![]() First, there’s zero creativity to beatmatching. You’ll hear the very real difference between an MP3 and vinyl, and your ears will thank you for evermore when you treat them to something proper rather than the tossed-off amateurism of the Plastic DJ cheaters. Strain your ears, not your eyes, and you’ll hear the small mixing imperfections that show a DJ isn’t cheating. When you stop and listen even more is revealed. Towards the end of his rant, the Secret DJ offers the following solution for dealing with “plastic DJs”: Shazam–Beatport–Sync has dramatically lowered the bar in all of these areas, and this (justifiably) pisses the hell off of the Secret DJ. There’s a common thread to all of the above, and it’s this: Previously, you had to invest time, money and your very own sweat into sourcing music, obtaining it, and learning to DJ. Push a button, and the software beatmatches the tracks automatically, leaving you only to neatly crossfade from one tune to another.īack in the day, you would get kicked out from the DJ booth after a few trainwrecked mixes if you didn’t know how to beatmatch. You still need to learn phrasing, mixing and EQing, but with sync, practically anyone can learn to mix half-decently in a matter of days. ![]() These days, the sync functionality built into modern digital decks and DJ software takes out all the hard work for you. In fact, learning to beatmatch was probably the first real test of your desire to become a DJ. One of such skills was beatmatching by ear. In the age of vinyl, you had to actually spend months in your bedroom to learn some key skills before you could DJ in public. Out of the window goes the awe of “the stuff that has gone before, and how little you know”, as he puts it. What worries the Secret DJ, though, is that buying tracks by the bunch off of Beatport goes hand-in-hand with lost appreciation for the music. As Secret DJ mentions elsewhere in the book, “rarities and the things that can make a DJ excel are readily available from the comfort of your sofa.”ĭigital has made music available to everyone. The catalogs of the online stores are huge, and they get constantly updated with digital re-releases of even the lesser-known old titles. Hunting for an obscure record is mostly a thing of the past. Today, you can download that same track for a dollar or so on iTunes, Google Play or Beatport. And when the record shop didn’t carry the record you were interested in, you’d have to order it by mail, which was even more expensive. Mind you, you’d be playing just one of those remixes most of the time. A vinyl dance single would contain 2-3 remixes of a track and could cost as much as $10. Just 15 years ago, a DJ would be buying vinyl records to DJ with, typically in a record shop in their own town. Without some historical context, it’s hard to convey just how cheap and available music has become with the advent of digital downloads. Mindless Shazaming, says the Secret DJ, may lead you to sourcing a track not because you liked it but because of a cheer or the immediate effect it happened to produce on the dancefloor at that exact moment, “with no musical or brain process involved at all.” Beatport This, according to the Secret DJ, leads to taking “all the intelligence and invaluable research” out of the process and results in “a sad wee think-puddle” of lost music knowledge. Not so these days: You just fire up Shazam and have the track ID in seconds. You try to learn about its history, who the producer was, what other tracks they have released. Inevitably, investing such effort in IDing a tune makes you appreciate it more. Believe it or not, I still get to relive bits of this pre-Shazam past from time to time, having only recently identified a house track that I heard 20 years ago. You could try humming it to your DJ friends, googling the lyrics (if it had any), or asking around on forums. So what exactly is Shazam–Beatport–Sync all about?īack in the day, you could spend weeks or even months identifying a tune that you heard in a club or on the radio. ![]() In an nutshell, it has to do with the dramatic lowering of the bar for up-and-coming DJs. The flood of “plastic DJs” in recent years is due to what the Secret DJ refers to as the “Shazam–Beatport–Sync” routine. According to the Secret DJ, these are the folks with no music knowledge or appreciation of the craft who would not be able to call themselves DJs if not for the modern technology. One rant that stands out, though, is the one where the Secret DJ goes after what he calls “plastic” or “push-button” DJs. The new book by the Secret DJ contains plenty of rants and settles a lot of scores, much of them justified.
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