When I first got Serato ScratchLive I though the obvious thing to do was record a little mix of some of the music I made over the years. It’s been posted on the net before but I thought I post it up here again.
This is another mix I did quite a while back, it’s basically a mix of funky uptempo 7″ singles.
A group of 10 forum members, myself included, from Digital Vertigo got together and recorded a 1hr mix by recording a 5 min mix then passing it on to the next DJ to add their 5mins.
Recently I became the owner of a pair of Vestax PDX-3000 turntables, up until that point and my DJing antics were restricted to the +/-8% pitch range of my trusty Technics. So with my new found glory of ultra pitch I thought I’d post some info about pitch ranges, most of what I am going to say will be fairly obvious but I hope there may be useful tips/ideas for some people in here to inspire some extra creativity.
Whenever the question “What is your favourite beat juggle?” is asked on a message board you can guarentee that it won’t take long for someone to mention DJ Babu’s Juggle with Blind Alley by The Emotions. There is a good reason for this; it is a fantastically musical juggle and a joy to just listen to, in fact whenever I hear the song played without the juggle is sounds wrong to me because I like what Babu did to it so much.
I just thought I’d post up a little bit about what settings I use in Serato ScratchLive and why. Obviously different people choose different settings for different reasons but I hope that maybe by explaining why I use the ones I do I might help some people discover new things they can do with this software.
In my oppinion reversing and rotating your scratches and combos are 2 very useful things to do. This not only create new sounds (even though they are the same scratches they can sound very different) but add more movements to your arsenal to combine with each other and create new sounds & combos.
So what do I mean by reversing and rotating?
When I first got Serato ScratchLive I had to some time to work out how I was going to use if for juggling because it was obvious that things were going to have to be done a little bit differently. After playing about for a short time however it suddenly became obvious that ScratchLive actually made life much easier when it come to juggling & trick mixing, and with the release of version 1.8 this was improved even more (if you don’t have version 1.8 go to http://www.scratchlive.net/).
This is a scratch pattern I discovered yesterday, it’s basically a 2 click flare with an added bit of style. Here I’m just going to break down how I came up with it and also post a little video so you can see how it sounds.
When I first came up with this I knew I wanted 4 sounds in the scratch so I took a 2 click flare (3 sounds) and added a fast pull back to make 4 sounds…nothing new about that.
A few days ago there was a thread (started by dooban) over at Digital Vertigo talking about how to actually incorperate crescent flares into your flow. This instantly caught my interest because I’ve had this exact conversation with people before and it seems a lot of people seem to learnt how to do crescent flares then never actually do them because they can’t find out how to flow with them.
Someone else then mentioned that crescent flares could be interchanged easily with 3 click flares. By pure coincedence, I had been cutting over fast electro beats for the past few days (I normally cut over slower beats) and while cutting to the faster beat I seemed to keep coming back to 3 click flares. So the obvious thing to do was to have a go at switching back and forth to crescent flares, this seemed easy enough and after playing around a bit more I suddenly discovered a few other uses and combinations which work well with crescent flares:
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