Look out honey ’cause we’re using… itunes?

So, I loathe being simply an aggregator of information sometimes, but isn’t that the nature of humanity? We discover through exploration, and then history is made through the telling and retelling of the journey.

My old friend Gary Perkins (who used to go by Sweet P when we were doing house parties in Cincy) hit us up with this blog talking about the Attigo TT which looks pretty damn ridiculous. D and I have drooled over the interfaces Daft Punk uses, and this is just another step in reinvention and virtualization of dj interfaces. Something some djs are completely against.

Specifically, one friend of mine (Dj InForm) was talking to Dj Houseshoes of Detroit, MI, and related that Houseshoes HATES Serato. After hearing his set, I can understand why. His track selection was rarities of such quality and careful picking that you could tell he knew each record inside and out. He knew those tracks by heart, he probably knew the history of each one, as he dropped a 70’s synth reworking of Beethoven’s 5th (that I also have on vinyl) and slowed it down to match a track that sampled the arpeggiated bridge of the piece at 1/3 the tempo. A perfect drop. He swigged from his Hennessey bottle (part of his requirement to play) and let people soak it in. Things like that made up the meat of his set.

It caused me to realize that I have a history issue. I’ve only in the past five years really discovered hip-hop, punk, hardcore, soul, funk, psych rock. Up until then I was a total tech head, my loves were classic rock, industrial, deep techno, deep house, a touch of trance, prog house, funky and disco house, and club tracks. To learn the history of tracks in those genres was sometimes similar to that of hip-hop (sample roots, production methods, stories behind songs, beef between producers, jokes between producers.) Still, as I moved to working off of cds, learning the history and love behind the tracks became sparse. I felt myself disconnecting from some of the music. I was losing touch with what I was playing.

That comes out when a dj doesn’t “know” their material. If the love is there you can hear it. If you’re just doing it as a job it sounds mechanical, trite, and bland. The nights that I heard my sets sound like that were the nights that caused me to take a break. To sit down and learn my shit, to go home and practice, even if it wasn’t mixing, but to actually really listen to what the hell I had in my library. To start to play with my tools rather than to just start hitting the first nail that came along.

So the beef Houseshoes has with serato makes sense to me, but its more than just the technology. Its the people using it. To wit, this post has a good quote:

A lot of the old school dj/turntablists that I’ve interviewed are very careful not to slam Serato. “It means I don’t have to carry 80 pounds worth of records on the airplane with me.” said one. But they do say that you can’t polish a turd; meaning if you kill on the decks with 45s, then you’ll be great with serato. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you will still suck. Technology can sink or swim you.