So I have a gig this coming Saturday. It’s a friends birthday party and a few other friends and DJ’s that I know are playing at it as well. I was chatting to one of them yesterday evening, DJ Unknown, and I casually mention that ‘I think this venue only has CDJ’s‘, he starts to panic because he has never played from CDJ’s before! I’ve never done a gig in front of a club from CDJ’s before either, we both use DJDecks  exclusively from SL1200’s using SSL Vinyl but at least I have a secondhand CDJ800 which I bought for this express purpose…. the day when I did a gig and there are no SL1200’s avaliable, this is that day! So today I spent a few hours practicing on the single CDJ that I have and making sure DJDecks is set up correctly… sweet… no problems, things worked perfectly, in fact I think I was mixing better on the CDJ than I have on the SL1200’s over the last few weeks.

One important thing to note, if you are using a CDJ with a U46DJ interface then the output of the CDJ will be too loud for the U46DJ. So you will need to do one of two things, either buy four attenuater and put them between the CDJ’s and the sound card, -15dB should be good enough, or simply burn a timecode CD that has a maximum level of -15dB, ie: drop the level of the timecode 15dB, you can do with with Wavelab, Audacity or some sort of wave editing software. The reason for this is because the output of the CDJ is at +4dB and the input of the U46DJ is -10dB a difference of 14dB, if you drop the level by 15dB the you will have 1dB of headroom which seems to work perfectly!

Also I’ve be playing around with a new skin. I’ve been using the SPM skin for years but today I tried out the VCSkin… very nice. Much simpler interface and only has information that is important when using vinyl control. Also the font for the file browser is smaller so more info fits on the screen, also nice…..