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After a long semester at NYU and the exciting events that have taken place at StarStyle over the past 6 months, I finally took some time to learn how to DJ with Ableton Live 6. The program is a mix show programmer’s dream. With it, you can either DJ live or you can use the sequencing feature to lay your tracks into the timeline. The software uses a feature called “warping” to identify and sync the beats from two different songs.
For many years, I refused to go from vinyl to CD. When CDs skip, it can cause a very ubrupt digital hiccup. It’s not something that I inherently trusted in a live environment. CD players rely on optics to read the discs. I always thought, correctly or not, that if the player wasn’t cleaned regularly, you’d have dirt accumulate on the lenses and cause a skipping problem. Not to mention, once a CD is scratched, it renders the technogy pretty much useless. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in nightclubs and heard that awful sound.
A few years back, I’d seen a demo of Stanton’s Final Skratch in beta (before Stanton acquired the technology). I was impressed but had heard there were latency issues. I continued to play vinyl until Native Instruments released the first version of Traktor DJ. After that, I was hooked on digital DJing. You no longer needed to carry crates of records (I used to carry about 400 to 500 to my gigs), lug turntables or worry about CDs skipping. I really liked Traktor 2, but was unhappy with Traktor 3’s new software interface. They’d changed the pitch control from a fader to a knob. I think that was a big mistake. Unless you can assign the knob to a hardware interface, it’s hard to work with the knob using a mouse. I also noticed the the beat sync wasn’t as good as in the prior version.
I’d started to hear about a few DJs, like Sasha and David Waxman, who were using Ableton Live to mix. I’d got a copy of Live Lite 4 with an M-Audio firewire interface. I quickly realized there wasn’t much I could do with it, unless I converted all my mp3 tracks to wav. It wasn’t until Ableton 5 that MP3 was adopted as a supported format. A few weeks ago, I purchased Live 6 from B&H Photo on 34th Street (got a discount with my NYU student ID) and got started learning how to DJ with it. The manual doesn’t offer much real instruction, so I checked out YouTube.com, where I found a few video tutorials, which taught me how to warp my tracks and set up my mixer with M-Audio firewire DJ Mixer.
After a few stops and starts, I learned that I didn’t have to spend three hours at a sitting mixing my set. I could lay all the tracks in to the timeline and match or sync them. What a revelation! It became so simple to put together a set, which I’ve posted here. You can either listen by clicking the play icon or you can download the full set. At about 125 MBs, it’ll take about 25 minutes to download on a cable modem. Of course, you can also tune into Netmix Radio, where the show can be heard between 8pm and 11 pm, Mon. thru Fri.
Tony Zeoli is an innovative digital media product development consultant who has been at the forefront of the convergence of music and technology since he founded Netmix.com in 1995. He has guided music, video and web application product development and strategy for a wide range of companies including Cablevision, the Associated Press and Entertainment Media Works.
