#117 
[quote="petesasqwax, post:110, topic:4802, full:true"]

I’m fortunate to count a lot of incredible DJs as good friends, but that’s more about the nature of the scene than it is about me being any kind of important part of it. [/quote]
Absolutely! I was helping out a local jazz festival as technical backbone on stage. They had Material, Laswells brain to body child for a one off gig, him/buckethead/some drummer i cant remember/Dj DMX and the the Picklz. This was in my shiggerfragger apprentice times and i was glad to help anybody do this one off. Unfortunatley Laswell behaved like the true jazz perfectionist that screams everybody down when they dont function as he tells them to…so i get a very hearty welcome from the Picklz because i was the first person in Europe being polite to them hahaha… anyways, to make things worse for the event they refused to have my help onstage while changing up completely their setup on the fly. We had 1Dj into the mixer of the other and somehow wahwah pedals were plugged live-pure chaos as in the vhs. Now understand that Laswell had the Band rehearse a whole day before the gig. The Band comes to Zurich, goes straight into rehearsing for 8 hours (i know because they had to pay for that venue as well), back to the hotel, sleep over and soundcheck for the gig, thats where i come in. A berserk Laswell in Soundcheck and after that the Picklz ask me very polite if it was possible to smoke some weed and if we had any. Of course we did and that gig is remembered as a turning point for said festival. Never before ppl stood there open mouthed. Laswell even decided to release this as a Live CD and literally without most of the Picklz routines-what you can hear on that cd is like ‚cueing up‘ plugging wahwahs but we know… prior to the gig i had this convo with them (now being very talkative from the weed) where they said that they‘ll always need to explain what their art is. For them it was nornal that jazzheads hated them. They knew that Laswell jumped a band wagon and had no idea of what they were about. They were just about to found the TTF back then…i had good contact with most of them over the years, qbert being the guy that hates it when you wax him as a legend-he‘d rather jam with you. I believe this humbleness is something that comes from that very innovative Bay Area posse and the straight up fact that you are only a DJ, not a musician in the classical sense-in the extreme you have Voltron Powers. I‘m happy to have witnessed the shiggerfragger show!

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#118

Ha! That’s awesome! That’s such a shame about Laswell - he was involved with so many interesting artists over the years but so often the end result was sort of passed through a world-music filter, if that makes sense. I used to have the Praxis album you’re talking about and loved that it existed but it just didn’t do them justice at all!

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#119

Hehehe true, i had an opportunity to buy two battered 1200s from the 8ties for a good price-800€ still
I had troubles finding my perfect mixer for a long time, but the first time i had a chance to connect all together i was straight into doing mixtapes for several days.

It has to be said: i love the sound of fucked cue pointed breaks/sounds. that hiss and thump/drop when it comes in…damn you phace :smiley:

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#120

Ha - man, 100% with you on that! I strongly attest that the additional noise and hiss of things like cue burnt battle records, 12 bit samplers and 10th generation tape dubs are as much an integral part of the music as all the stuff that the original creators intended to put in there! It’s why the music I make sounds like it does - if it’s not got a slight ring like it’s been run through a 12-bit sampler algorithm at some point and sounding a bit shitty on some level, I’m really not happy with it!

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#121

Bill Laswell was dead for me after this-i had a ceremony of burning all these coveted CDs

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#122

Such a shame too - I always thought that he couldn’t really be as much of a dick as he came across as being because he put out records with Skiz at Wordsound and Skiz is one of the most incredibly genuine humans working within music!

#123

There are a lot of incredible musicians he worked with. I can even say that he‘s a producer like no other and i admire his work and clinical approach. I also think that hiss/thump doesnt go with clinical. It was a time when most producers wanted to be as clean as possible. Laswell always claimed to have deeeep bass-but somehow couldnt manage to get that grungy reggae bass. Today producers just go grungy and hiss, no problem to hide it really :sunglasses:

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#124

Yes! That’s it exactly! Everything he did for Skiz was dub, but it was clean dub… which just seems like a total oxymoron!

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#125

Yep, this is the true culture! Some of these oldschool joints go for big money nowadays-glad i have an extensive collection. I‘m always a bit late with new trends like the 7inches but these are sexy anyway :smiley:

Did any of you check out LeJad?
Mainly audiofiles but there is that 1 stereopaning madness on vinyl. Great artwork as well

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#126

I’ve got to admit: I never got into DVS. I know it sounds stupid, but I wanted to use it for scratch production and when I used it it always seemed to introduce the kind of digital artifacts I didn’t like and made it impossible to get the kind of analogue artifacts I did (i.e. cue burn!)

I do know Le Jad, though - for a while he was the only one doing the ultrapitch records and it seems like everybody I knew was cutting with Le Jad records. Oddly, that reminded me of another French artist that I’ve not heard a lot of for years: The Groove of Satyre. They put out 2 records - sort of somewhere between battle breaks and library records - and then this compilation, which was the result of various DJs being given a copy of the records and being asked to make tracks using solely things from them.

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#127

Yeah digital precision for very precise cutting. To me Le Jad nailed the sound of the samples/tunes. its a classic rundown of your usual suspects sounding great…this might be good for adventurerers. The stereotor record is a bit crazy because its panning wildly in sync to the beat. And its blue and i payed a bloody fortune on usps :joy: i love it!

There are quite a lot of french battle records that i prolly neglected.

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#128

I had two 1200s and a mixer until I had a kiddo, at which point space became an issue. So, I sold 'em. I’ve been thinking about a one-turntable approach for awhile, like looping a couple measures at the end of a track and using that to provide cover while you get the next piece beatmatched, and then fading over.

Anyhow, while watching too many turntable/looper videos, I came upon this one, which is faaaarrrr beyond anything I could ever accomplish, but it’s sure is nice to have a distant point on the horizon to head toward.

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#129

There’s a Wire mag invisible jukebox with Laswell where he bitches about working with Fela Kuti and how he played out of tune. Not the greatest look imo.

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#130

I did the same, although I managed to keep 1 up until this year when it became a choice between my remaining 1210 and mixer or a PT01 Scratch and an MS20 Mini. I only had space for one option so the MS20 won. Zero regrets so far! The thing is: I have friends who are so absurdly good that, even if I were to keep my 1210s, I’d still prefer them to do any cuts I needed recorded for anything. I’m 1/4 of a group with 3 incredible scratch DJs - I handle all the music and they do the rest. It definitely plays more to my strengths than trying to keep up with friends who compete globally and practice for hours and hours each day.

The first person I ever saw using a loop pedal was Radar:

It’s not as hard as you think to put it together - especially with DVS - but the skill is in the timing of hitting the looper… and doing it on stage in front of a crowd!

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#131

Holy shit - that’s mindblowing!

#132

My only audience consists of my other instruments. :slight_smile:

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#133

Yeah i had a brief stunt with my ditto looper and turntables. I wanted to prepare a live show where i had like 3 samples/rekkids ready with pitch indication, eq settings noted down and wanted to speed live composition up. The ditto is quite fun because you can erase your last take but not the one before that :smiley:so making decisions wether this recording was good enough came into play as well. I‘d start with a thourough loop, sometimes eqd down to a bassline. When i‘m hitting knobs in precise timing i sort of dance/groove around. This is horribly wrong when you try to pattern scratch a bassdrum while hitting the pedal full force with your foot :joy: i couldn’t get a fast workflow like this, i was thinking that i‘d need a lot of practice or maybe someone that recorded (hit in/out) my performance—-so big respect to the DJs that can do that live! I‘m very fast with the same pedal and a guitar. And i have not tried out the looper function on my MPCLive yet.

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#134

That’s a very useful function! I never got around to grabbing a loop pedal but that’s the kind of facility I’d want! I have done a couple of live performances with other DJs and the amount of practice it took to get the timing right for just a short set was exhausting. Huge respect to people like Ned Hoddings/Rock Hard Bastards etc. who did that sort of thing almost exclusively.

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#135

The ditto is great in that aspect-cheap-easy-sounding good and you can export tracks via mini usb :flushed: after the performance. There‘s even an advanced ditto which i dont really know the difference to the basic model…

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#136

Damn, I just googled the price and hadn’t remotely realised how cheap they were!

I’m not sure if people know about this yet, but this is a video of my friend Ric (who is also part of Phonobrow - the group I’m in). He’s demonstrating the Button Box which offers the functionality of a Vestax Controller 1… and then some!

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