Chapter 5

The Tech Revolution: Format Choices

In This Chapter

Looking at the blurry line between CD and vinyl

Deciding between analogue and digital

Defusing the argument with hybrids and computers

Cain and Abel, the Montagues and Capulets, Apple and Microsoft; throughout time, history and literature have told of the wars between two similar sides – wars that exist because of what the two sides have in common, not because of how different they are. When CD decks first came onto the scene, vinyl purists all over the world cried foul. CDs were seen as a great threat to the vinyl DJ, and DJs started to take sides between the standard vinyl method of DJing and the CD upstart.

However, since the early 2000s, this is no longer a two-way fight. Although digital DJing has been around since before the beginning of this century, over recent years it has exploded to become the most common way to get into DJing.

If you’re unsure which format to use as a DJ, this chapter covers the major differences between DJing with CDs or vinyl, and suggests how utilising your computer destroys those differences.

The Contestants

You have three main DJing formats vying for your attention (and money):

• Vinyl DJing – using turntables
• CD DJing – using DJ CD decks
• Digital DJing – using … well, just about everything and anything to play digital music files stored on a computer or removable hard drive

It’s very difficult to compare the three formats with each other. Comparing vinyl and CD is relatively easy. It’s a bit like comparing sultanas and raisins. They’re very similar but also very different. Digital DJing is like Christmas pudding. It may contain raisins, sultanas or both – but, importantly, it contains a lot more! I’m not sure what the equivalent of the custard that goes with the Christmas pud would be though – an iPad?

So I suggest the best thing to do is to compare the pros and cons of turntables and CD decks – and then at the end, discuss how digital DJing uses the best parts – or often neither part – of these formats.

Finding Your Music

You may dream of being a vinyl DJ using two turntables, a mixer and a box of records to create your sets, but unfortunately the genre you want to play may not let you. During the 1970s and ’80s, this wasn’t an issue, because music was released across all formats: vinyl, tape and then CD. But as vinyl became less popular, CD and digital downloads became the main way to buy music, and the variety of music you could buy on vinyl reduced considerably.

Circling around turntables

Turntables play records. These are circular discs made out of vinyl, which have a single groove that spirals from the outside to the inside of the record. This groove contains the audio information, and a needle inside the groove transfers this information to the speakers.

Records come in a few different sizes and layouts:

• 7-inch singles: Not as popular as they were a few years ago, but still hanging in there, 7-inch singles tend to have the main release on one side (the A side) and a different tune on the other side (the B side). The A side may be a specially edited version of the original tune for radio (known as a radio edit), which cuts the tune down to a minimum length and content; this process may remove parts of the tune that you really want the crowd to hear. The B side may contain a tune that you don’t like or don’t want to play to a crowd.

  Seven-inch singles are small, so they’re quite fiddly to work with, and the cut-down version of the main tune on the A side combined with the lack of remixes of the tune mean that club DJs don’t often use this format. However, many northern soul, ska, reggae and retro party DJs still find that the 7-inch is king for releases of their music.

• LPs: An LP (long play) is a larger record (12 inches in diameter) that contains an entire album by an artist. Wedding and party DJs who still like to use vinyl may use LPs because the album version of a tune is more than likely the one most people are familiar with, and the LP may have a few more tracks that the DJ wants to play.

  The downside to using LPs is that they’re quite hard to use if beatmatching or scratch DJing, due to the amount of space dedicated to each song. With only an inch or two’s worth of vinyl available to play the entire track, you may find that the map of the tune, which the different shading of the black rings creates (see Chapter 14), is fairly difficult to see, and the tightly compacted groove is prone to picking up scratches, pops and crackles.

• 12-inch singles: These singles are designed and produced with the DJ in mind. Typically, you get two or three remixes of the same tune on one record, offering a lot more choice and versatility with how you play the tune. A different tune may be on the B side, too – but not often.

  Remixes are variations of the same tune, sometimes made by the producer who created the original tune or sometimes by other producers who change the sound of the original tune entirely (like Tiësto did to Sarah McLachlan’s ‘Silence’). The layout changes from record to record, but often the main mix that the record company feels may be most popular sits on an entire side of a 12-inch single, with the remixes on the B side.

Reflecting on vinyl availability

As sales to the home consumer market have fallen over the years, vinyl has been aimed almost exclusively at the club music market because of its long associated history. Music genres such as house, trance, drum and bass, hip-hop and techno still release a large selection of their tunes on vinyl.

Some rock, classical, folk and country music is still released on vinyl, and a bit of a resurgence is going on in the indie/alternative scene in the UK for 7-inch singles, but when you compare the range of music that’s released across all the different genres, only a tiny percentage of it is available on vinyl. So before you make a format decision, try hunting for some of the music you want to play. Is it all available on vinyl? If so, then it’s probably a safe way to go. If you’re ruling out a lot with your search, maybe you should look at one of the other format choices.

Polishing up on CD options

If you’re thinking of DJing with CD decks, a lot more music can be available.

CDs come in different sizes, too, like records. The most common CD size is 12 centimetres in diameter, but a smaller version (originally marketed as a CD single) comes in at only 8 centimetres. CDs this size have a place as CD-ROM business cards and promotional gimmick CD releases. The full-size 12-centimetre diameter CD comes in a few different flavours:

• CD singles: CD singles are like the middle ground between a 7-inch and a 12-inch single. CD singles normally contain the main release of a tune (often still the radio edit), the full mix of a tune (if appropriate) and the B side that would be on the 7-inch single. Most importantly, CD singles regularly contain one or two of the remixes that you find on the 12-inch versions.
• CD albums: Albums on CD are similar to LPs in that they give you more songs from the artist, but they only give you one mix (the original) of the tune to play. Unlike albums on vinyl, however, size and reliability problems aren’t an issue with CDs, so if you’re happy using an album from an artist, nothing’s stopping you doing so on CD.
• Compilation CDs: Compilation albums with 20 or more tunes from different artists on them can help the party or wedding DJ build a large music collection for a small amount of money.

  One compilation CD can contain the entire tracklist for an evening. Buy two copies of the same CD so that you can mix from one to the other, and you’ll have a record collection for £20, whereas the individual tunes together would probably cost you £100!

  One point to be careful about when buying compilation CDs: the tracks on them may be the dreaded radio-edited versions, not the full-length tunes you want to play.

• Mixed CD compilations: Whether you’re looking for pop music, commercial dance music or rock and pop tunes, you may come across a lot of premixed CD albums that contain a whole load of tracks that you’d like to get your hands on. But instead of each tune starting and stopping, the tunes blend together from one to the next (something that you want the option to do yourself).

  The problem with mixed CDs is that lifting only one tune out of the original DJ’s mix to use in your own set is hard to do because of the overlap between the intro and outro of tunes. If, for example, a mix CD contains ‘Jump’ by Van Halen and the DJ mixes Foo Fighter’s ‘Everlong’ into it, the end of ‘Jump’ and the intro of ‘Everlong’ will mix together. If you want to play ‘Everlong’ in one of your mixes and choose to start it from the very beginning, you’ll still hear Van Halen playing. You need to have a clean version of ‘Everlong’ (just the tune on its own) in order to keep this a nice-sounding mix – which you don’t have on a mixed compilation CD.

CDs with ease

Almost all music released nowadays by record companies is available on CD. For all electronic dance music genres – rock, folk, classical, country, pop – most of the music is waiting for you on a shiny 12-centimetre disc. And even if it’s not available to buy in store on CD, you can buy and download a digital file online, burn it to CD and play it immediately on the right CD DJ deck.

As a CD DJ, if you receive any promos on vinyl, you can easily transfer them onto CD. All you need is a good quality direct-drive turntable that plays accurately at 0 pitch (refer to Chapter 6), a good set of needles and a computer with a soundcard and CD burner, and you can transfer all your records to CD. Of course, if you have a good turntable anyway, you may want to incorporate it into your DJ setup for some variation!

If you have lots of vinyl that you’re transferring onto CD and you’re a beatmatching DJ, use a bpm (beats per minute) counter to set the beats per minute for each tune from the same genre to the same value during the transfer process (125 for house, 135 for trance and so on). This way, when you play back tunes with a similar genre from CD, beatmatching is really easy, because you don’t have to change the speed of your tunes by much (if at all) in order to match the beats. (Check out Chapter 15 for more about beatmatching.)

If, for instance, you’re a rock DJ, you’ll find that most of the tunes you want to play aren’t available on vinyl; so to be a rock DJ who uses vinyl, you need a way to transfer the music you want to play onto vinyl. Unfortunately for the vinyl DJ, recording from CD to vinyl doesn’t work out quite as cost-effectively as it does the other way around. If you want to etch the music onto blank 12-inch records, Vinylium makes the Kingston Dubcutter to add onto a standard Technics turntable, or you may be able to find the Vestax VRX-2000. But at around £5,500 for the Dubcutter and more than that for the Vestax, you’ll need to make a lot of records to get your money’s worth!

Digital – all music, all night

Digital DJing plays music stored as music files on a computer’s hard drive or on a removable drive. This gives you access to pretty much all the music in the world, almost instantly; how’s that for a winning argument!

Nearly all music ever released is available to you in a digital file format, either by going online then buying it and downloading it, or by buying it on CD and ripping (converting and copying) the music to your hard drive. In the rare instance that music is only available on vinyl, it’s a simple process to connect a turntable to your computer soundcard (usually via a DJ mixer) and then record the music to your computer as a digital file.

The specific format that digital files come in may alter depending on how you source or convert them, but most DJ software will happily play WAV files and AIFF files (both of which are uncompressed, full quality formats) and compressed files like AACs, M4As, WMAs and MP3s (the most common form of digital music file).

Byting into compression with digital files

You can fit only 74 minutes of CD-quality music on a typical CD. If you burn your MP3s onto a CD at 320 Kbps (kilobits per second) – the best bit rate for compressed music files – you can get over 250 minutes’ worth of good quality music stored onto a CD. If taking a wallet filled with CDs to a club instead of a massive record box is an eye opener (and a weight off your shoulder) for vinyl DJs, just think what MP3 CDs mean! You can walk into a club with a pair of headphones and just two CDs filled with MP3s, and DJ for hours!

MP3s and AACs are able to cut the file sizes down using compression, throwing away sound frequencies that don’t make much of an impact on the sound quality of the music. This method is perfectly acceptable for a lot of people, and with a good pair of headphones playing music at 320 Kbps, your brain will soon adjust to accept and dismiss this compression of the music.

But the compression in MP3s can have a huge effect on how the music sounds in a club. The low sub-bass frequencies and the very high frequencies are the main casualties of MP3 encoding, especially at lower bit rates. The higher frequencies help with the clarity of the music, but the sub-bass is what makes your whole body shake as the bass beats thump – and its loss can be devastating.

Sub-woofer amplifiers and careful attention to EQ (equaliser) settings can emulate sub-bass information from the frequencies left in the compressed tune, but the key to keeping digital files sounding good on the dance floor is in the compression setting. Music compressed to 320 Kbps is preferable by far, but if you make sure not to go lower than 192 Kbps you should be okay.

Staying on the right side of the law

Explaining the legalities of downloading and using MP3 tunes is very simple. If you go to somewhere like iTunes or Beatport to buy and download your music, you’re doing so legally. If you use peer-to-peer software to share music files, downloading a few gigabytes’ worth of music without giving any money towards the artist, you’re doing so illegally.

From a moral standpoint, as a DJ you’re an artist yourself and you need to respect your fellow artists. Take an example of (imaginary) new producer DJ Steve who’s just released his first single. Suddenly, the single’s a smash hit and tens of thousands of DJs all over the world are downloading his track to play in nightclubs, but Steve doesn’t have a strong financial foundation to absorb such a loss of revenue. All this time, you’re getting paid to play Steve’s music, which you didn’t pay for, while he starves … Okay, maybe I’m being a little heavy handed here, but as a DJ who gets paid to play, you’ll be treading on very thin ground, both legally and morally, by playing stolen music.

One way the music industry has tried to control this problem is through digital DJ licences. Check out whether you need a licence to stay legal. Investigate what you need to do as a DJ and check that the bar, club or any other venue where you play owns any legal licence that is required. In the UK, an organisation called PPL (Phonographic Performance Limited) deals with this; see www.ppluk.com for more information. Search for ‘digital DJ licence’ online to find out whether you need one in your country.

Choosing Analogue or Digital Sound

The availability of the music you want to play is probably the biggest factor in deciding which format you’ll eventually use to DJ with, but if you’re still stuck and need a tie-breaker, the quality of the music you’ll be playing may swing it for you.

Analogue audio (which you encounter as a DJ when you play records on turntables) played through the right sound system may sound warmer (more pleasant with a feeling of depth) than an original CD played through the same sound system. But the fragility of vinyl, which suffers through time from cracks, pops, skips and jumps, is a flaw that (in my opinion) gives music released digitally on CD an edge over analogue audio for DJ use.

The only time a CD release sounds different is when you play it on a different sound system. A CD never wears out, it never degrades and, as long as you take care to prevent it from getting deep scratches on the surface of the disc, you don’t need to worry about the CD skipping or jumping.

Digital music files burnt to CD are a different proposition. To keep the digital file sizes small, MP3s are heavily compressed, removing some of the higher and lower audio frequencies that aren’t too audible in the first place. If you’re using MP3s or AACs with DJ software, this is also the case. If you want to DJ with uncompressed CD-quality music with software, stick to WAV and AIFF file formats.

How much the music is compressed directly affects how the music sounds. If you heavily compress the music and remove too many audio frequencies to keep the file size small, the music can sound as if it’s been recorded underwater. But with the correct compression setting (I recommend 320 Kbps stereo encoding – but don’t go below 192 Kbps per second) on a good sound system it can be hard to tell the difference.

You can burn an MP3 to a CD-R in MP3 format, which means you can fit a lot more music onto the disc (check whether your CD deck can play MP3 CDs first), or you can ‘up convert’ MP3s and burn them as a traditional CD. However, this up-conversion doesn’t transform an MP3 into CD-quality music. All it does is allow you to play MP3s on a normal CD player – if it sounded bad before, it’ll still sound bad …

Mechanics: My Way Is Best!

If you get the chance to compare a record, a CD and 320 Kbps music played from DJ software in a club environment, you’ll be hard pushed to tell the difference. So if you can get the music you want, and it all sounds good to you, the last decision simply relates to the mechanics of how you mix the tunes together.

Deciding on how much space you want to take up with your DJ setup and how much bulk you are happy to carry with you from club to club or party to party is very important. But the most important thing to think about with the mechanics of DJing is what it will be like to use the equipment.

DJing with turntables is a very tactile affair. You’re literally touching the music – which can help you immerse yourself in the functions of the mix. DJing with CDs can be very technical, and on cheaper CD decks it involves lots of button pushing, giving you less of a connection to the music. Depending on your equipment, digital DJing can be a harsh button-pushing, mouse-clicking affair – or is can be as tactile and beautiful as DJing with vinyl.

Vinyl is more aesthetically pleasing

DJing with vinyl looks like a performance. There’s a dance going on behind the decks as the DJ works with the vinyl, pushing, pulling, polishing and flipping the records to get the best out of them.

CD DJing often involves pressing a lot of buttons, which is not nearly as exciting. But expensive, professional CD decks like the ones made by Pioneer and Denon have large platters with vinyl sound emulation that let you work with the music from CD in a similar way to the way you would with turntables. For those who like to see a DJ do more than just press a couple of buttons on cheaper CD decks, these professional CD decks give the DJ creative flexibility, along with the opportunity for loads of visual flair when working the controls.

Personally, the sight of a DJ teasing a record out of its sleeve, cleaning it on his or her T-shirt, placing the needle in the groove and then man-handling it to get the beats matched still does it for me. But as the design, control and versatility of CD decks evolve, the argument about the lack of aesthetic performance isn’t as strong – provided you spend the money.

Updating or DJing?

The aesthetics argument takes on a new life with digital DJing, because the core piece of equipment used for digital DJing is a computer. And let’s face it, watching someone use a computer doesn’t exactly set the world on fire.

Normally running on a laptop, DJ software contains the music library and sometimes the mixer and effects processors too – making it the main focus of the DJ. The problem is that this is often the only focus of the DJ. I’ve witnessed some live sets by digital DJs that have had more performance value than the best vinyl DJs I’ve ever seen – but I’ve also witnessed sets by the biggest DJs in the country where they’re so engrossed in the computer screen it just looks like they’re doing an online grocery shop instead of DJing.

A lot of this is down to the mechanics of how the DJ is DJing digitally. Chapter 9 covers this in more detail, but there are two ways to DJ digitally:

• Use a laptop on its own
• Use hardware to control all or part of the mix

Using a laptop on its own is prone to lean more to the lacklustre side, as all you’re seeing is the DJ pressing keys and scrolling with the mouse.

But, when some element of hardware is used to control the software, it’s a whole new ball game – a ball game that blows the choice between vinyl, CD or DJ software out of the water.

For a start, adding in a mixer to the digital DJ setup can add the necessary animation to the DJ to create a spark with the crowd. A step further is to use a controller that lets the DJ start, stop, add effects and mix the music away from the computer keys. This can provide the tactile response to the DJ and show that the DJ’s doing more than posting something on a social networking site.

A digital analogy

If CD DJing was daddy bear and vinyl DJing was mummy bear, a digital vinyl system is most definitely baby bear.

The most explosive feature of digital DJing is that instead of using a DJ controller, you can use your turntables or CD decks along with a mixer to control and mix the music in the DJ software. Chapter 9 has more about this, but it means that while CD and vinyl formats are squabbling with each other over availability of music and are pointing aesthetic fingers at digital DJs, the digital DJ can sit back with a smile and show them just how versatile digital DJing can be.

From a functionality point of view, most of the special features that CD decks have that turntables don’t, like effects, beat-per-minute counters and loop controls, are contained within some of the DJ software programs. This gives you access to exactly the same creativity tools using your turntables and DJ software that CD DJs have, and means that in the right hands, with the right software, turntables are on an equal playing field with CD decks. For vinyl and CD DJs, the way music can be organised in a digital library with DJ software, and the addition of more effects and remix options coupled with the fact that DJs can still use their CD decks or turntables with CDs or records, frees them to make the best mix possible rather than making them feel handcuffed by an obsolete format.

On my journey through DJ formats, I started as a vinyl DJ, but I moved to CD DJing when the music I wanted to play was too hard to find on vinyl. Then I moved to a digital DJ setup, using my turntables and mixer to control Native Instruments’ ‘Traktor’ – finding that the expanded options I had, with a larger effects palette and multiple playback decks in the software let me be creative when I wanted to be, but also left me free to mix tunes like in the old days, using two turntables and a mixer. Nowadays, my turntables and CD decks lie mostly unused, as I now use a controller (currently the S4 by Native Instruments), because the control and ability it offers to create great mixes is so fantastic.

Turning the tables on controllers

An extension to the idea of using traditional turntables to control DJ software can be found on decks like the Reloop RP-8000, which works as a standard turntable but also works as a controller for digital DJ software. With a host of performance pads on the unit itself, it can be an interesting alternative to using a DJ controller or using regular turntables with a digital vinyl system.

If you do wish to use something like the Reloop RP-8000, you can’t expect them to be installed as standard in the clubs or pubs you work in – so be sure to do some research first before standing in the DJ booth with a look of horror on your face!

Chapters 20 and 21 have some guidance on what to look for in the DJ booth.

Turntables and records are heavy and cumbersome

Turntables are solid and heavy for a good reason: if they weren’t, the needle would skip with all the booming bass you play through the club’s sound system.

Having lugged around a couple of bags and boxes filled with vinyl to clubs, I’ll concede that a laptop filled with tunes or a wallet with a hundred CDs inside is a lot lighter than the same number of tunes on vinyl, but you can use nightclub weight-training as a booster to gym visits …

On an affectation level, I’m embarrassed to say that I felt really cool walking into clubs with two big boxes filled with records. Everyone I passed in the crowd knew I was the DJ (and if they didn’t, I’d make sure to bash their knees with the record boxes a couple of times). If you walk into a club with a little wallet filled with a hundred CDs, the crowd may think that you’re just there to read the meter!

I was kidding about the boxes and the knees. I’d never do that …

Turntables don’t have built-in effects

Until CD decks and DJ software included built-in effects, this point was never an issue. If you wanted effects, you’d buy a separate effects processor like the Pioneer EFX-1000 or you’d get a mixer with built-in effects. Personally, I’d much rather have the effects externally, on the mixer or in the DJ software, rather than on the turntable or CD player, but my opinions aside, effects, loop controls and multiple cue points (places to start playing from) make CD decks more versatile than a single turntable. See Chapter 8 for more on these functions.

You can’t see the music on CD

The great thing about vinyl is that all the different shades of grey and black rings on the record let you see where you are in the tune. If you look closely at the changes between the darkness of the rings, you can work out how long it will be until the breakdown, chorus and so on, and you know when to start your mix accordingly.

Most DJ software has a waveform display showing the tune’s peaks and troughs. The thicker parts of the waveform are the louder parts, and the thinner parts are the quieter parts. By looking at the changes in this waveform, you can navigate the tune just as well as with vinyl.

Because a CD (which is a shiny disc without shading information) just spins around inside the deck, you have to take the time to discover the structure of your tunes, remembering when changes happen, and read the time display in order to make perfect mix placements. Unless, that is, you have a CD deck with a waveform display.

Manufacturers realised that the need to remember the tune structure was a big issue for the beatmatching DJ, and have started to show a representation of the music’s waveform on readouts of CD decks (see Figure 5-1). It may not be quite as detailed as with DJ software waveforms, but the CD deck’s waveform follows the same principle. It’s larger for loud parts and smaller for quiet parts, so you can tell by the dips and troughs when the tune is about to change to a quieter or louder part. You still need to know the structure of the tune, and the waveform is more of a ballpark reference than a precise guide, but it has transformed mixing on CD from blind memory of a tune structure to a visual trigger of your memory.

Bars don’t have turntables any more

As vinyl has become less popular, and more DJs shift towards digital and CD DJing, sadly a lot of bars have realised they can claim back space by removing bulky turntables and replacing them with twin CD units or leaving space for a laptop and a controller. If you’re a vinyl DJ, you can’t do much about this unless you’re allowed to bring along your turntables. One option is to transfer your entire collection onto CD for occasions like this, but that can take a lot of time.

Whether clubs still have turntables depends a lot on the genres that they play. House/trance clubs should still have a set of turntables waiting to be used, but if you’re a rock, pop or indie DJ, you may not be so lucky.

Turntables are more expensive than CD decks

This all depends on what you’re buying. I’ve found that one of the most expensive vinyl-only turntables is the Technics SL-1210M5G, which is around £700; but one of the most expensive CD decks on the market is the Pioneer CDJ2000 at £1,500 each! Even the CDJ900 Nexus from Pioneer is around £1200. Compare money with features, though, and turntables can still be a lot more costly than CD decks.

A pair of £100 turntables will probably be belt-driven, have motors that won’t hold their pitch very well, will most likely cause feedback when you play them too loudly, due to the thin plastic bodies, and you’ll probably get fed up with them in a year or so and want to buy a different pair. On the other hand, if you have £100 to spend on a CD deck, you can find one that gives you a reliable pitch control and pitch bend with possibly a loop function too. The anti-skip may not be the best, but these basic functions on a cheap CD deck can give you more control and confidence mixing the music than a cheap, belt-driven turntable ever could.

If you have £200 to spend, you’ll find that the features on the CD decks you look at outclass what’s on a turntable of the same price. Although the turntable you can afford now has a high torque (power), direct-drive motor and may offer a pitch bend and large ranges of pitch variance (sometimes over 50 per cent faster or slower), I still don’t think that a turntable competes with a CD deck in the same price range.

With £200, you can afford twin CD decks, so you only have to pay £200 to get both of the input devices instead of paying £400 for two turntables! Or you can get one single CD deck with loads of built-in effects, multiple cue points, a beat counter, seamless looping and the chance to do some scratching on CD too! Of course, you still need to buy another one …

If you compare the £700 Technics SL-1210Mk5G mentioned previously with a CD deck in a similar price range, you’ll find that the CD deck still beats the turntable hands down on features. For £700 you can get the Denon DJ SC3900, and this thing rocks. It’s got a motorised platter, so it can feel like using a turntable, built-in effects, the ability to connect external hard drives, and it can act as a media controller to manipulate playback of music from DJ software.

So if you want to compare top prices, CD decks are more expensive but you get a lot more bang for your buck. Refer to Chapter 3 for more on buying and budgeting for equipment.