I have retired the Novation SL Zero Mk1 MIDI controller that was causing me a lot of grief when I was running Resolume and Ableton Live at the same time, as its Automap functionality was locking on to the Ableton Live mixer in session view now and then, and so, sometimes, when I thought I was controlling Resolumes visual FX, I was actually changing the volume faders in my DJ mix. Which was bad. ...
I recently found a good price on a Vestax VCM-600 controller. It is a specially made MIDI controller for Ableton Live, with the same build quality as a DJ mixer. It allows for control over 6 channels in the Ableton Live ‘session’ view, which is arranged similarly to a mixing console. It also adds dozens of MIDI mappable DJ controls such as the traditional Hi, Mid and Lo EQs, a crossfader, a filter control, control over a lot of Ableton FX, and more. It has 6 channel faders + 2 send faders for FX. More info in this video: ...
I think, for obvious reasons, 2020 has been a year that no-one could really have expected. With COVID-19 and lockdown, a lot of things have changed, both in my life, in everyone’s lives, and in the workplace. My online DJing setup Things that went well I changed medication around March 2020 which has resulted in significant weight loss, as expected. The previous medication was making me put on and retain weight even when I was eating very very little. In March 2020 my weight was nearly 136KG and now it has gone down to 125KG in March 2021. I have not been doing more exercise, indeed quite a bit less, as I have been staying indoors most of the time. The weight loss has had a very good effect on my general health and my sleep. I am much happier than this time last year. Working corporate jobs I found very very stressful and apart from being financially rewarding, I wasn’t getting much else out of it. My mental and physical health was suffering. My relationship with my wife and friends are much better now because I am less miserable all the time. I have taken up DJing over the internet and have turned this into a part-time income. It is so much fun. I used to DJ in clubs in my 20s regularly and I didn’t realise how much I had missed it. It is great to have a way to connect socially with people in lockdown and people really appreciate my DJ sets, which is great. Working from home has been a great change for me. Before the pandemic I wanted to work from home 100% anyway, because I was ending up spending at least 2 hours commuting to and from work, it was costing a lot (because I can’t drive) and it was taking up a lot of time and energy. My work from home setup ...
After the last post I have added Ableton Live and my Eurorack modular to my DJ setup, with a master clock being sent via MIDI cables from my Roland TR8 drum machine that syncs with Ableton. The drum machine also can be used creatively for drum fills etc. I hope these two diagrams explain my setup adequately - sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words! The ‘actor’ is me - I just couldn’t find a way to change that on http://draw.io :) ...
The classic! Yes! Some people actually write and read BOOKS on DJing. As if YouTube wasn’t enough. Well it can be enough.. but YouTube is also a cess pit of rubbish information, and at least a book has a better chance of being properly edited and reviewed. Also reading a book makes you more intellectual. Which is utterly true. So. I have been reading through these DJing books to see if they could teach me something I didn’t know about DJing after over 10 years doing it. And there were quite a few interesting techniques and tricks that I learned from these. ...
I thought I’d write a bit here about my Twitch DJing setup and some of the hardware and software I’m using. Twitch streaming has become very popular over the lockdown period, and I think people might be interested in how I have configured my stream. Something that seperates my stream from anyone else I’ve seen on Twitch is that is that I do live vinyl DJing AND live VJing at the same time on my stream. This is how I achieve it. ...
Journalism has deteriorated to a huge degree in the online age. A lot of articles and video content are one-sided short ‘clickbait’ – short messages designed to trigger an extreme emotional reaction. ALMOST ALL journalism is like this these days, it doesn’t matter if you have a highly established news network you have been trusting for decades, they have all had to adopt this low-quality strategy due to the ultra-competitive and dire financial situation that all news reporting finds itself in. However a lot of people still take news content at complete face value, and this leads to a huge number of people being misled about the real facts. ...
The three sections Left 9U section Right 9U section Middle 9U section So.. finally my 27U Eurorack modular synthesiser is complete. I have filled up the third - and surely last, as there is no more room in the studio! - case. I started this Eurorack modular in 2015.. so I am glad it is all complete now. I put in a small amount nearly every month for new modules. I am not some ‘rich kid’ who could afford to buy everything at once - and indeed I think my gradual approach has benefitted the overall modular because it’s made me think about what I actually need, and given me time to learn as I go along. ...
In our house, seperate to my main PC (see the tab above) we still have two Ivy Bridge-based PCs: Conny’s PC i7-3770K 16GB DDR3 RAM Nvidea Radeon 970 Graphics Card 250 GB SSD Windows 10 My wife uses this as her main PC, and plays quite a few games with it. For a CPU and motherboard that I put together in 2011 or so, I am quite amazed it still runs adequetely! It runs the games she wants to play, the most graphically intensive being Deadpool, but it will also cope with Borderlands 2, Skyrim Special Edition, Shadow Warrior 2, and others. She is not interested in the top graphics games, but it runs just fine. ...
I have made some considerable modifications to my modular since my last post. I have a 4-voice polyphony setup now with multiple voice Osc, VCA, Envelope and MIDI-CV modules, allowing me to experiment with polyphony voicing. Elsewhere, I have added an Access Virus C synthesizer to my studio, and now have rack-mounted Behringer Model D and Emu Orbit 9090 synthesizers. I have also upgraded to Ableton 10 and use NI’s Komplete suite including Massive X, plus TAL-NO-UX Juno 106 softsynth, Sylenth1 and others.