What, Another CDJ!

So I’ve splashed out and got myself another CDJ800 !! Woooooot!!! For a vinyl DJ I certainly have a lot of CDJ’s, well two now. I bought the first one about six months ago so I could practice and learn how to use a CDJ, well, that took me the best part of five minutes then I went back to using DJ Decks on vinyl. I bought the second one today after I was booked in to supply the equipment for a job on Thursday, they wanted 2x SL1200, 2xCDJ’s, a 4 Channel mixer and a few other things, I almost have all the gear and I wasn’t about to go and hire just a single CDJ so I figured it would be easier to simply buy another one, meh what you gonna do…. In fact I was surprised at how many single CDJ’s there are on ebay, getting them as one off from a store I can understand but I would expect that secondhand CDJ’s would generally come in pairs… strange… and after all this the funny thing is that nearly as soon as I got it in the studio I was thinking of selling the CDJ’s and my mixer and going for a DJM900… hmmmm…

Komplete

So I’ve bought into the juggernaut that is Native Instruments Komplete, but I didn’t go the normal way about it. These days I’m all about doing things cheaply and relatively efficiently, so I bought an older version of Komplete,  Komplete 5. I’d had a search going on ebay for almost 12 months and nothing had really come up, then finally about a week ago I got a hit on a version of Komplete 5 going for $199 so I snapped it up. My plan is to upgrade this at a later date to the most recent Komplete 8, I can do that for about $200, which all up is cheaper than diving straight into Komplete 8 at about $550. The fun part of all this is the installation, it took 12 hours! There are 12 DVD’s in this thing and umpteen number of updates to download. Combine that with the fact that I also got a copy of Komplete Elements and I downloaded and install all the Komplete 8 players at the same time it turned out to be about 100gb of installed stuff! Yeah, it’s amonster, I can now see why Komplete 8 Ultimate comes with it’s own harddrive !

How to record a video conference

So over the last few days I have been working out at Homebush at the V8 Supercars event. Once again I was working for DART as the sound guy and working with another company called Powa Productions to deliver a video conference into about 30 schools throughout NSW. This was a pretty straight forward gig, unlike previous V/C’s! This time all I really had to do was take a feed from the V/C codec and send that to the FOH desk then take a feed back from the stage mics back into the codec. I patched this all through my desk and took an AUX out to record everything into my Zoom recorder… simple… and it really was!  This time however I did something a little different when I recorded. I took each side of the call, the local end, and the remote end, and split them into separate tracks on the recorder. This gave me the local stage mics on channel 1 and the remote classrooms on channel 2. This then allowed be to cut the tracks up and mix it down in post-production and get a nice clean recording. Generally there is so much background noise and echo coming from the remote end than if you record it all into one track to gets messy and garbled, not this time however. The result was great the the client very happy!

DJ Warehouse Fail!

So I went to DJ Warehouse today, let me start by saying that the experience was not pleasant. I went there to get some road cases for my SL1200’s, which I had been shopping around for, for sometime. I found that DJ Warehouse had the best price on these type of cases, but, unfortunately the cheap price reflected the cheap service.

Now, generally I buy this kind of thing online and I have it shipped to me so I don’t have to deal with the dosh bags in the store, but when I discovered that these guys had cases at a good price and the shipping costs where extortionate I decided that I would go pick them up myself since the store is local to me in Sydney. It started last week when I rang the store and I spoke to ‘Jayson’, I asked the guy twice and I wrote the name down. When I rang them today I asked for Jayson and I was told that Jayson only works in the warehouse and ‘No, he never works on the front counter, you must be mistaken’

‘oh god, ok whatever, what is your name ?…’

‘Olivier’ he said

‘OK cool I’ll be there shortly’, in other words I was saying, ‘Get my shit ready I will come and get it and get out of your hair real quick!’. But this was never going to be the case.

First, when I get there, there is some cretin crapping on to the sales dude, who I assumed was ‘Oliver’. He was crapping on for about 20 minutes talking about shit which I am sure he knew nothing about and which I am sure that Oliver knew equally nothing about! Why do this? Before even stepping foot in a store like this you should be well armed and understand exactly what you are about the fork out cash for, never trust a salesman! There is so much stuff on the net these days that the salesman has become almost irrelevant, along with the store itself. The only value I see in a store is to act as a warehouse to store good that you may need to get on a whim or in an emergency…. anyway.

I just wanted to get my cases and go, but it continues. Oliver then suddenly asked me to pay, I said ‘Can I look at the cases ?’

”They are out the back’, he says

‘Oh really what do they look like ?’

‘Blah, blah, blah, they look like the ones on the website’

‘ok fine whatever, here’s my card…’

He then proceeds to bill me and print an invoice, but, there is no paper in the printer!! Arrrg, while he is trying to get the printer sorted out the phone rings, twice! Then after 10 minutes of searching he decides that there is no paper and rings the warehouse to ask if he can email the order to them… ummm… why don’t you just do that all the time!?!?!  Anyway, whatever, I think to myself.

So finally I head out to the warehouse to pickup my order, where low-and-behold, I meet a guy called Jayson! He also screwed around… couldn’t find the cases and when he did find them one of them had scratches on, which to be honest I was not that worried about. Finally I get these things and tried them out in the studio, they are good, pretty happy in the long run but it was a long painful process. It’s this kind of experience that has really put me off going to shops, if the retail sector is serious about keeping customers then they need to sharpen up their game and stop being so full of themselves!

 

 

Positiva, another Dj Mix for ya!

A new DJ mix for you today. This one is a celebration of the record label ‘Positiva‘, arguably one of the most influentual record labels of the 1990’s. From dance, house and trance this label had plenty of hits, and misses! Artists such as, Hyper Go-Go, Dj Quicksliver, Deepdish and Fragma are just a few of the sensational line up that has had hit tunes on Positiva. Mixed on 21st November 2012, and you can download the mp3 from HERE. Enjoy….

 

 

Focusrite and Windows 8 No Go!

THIS is bullshit.  Manufacturers of hardware have had months and months to get Windows 8 drivers for their products sorted out. I am a proud owner of a Focusrite Saffire Pro 24DSP, it has been my workhorse for around 2 years now, I had to buy it when my last card, an EDIROL DA-2496 was passed by for 64bit drivers when I went to Windows 7, now there exists the potential for the same to happen again with my new-ish Focusrite! I can only hope that they will get their act together and develop a driver and save me from throwing yet another piece of hardware in the bin!

Great ad, technical fail.

I’ve seen this ad once on TV. I love it, great tune and cleverly down using a turntable. But there is one big problem, the turntable is spinning the wrong way! I suppose that if you want to lick the record with your tough like this then it has to spin this way, only a minor problem!



Studio Session

Over the weekend I got to work in another studio. When I say studio I just mean a small room with some instruments in it, it really was just a practice studio. But these days you can really make a studio wherever you have a laptop and a soundcard. This room was cool I suppose, fairly well sound proofed and lots of instruments just lying around, including a Roland XP-80 and an X-Station 25… which I made use of. There where also many, many other pieces of old gear lying around including a big pile of jumbled cables and a drum kit with heads that where way to lose and gave me a headache!

Supporting Sala Bai

As part of my business, I’m helping these guys out tonight at a charity wine auction. I was asked to put together a DVD containing some video that was shot around the homes of the Sala Bai students, there are also some stills and thank you slides amongst it all, the package has come out quite well and both the client and I are very happy with it. The vision will be used for a presentation and talk that will be given by one of the stakeholders of the school. The event will be held at the Manly Quarantine Station, which is a really nice location. It should be a fun night, and all for a good cause!

‘Party Of The Decade’, it’s a banging house mix!

Another new house mix for you to pump! This is more-or-less the set I played on the weekend at my mates birthday party, there are a few tracks at the end that I changed because I wanted to have more recent tracks. No gimiks, themes or fancy pants stuff with this mix, just the best tracks that are around at the moment… enjoy… and as always you can download the mp3 HERE