adamcoates.com – Podcasts by Adam Coates

New set-up

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

Winter Down Under [July 2009]

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Latest mix using a korg zero4, cdj-1000’s, techics 1210’s and traktor scratch pro. Playlist to follow in a couple of days time.

[podcast]http://adamcoates.com/podcasts/july_2009.mp3[/podcast]

Return to the decks with Progressive House!

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Finally got back on the decks having moved them all the way around to the other side of the world and then left them sat un-used for the last 5 months. Have been listening to a fair amount of progressive house recently and discovered a great label ‘Anjunadeep’ which is the house version of the better known trance label. Amazing tunes coming out of Miami at the moment, reeperbahn is Pryda at his best and a recent night at chinese laundry reminded me just how good ‘A bit Patchy – Switch (Eric Prydz mix)’ is. 3 years old and still sounds great.

Hopefully the next mix will be done on a CDJ1000’s and a decent mixer as I had to hand back a borrowed DJM600 before leaving for Sydney which meant I had to resort to a very tired and crappy behringer VX300 for this.

Let me know what you think, tracklisting below:

French Electro / Nu Rave Podcast

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Quite proud of this one, only 1 sketchy mix which isn’t bad considering I hadn’t listened to the tunes all the way thru before jumping in to mixing with them. I’ve just discovered a whole new set of artists and think this might be a new sub genre of house I’ll stick with for quite some time! Inspired by a promo mix that I heard by a london DJ called Russ Chimes (kudos to his remixes, all suberb!)

Tracklisting is below (although may not be quite the right order due to Traktor messing up the playlist when I exported it)

Check it out and let me know what you think!

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Nicki’s Kili tunes

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Nicki’s tunes for Kili as a podcast episode.

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