This is going to upset a few people. And to be honest would have probably gotten my goat if it were 5 years ago.
If you are like me (and there is many of us) and you are celebrating in excess of 50 years on this mortal coil and a DJ, then you are also more than likely a die hard vinyl fan. Now to be honest this is pretty irrational when you break it down. Vinyl records are all of the following: heavy, expensive, hard to keep free from dust, easily damaged, hard to store, a conundrum to organise and a pain in the arse to put back into their sleeves. So it bemuses me why we love the format and will defend it with such vigour and passion.
Maybe it’s the fact the each record is a physical thing and each purchase or acquisition was an experience and a story in it’s own right. Pulling a record from the rack evokes memories and emotions. Yes we are all poor because of it and have arms like orangutans from carrying boxes of the bloody things from gig to gig but we wouldn’t change it for the world. Anyway I am going off track here caught up in a nostalgic bubble.
Mixing records in it’s purist form is considered an art form and as someone who this didn’t come easily to I’m inclined to agree. So as the world digitised and music formats started decreasing in size ending up as bits on a computer in the form of MP3s and it’s lossless compatriots, the sync function was born. And so did the civil war of the DJ community. Us oldies got very defensive over our “artform” and in the early stages were mis-informed to how sync could actually be used for the better of the scene.
As things have evolved the two factions have learned to co-exist. The vinyl-only DJ have got their lane back and a whole new audience of appreciators (which is great). Whereas the new generation of entertainers in the space have utilised sync to be able to go wild with creative possibilities using multiple loops, accapellas, cue points and traversing genres with ease. I personally love what these guys and gals are achieving and the creativity is truly impressive.
What is sync?
Sorry I should have gone through this a little earlier in the post. Sync is a way to automatically lock the tempo of the track coming into the mix to the currently playing track (the master track) tempo. Traditionally a dj would spend some time doing this manually using their ears to audibly match the incoming tune in their headphone before introducing it into the mix.
I’d love to hear the opinions of DJ’s from both sides of the fence on this one in the comments.
Leave a Reply