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I finally got around to upgrading my DJ set-up from a very tired cheap & nasty Behringer Mixer & Technics 1210′s to something a little more cutting edge.

I’ve been a longtime user of Final Scratch and really like the combination of digital DJ’ing but the tactile elements of vinyl so I decided to keep the technics 1210′s but went for a software upgrade. The mixer I bought has a built in ‘scratchamp’ equivalent which hooks up to Traktor Scratch Pro – the software is pretty much the same but the timecoded vinyl system has been much improved and crashes a lot less.

The mixer itself is a Korg Zero4 which has firewire interface, midi controller and 4 channels. It does a good job of replacing my mixer and scratch amp whilst also offering a whole bunch of features like effects on a per channel basis which can then be sent through to the master and another layer of FX applied there if you want. Initial feedback is that its a pretty solid mixer and the illumination also looks pretty cool.

If I ever get around to playing out then CDJ’s seem to be the industry standard at the moment so I invested in a couple of CDJ-1000′s and stands so that I can get the whole rig into a fairly compact space. The final aspect was to upgrade the speakers to active-powered Behringer Truths which are pretty punchy for the price. Quality isn’t the best but I’m not the most demanding audiophile….yet

Also added a lap-top stand to make it much easier to intergrate Traktor into my line of sight. Its actually a pretty versatile set-up now, I can either do full digital DJ’ing using the mixer as a MIDI controller only or can go completely old school and move back to Vinyl or can use CDJ/Vinyl as timecodes to manipulate tracks in Traktor Scratch Pro.

I still have the old scratch amp which makes a pretty decent external soundcard and is the only thing I need to hook-up to the mixer so I can record sets which will hopefully be pretty soon!

Pics below:

My completed Set-up!

Korg Zero 4

Dj Set-UP

Just 30 min podcast this time, I love the recent crop of tunes being produced. Check out the last tune of the mix which is an amazing breaks type remix of Splittr – All Alone.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Latest podcast episode available to download. Mostly funky house with a bit of electro as well. Tracklisting is below:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Here is a neat feature from beatport! I use beatport to buy a lot of the tracks I DJ with. They have a much larger collection of tunes than djdownload which is the other site that I use. The site used to be US only localised so I find that there is defintley an american bias towards the tracks when you look at most downloaded etc. I’m sure this will balance out over time assuming they are tracking UK playbacks seperately to US playbacks. I’ve created this one as a House/Top downloads page.

Seems like a cool way to drive traffic to their site and its quite a neat feature to embed on a blog page.