Friday, April 09, 2004

Lustre Lounge Function

My second major function at Lustre Lounge. A girl was celebrating her 21st birthday and wanted me to play RnB, but with a lot of JLo, Brittany, Beyonce and Madonna. I bought a couple of Brittany singles and I already had an old JLo album and a few Beyonce tracks so I thought I was prepared. At the actual function I realised that neither of the Brittany singles (Toxic and Me against the Music) mixed with the average paced RnB music so I ended up not playing them. I also avoided the JLo songs since it looked like everyone was enjoying, so why ruin it? :-)

Monday, April 05, 2004

Gemini BPM500

Spoke to Gary Couch (webmaster of RainbowRadio.com) about the Gemini BPM500 mixer. I asked him about how accurate the automatic BPM extraction was and he said: "I never thought much about the BPM display as I have been DJing so long that I can usually pick out the BPM within 5 beats of what it actually is and/or match beats while cueing within the headphones.". Hmmm, thats pretty cool. I also asked him about auto-start of the CD player (i.e. my Numark mixer starts the CD player on moving the crossfader) to which he said:"As for the question about starting the song on the fade automatic nothing I know will do this as that would be controlled by the cd player and not the mixer. It also would not be as acurate as simply starting manually.". This I thought was pretty weird :-/ I've seen at least one professional DJ using the fader to start the CD player and I was surprised that him being a professional DJ himself hadn't heard about it. Maybe it's rarely used then.

Sunday, April 04, 2004

Denon 1800F

Started using the Denon DN 1800F twin CD player at Lustre Lounge. This needed a bit of practice (about 4 hours) because it was a bit different to my twin CD player in that no scratch support was provided, no looping, no manual BPM counting (which is useful for beginners) and no fader auto-start (which wasn't really needed). Also, the cueing in the Denon was a bit different to my Numark. The mixer (Gemini BPM500) at Lustre was old, but had automatic BPM detection. This was good for many House tracks but when it came to RnB music, the BMP detection went crazy. I had to get used to mixing using only pitch control which turned out to actually be the way to go!