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Digital DJ Turntable
Daniel Gomez-Ibanez writes "I made a digital turntable - it stores digital audio and plays it back like a record player. This lets you scratch the audio from a CD. I like it because there's no 'computer' involved- a four year old can figure it out. There's a description here." Daniel also has a more descriptive web page on the inspiration and design of this beast.
There is a lot of white noise generated during scratching, noise that is not available on a digital CD.
How did you create the scratch effect?
I have been pwned because my
Maybe it's just an error-diffusing way to reduce your 24-bit beard to 8 bits of stubble.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
Final Scratch
Final Scratch, uses a hybrid of actual turntables and digital audio. You use a pair of special vinyl records, connect the audio out of the turntables into this strange USB device which controls the software that allows you to cue/scratch mp3s...
It was only available for systems running BeOS, but they are branching out with Mac OS/Win32 and Linux versions.. You only need a 'standard' DJ setup, two turntables and a two line mixer.. it's insanely cool.. the only downside is the price, $500USD, but thats relatively cheap to a stack of vinyl, or your Technics 1200's.
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Insert Witty Sig Here
One of the biggest cues DJ's use when scratching is the pattern of bands on the record. Good DJs can usually drop the needle to with a few grooves of the spot they want.
Not sure how this would be done digitally, but the guy's design is still a pretty cool exercise in man machine interface design.
I remember hearing about a program called FinalScratch that is REAL similar to this, a few years ago. I think it came out first for BeOS. It's the same kind of thing, in that it uses digital audio for the source, but it's actually tied into a real turntable with a "real" vinyl record, and it sounds like it has a lot of cool features for DJ's.
Here's their site.
"And like that
As has been posted before, there's more to the sound of scratching than just speeding up/slowing down the sound ... There are significant changes in volume, and increases in teh amount of noise. And, if you move the record really slow you get a strange sorta softened crunch noise which is very different than the 'normal' sound you get from a slowed down audio stream..
Still, it's a damn good idea, and if nothing else (and it's definitely more than this), it would be a kickass gimmick to have on stage with you!
Technology is a good thing...
ìì!
Denon and Pioneer have great digital turntables - the Denon DN-D9000 and the Pioneer CDJ-1000. They are quite impressive.
this sig is a highly rehearsed improvisation
Not pretending that I understood everything this guy did, it still looks like an improvement over the current "digital turntables"
While on the topic of digital DJ'ing - if you're looking for software, check out MixMeister. It's one of the most interesting DJ software titles around, with great waveform and BPM manipulations tools (ie. changing speed without changing pitch), and smart automatic beat matching.
I understand the free GDAM has similar abilities, but I haven't used it. Any comments from those who have would be appreciated!
My other car is a cons.
Why would beatmatching be any harder with an mp3 than with a CD? It's not. Especially considering professional CD players that play CD and mp3s (and emulate scratching).
... based entirely in Linux, because as it says on Stanton's website, Windows is "not a stable enough environment"
I've played with Final Scratch, Ritchie Hawtin had a hand in it, and it is, without a word of a doubt, incredible. But if you really want to go pure digital, check out the Pioneer CDJ-1000, allows you to save wave data off a CD, store it to an SD card, scratch, cue, add effects, everything. Check it out here
Mouse, Mice. Goose, Geese. Moose... Moose?
The one, the only, Numba One.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
My crappy case mod and half dead dremel all of the sudden seem so inadequate....
http://remixmag.com/ar/remix_pioneer_cdj/index.htm
I've heard nothing but good things about these. They're supposed to feel just like vinyl. Of course, for over a grand, they damn well better.
c-hack.com |
My ass makes music too, but the bean industry would claim that it was derivative.
I have been pwned because my
kinda reminds me of the very cool terminatorX program.... the author built a turntable for scratching using an old turntable and some mouse guts.
Despite being a nearly exact copy of a previous post 11 minutes prior, I will hazard a response to both posters:
The customized system presented in this story does not require a computer. So while it's great that FinalScratch runs on BeOS, it still requires a computer which is exactly opposite what our story's protagonist aimed to create.
A digital signal processor seemed to be the answer but the cost of the development kit was $3000. Fortunately, thanks to a generous "donation" from "corporate sponsors" I obtained the development kit and a DSP board.
:)
Does this make anyone else wonder where he got it?
- This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along, move along..
Of course, this has to take into account the fact that American DJ makes second-class products. I bought an ADJ mixer back in the day, and have to say that if it weren't so cheap, I'd never have bought it. The cutoffs are just about nonexistant, the fader gives problems constantly, and it just lacks a lot of features that I would have expected to be there.
On a semi-related note, a Scratch DJ friend of mine got an ADJ t-shirt from relatives for Christmas and everyone constantly bugs him about it. It's just one of those things.
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
But:
1) They don't sample and playback which is what this device does
2) The quality of ANYTHING made my American DJ leaves much to be desired. They are the mcdonalds of DJ equipment.
Go see any show by Kid Koala (i.e. DJ for the Gorillaz, and most importantly Bullfrog). He "makes" music, too and he's insanely good at it. I know a hell of a lot of people who can pick up a guitar and learn how to play a pile of songs fairly quickly, but almost nobody who can scratch for any credit. It's a lot harder than it looks and someone who's talented at it can make some fairly impressive sounds.
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
. . .I have a turntable almost exactly like that one. I'm going to cut that bad boy open tonight!!
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
Well, yeah, but then they're just playing stolen music on CDs. That's different.
A guy with a laptop and Winamp with the pitch control plugin gets the gas-face from me, though.
- A.P. (DJing for 13 years now...)
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
As for making it so you can identify phrasing and such, I always wondered how hard it would be to add a new type of packet to the Ogg (or some other) format, so that you can store uncompressed audio (or 320 kbit compressed for the super poor DJ's who can't afford to burn a lot of CD's yet...) in the file, along with beat and sample information for each audio frame. A playback program or digital turntable could read this information and build a visualization chart that looks something like
[Insert here the best ASCII art interface diagram ever that the lameness filter wouldn't pass through no matter how much I varied the characters -- see my
At any rate, I've always wanted to try my hand at spinning some tracks, I've made some loop-based songs before (using my own loops that I created). What's the best way to start learning to DJ?
A solution to the problem with music today
AtomixMP3 is set up a lot like turntables -- i.e. it is optimized for real-time DJing. If you have multiple sound cards (or as SBlive using front/rear speakers), you can cue up the next song in the headphones while the other is playing on the speakers. It gives you some visual feedback (waveform) as to what is coming up in the song.
Mixmeister is better for creating CD compilations -- you can set up tempo, volume, and frequency envelopes in a set up similar to a multitrack recorder. I've used it to make some fun beatmixed compilations.
You can also use more advanced tools like Sonic Foundry Acid Pro which are better w/ loops and effects -- but Acid is sadly missing a tempo envelope tool and it's technology for changing the tempo w/o changing the pitch doesn't seem to be as good as Mixmeister's...
Evolution: love it or leave it
When you use tools like Acid and Mixmeister (note - these aren't "realtime" DJ tools though), you can see the waveform of the song (which IMHO has got to be better than "grooves").
If someone would incorporate this technology into a program like AtomixMP3 (yes -- you'd need to build the waveform graphs ahead of time in a database) then I don't see why this would be a problem.
Most of the big club DJs aren't taking requests -- they could get their music collection prescanned on a computer...
Evolution: love it or leave it
When I saw that Stanford had a product realization lab I regretted I wasn't young enough to "have went to Stanford." Then again, with grammar like that, they wouldn't have let me in.
Not forgetting the always cool BeOS solution, where the vinyl was a special time-code record, which was sampled by the computer, and which caused corresponding scratching to be performed on an mp3 file.
The cool thing with that setup was that you could needle drop anywhere into the track, in addition to using whichever player you had at hand.
Of course, I imagine they are dead in the water, what with the proliferation of BeOS platforms to run on and what not.
You'd laugh at Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva? I doubt it. They're some of the original pioneers. Richie is famous for his sets that mix songs, effects, and drum machines. He made the switch to Final Scratch (maps mp3's to a special vinyl record) so that he can carry the 3000 or so tracks that he wants with him around in his notebook, rather than having to tote 3 refrigerator box size crates around with him. Final Scratch and similar systems combine the portability of mp3 with the vinyl handling ability you traditionally think of when you think of djs (you can even needle drop the mp3s).
The one disadvantage of mp3 or cd is that you can't see the breaks in the vinyl, and the more intimately you know the track the less of a disadvantage that is. And if you're going to choose anything other than vinyl, why go with cd? Cd's have the disadvantages of mp3s (can't see the vinyl grooves) and the disadvantages of records (have to cart around all the physical media). If anyone's curious about mixing mp3's just at home for fun, check out this awesome software which has really advanced auto-beatmatching capabilities.
99% of people who spout off "Analog is better" have no idea that before their vinyl is pressed it is first digitally mastered, removing any of the benefits of true analog sound, while leaving the disadvantages of an analog playback media (playing the record actually degrades its sound quality).
I'm not sure what you mean. You can already see the waveforms in AtomixMP3. I vaguely remember the version 1 begin kinda lame, but version 2 rocks.
john and ritchie, but yes, same stuff
The idea of vibrating knives/swords/etc. has been a mainstay in space opera style sci-fi for decades. I think making the jump from a vibro-knife to a vibro-razor is very easy, and probably occured to many people independently.
From the site: "Your thoughtful gift of this Vibrating Razor will be live forever in the hearts of those you love."
That's a really interesting question.
Obviously, this guy has mastered the time cube, and is scratching forward in time.
This might cause some problems if presented in the same format as the 'next n seconds' waveform. The waveform as a straight line is realllllllly long. All the grooves on the vinyl really are is the waveform of the music, and they take up a 12" spiral. But I guess the waveform could be compressed to a fairly high degree, that would actually make it easer to spot the breaks. I guess the natural thing to do would be to compress it to fit in with the time marker, so that rather than just being a progress bar, it could show you the map of the song. Hmm.... that's a pretty good idea, and would certainly make the program more appealing to anyone with only one sound card.
They show you a mono waveform (the zoom level is of course dependent on your choices) that I've found to be fairly useful for making some educated guesses about where to mix in a track.
Acid drives me crazy because it insists on drawing the stereo waveform which just doesn't give me the same visual feedback.. I wish there was a way (or I knew how) to get it to display in mono...
Evolution: love it or leave it
Interstingly enough (or not), the guy who played "Lamar" went on to play gangsta rapper "Tasty Taste" in the excellent mockumentary "Fear of a Black Hat."
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"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."