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!

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Holy shit - that’s mindblowing!

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

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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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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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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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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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Bit of a necro bump here, but as I’ve been working on a bunch of turntable/scatching-adjacent stuff that has somewhat inspired me to get back into this.

I’ve not really touched a proper turntable in a couple of years now as the inspiration/motivation I had at the start of this thread got swallowed up by a really tumultuous couple of years where I had little time or energy for new creative pursuits.

Where I left it last was using my oldschool PT-01 with a shitty velcro’d on passive crossfader, but in having some google-ing around, it looks like a lot of stuff has happened in the world of portablism since.

I’m specifically thinking about and looking at the Reloop SPIN, which looks like a great all-in-one solution. And there are some crazy mod/options out there for it:

Anyone have any experience with the SPIN and/or developments in the world of Portablism in the last couple of years?

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I’m not qualified to comment on this beyond the following - I bought the updated PT-01 (Scratch!) and it does everything I ask of it. I scratched records for about 13 minutes on it, which was fun. Now I use it mostly to sample, which it does perfectly well.

That Reloop looks super nice.

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Hehe - you got 13mins more than I did (I’ve not actually used mine for anything yet, but it remains my “main turntable”)

The key thing in the world of turntablism is my friend Andy’s invention, the SC1000:

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Well I bit the bullet and have this sitting in front of me now:

Had a tiny play with it before setting out to work this morning and even though it obviously feels different from a snare, it doesn’t feel massively alien, which is a pleasant surprise.

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it’s so great seeing all of this turntablism!

just adding a…kinda different approach:

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