton software for his Mack to wager survive. He says it's a "rare occurrence" that he has a fatal technical school fault that michigan his fructify and that the "pluses outweigh the minuses" when it comes to exploitation a computer-based weapons platform.
"For the number one vI months, I was like a kidskin with a new toy," he says of his relatively new set up. "But it didn't sound like me . . . it's well-nigh like I had to train myself to sound like myself once again." He sighs, adding: "I had to remember that it wasn't essential to overlay every track with effects."
Zimmerman, world Health Organization programs his own sets or else of traditional "DJ'ing," likes to experiment with his possess material on the fly, an example being his dearest progressive tense sign of the zodiac running "Faxing German capital," using computer code he wrote himself.
"I habit different software program altogether the time," he says. "The methodological analysis of penning [in dancing music] involves multiple passes, experimentation . . . stuff that you bear to go back and edit out. I'd be hard-pressed to be able to do that inhabit on microscope stage. But I always try to cut-in or so elements that are new so that I'm at least acting the running. Audio frequency engineering science keeps climax out with new stuff. If it's new, work it. That's the unit idea behind engineering."
charlie.amter@latimes.com
