#102

ahhhh. This is amazing. Thank you for sharing.

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#103

I’ve no idea if any on here is into turntablism at all, but on the off-chance it’s worth sharing that my friend and all-round humble genius, Andy, has just published the necessary files for his open-source digital scratch instrument. The easiest way to explain what it does is to point you at his Instagram feed, starting with this:

The github link is in his bio, but also here for convenience:

Obviously he could have made thousands from this - either by making the units himself or by licensing it to another company - but he has opted to release everything online as open source project files.

I love this man. Also, I love this, man!

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#104

Ha! I’m an idiot and had missed this thread so, to whoever kindly moved the post, thank you!

(Random fact: Andy was also responsible for the first PT01 internal fader circuits)

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#105

This looks awesome! Wish I had more time for DIY right now.

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#106

likewise finding this portable scratching trend inspiring and cool, thanks for introducing it :slight_smile:

never been heavily into turntablism but DJ friends back in college exposing me to this stuff was a major influence on getting into noise + electronics. ineptly collage-mixing with DJ battle records + charity shop movie soundtrack and kid’s story records, seeing Scratch Perverts, DJ Krush, …some large Bristol scratch crew i can’t remember, (wanna say ‘optimus prime’ but google doesn’t seem to think that was it…) play live. “Poor Father Material” melting vinyl and playing them with a drill at No Ground Processes events @ TJs Newport … reading Project Dark’s article in the Digital Hardcore Recordings newspaper zine

I have a box of 200 new-old-stock audio taper slider pots, surely i need to develop some tiny portable faders :slight_smile: they are not scratching-grade tho i don’t think, still, this is giving me ideas.

A favorite from back in the day:

NOISE TURNTABLISM REPREZENT:

can’t find photos of his 4-armed turntable right now… also i think Nomex and/or Evil Moisture built an 8-armed one at some point

  • of course Graham Dunning going viral with his Mechanical Techno :slight_smile:

Early Cementimental mail-art anti-record:

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#107

Thanks so much for linking the community to the open files!

I just saw his post on IG and planned to share it with yall myself

#108

Ah, depending on how old you are, there’s a strong chance some of my good friends were in that Bristol crew! I was at university when the Scratch Perverts were at their peak (and when Tony Vegas dissolved them after their New Year’s Eve gig in '97, I think it was) so we’re probably similar ages. My late friend Dee Swift was in Bristol at the time, I think, although I didn’t know him until I moved back home, by which time he was in Sheffield. Without doubt the most incredible scratch DJ I’ve ever known - lost way too young.

That Sushi record was classic. I’ve asked Billy Jam and he won’t confirm or deny it, but I always assumed that was Eddie Def or maybe Disk (or both?). Either way, it’s a classic! Noise turntablism has some excellent proponents too. Did you ever hear the album Dälek’s original DJ, Still, put out there? It’s called ‘Remains’ and comes in a CD with a wax seal on the case. Glorious stuff. Such a talented guy.

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#109

My absolute pleasure, man. I may only have found this place in the last few days but already I can see how great it is & this seemed like exactly the sort of thing that the community here might appreciate. It was great to see that you’d already shared his previous videos!

#110

OK - just had chance to read the whole thread and there’s some great stuff here! I got into music production via hip-hop and started scratching at the same time. 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. Unfortunately it’s such a niche area that everyone genuinely does more or less know everyone, at least over here. There’s an event called Community Scratch BBQ which takes place over 3 days in late August in Brighton. The amount of incredible music that I experienced there is hard to even comprehend nevermind accurately describe. I ended up freestyling beats for the open decks session on Sunday morning using several dozen raw drum breaks, a soft synth and some plugins effects mapped to a controller keyboard. I glanced up at one stage and arguably my favourite scratch DJ of all time, Excess, was in front of me cutting up a storm over what I was doing! It’s genuinely an ego-free experience - I can’t wait for next year’s event!

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#111

this would be from like 1997 - 200X :slight_smile: I was in newport but we sometimes managed to excape to cardiff + bristol for D&B / hiphop :slight_smile:

Yeah i think at the time i believed the backstory :smiley: but pretty clearly some pseudonym or other. will check out that Remains album thanks

loved the aesthetics of battle records, scratchy the seal etc. Anti-‘album’/music feel of these stuck with me in later noise years. these new 7" ones are so cute ^___^

Still want to release a Cementimental battle / sample record, labels get in touch ha.

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#112

That’s the same time I was doing my degree in Southampton, just about (96-99) - prime jungle era! Awesome times!

Still used to have a Bandcamp where you could get his album but I tried to find the link to post here and it’s gone, it seems.

I know what you mean about the 7"s! A PT01 Scratch is my only turntable these days - something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago but which I thoroughly embrace these days. I haven’t scratched in a few years now, despite still being very much part of that world. With a large family I only have a finite amount of time for music and production always held more of an appeal than cutting.

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#113

admittedly super jealous of all the jungle era experiences! it was the first music i heard (5th grade) that i became obsessed with. Being a young kid in southern california at the time, hearing it only on mixtapes by brother was getting at raves added a great deal of mystery (and one late night radio show). most of my money was spent on jungle 12"s when i got turntables in the 7th grade.

went more the scratch dj route (i remember e-mailing back and forth with A-trak in 98??) and chose what university to attend partly because a lot of DJs went there + access to record stores. Did local battles and such and really appreciated the community at the time.

we had a crazy scratch session in the basement one the university’s buildings - think we had like 5 set-ups. bunch of bay area DJs were there. Kind of weird to say that even though D-Styles killed it (my all time scratch champ) it was Teeko that actually changed how i approached the whole endeavor. (he also is just a great party DJ. he played at Dam Funk’s weekly ‘funkmosphere in 08 or so and it was so tight. he was juggling fatback’s 'is this the future’ and kept it super funky.)

that said - this clip from skratchcon of q and d is still my favorite scratch thing ever (qbert doing the flashy things and D just vibing):

after college and getting more into clubs and house and production, ‘turntablism’ no longer was a big part of my life and am a little alienated by the threestyle/crazy cue point style that’s the main flow now. gettin older i guess.

my freshman dorm room was pretty indicative of my focus:
lab_3090930_o

i have 1200s now…but still set up battle style- cant break that habit.

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#114

In retrospect, I took that whole era for granted. I lived close enough to London for all the London-based DJs to come and play midweek gigs for very little money so I saw pretty much everybody - 3 or 4 gigs a week - for the whole time I was there. We used to play the hip-hop rooms and jungle would be in the main room so we didn’t even have to pay to see any of it either. Insane times, looking back on it, but at the time it was just normal!

I’m in a similar position re: D-Styles, so I get that 100%! As a solo cutter he’s mind blowing; in Third Sight he’s incredible (both on the cuts and the beats); and his solo material is amazing too… and yet Excess was always the one I looked towards in terms of truly encapsulating the essence of how I felt about turntablism. I get it totally on Teeko too - he was one of the other people who really pushed what you could do with a turntable - especially the Controller One.

This is the video that dropped in 2002 that totally changed my outlook:

The video that sold a thousand loop pedals :wink:

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#115

Ah yeah…there some tasty turntablist knowledge in here! And i‘m surprised that no one mentioned team phase here. https://youtu.be/LUzthsZ2O6s
This is still under crowdfunding final stages and quite expensive, but hey stylus free scratching is frowned upon the ‚real heads‘ but opens a whole new perspective for adventurers.
I used to live improvise with a multiinstrumentalist (trumpet/guitar/scatting/percussion) and another Dj laying the foundation tracks, while i had scratch and sfx duties on turntables some 25 years ago. We very quickly found out that we could easily jam for 5-6 hours due to the open format that is called turntables, especially when you have 4 of them on stage. I briefly enjoyed scratching on a CDX player, but the Software inside that thing didnt last ten years, shame really…

My favorite of the old school must be mix master mike, to me the perfect balance of a party dj that can bring absolute mayhem when he wants to…as experienced when opening for the beasties. But there are so many dope Turntablists from the old and the new school-grasshopper,rafik,swamp etcetcetc
I can proudly say the first time i saw a shiggerfragger show on vhs…my mind melted and i wanted a piece of this. Years later i got told that i needed to see all of them just for the culture and the tricks of course.

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#116

Good call! The Phase guys were at CSBBQ in Brighton in August and it looked (and sounded) really impressive. Apparently there have been some production issues which has pushed the release back a little but I’m expecting it to have significant impact when it’s out.

It sounds like your timeline is pretty similar to mine - I got my first 1210 around '97 and all I wanted to do was scratch! I couldn’t afford 2 and a mixer so just got one and used to cut over CDs. Nobody understood why I was buying import CD singles but it’s the only way I could get instrumentals to cut over!

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#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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