DJ Skills

The essential guide to Mixing and Scratching

Stephen Webber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136123092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Acoustical Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

DJ Skills: The Essential Guide to Mixing & Scratching is the most comprehensive, up to date approach to DJing ever produced. With insights from top club, mobile, and scratch DJs, the book includes many teaching strategies developed in the Berklee College of Music prototype DJ lab.From scratching and mixing skills to the latest trends in DVD and video mixing this book gives you access to all the tools, tips and techniques you need. Topics like hand position are taught in a completely new way, and close-up photos of famous DJ's hands are featured. As well as the step-by-step photos the book includes downloadable resources to demonstrate techniques. This book is perfect for intermediate and advanced DJs looking to improve their skills in both the analogue and digital domain.

The Revolution

The Revolution of Records

First off, let's get our terminology straight. “Record” is short for “recording.”

It has nothing to do with whether that recording is stored in vinyl grooves or digital bits. The Recording Academy still gives the Grammy for the Record of the Year, recording artists still make records, and DJs still play records. Because the vinyl record was the only game in town for a few years, many people came to associate the term “record” with its vinyl incarnation. However, a “record” is any recording made by a recording artist for release to the public. Wax cylinders were records. CDs are records. MP3s are records. DVD-As (Digital Video Disc, or Digital Versatile Disc-Audio) are records.

The birth of the record, like any good story, is full of conflict and unexpected turns.

The record's many incarnations and constant fight for survival is worth knowing, as there are many parallels to present-day issues. It started back in 1857 when French researcher Leon Scott de Martinville invented the “phonoautograph,” a device that would record air pressure fluctuations by means of a diaphragm and a pig's hair bristle that traced a wavy line on a manually rotated cylinder. Unfortunately, this first recording had one big drawback: it could not be played back. It would take another 20 years until this problem could be solved.

Wax Cylinders

The big breakthrough arrived in 1877 when Thomas Edison, while experimenting with a new telegraph device, accidentally ran indented tin foil under a stylus. This led him to develop the first instrument that could both record and reproduce sound. Edison's machine used wax cylinders and was far from high fidelity. His invention was initially used as an office machine for businessmen, enabling them to record and play back messages and dictation.

Shortly after patenting his “phonograph” in 1878, Edison temporarily abandoned this project to concentrate on developing the incandescent light bulb. But by inventing the phonograph, he set off the initial spark, which would inspire further experimentation and eventually lead to the “wheels of steel” and beyond (Figure 1.1).

Fig. 1.1. The Edison wax cylinder recorder. This device collected sound through a horn, then translated sound pressure levels into movements of a diaphragm, which vibrated the connected stylus, cutting tiny grooves in a rotating wax cylinder.

And this is where Alexander Graham Bell enters the picture. After inventing the telephone (a device that would carry sound waves from one location to another) in 1876, it was a small step for Bell to develop what he called the “graphophone.” With the money he was earning from his telephone invention, Bell established an electro-acoustic research facility in Washington, DC called the “Volta Laboratory Association,” where he and others worked on improving Edison's phonograph. Their development used wax cylinders and a battery-driven motor, versus Edison's manually operated original version.

Flat Discs and Gramophones

In 1888, while Edison and Bell were embroiled in some ugly lawsuits over stolen patents, German immigrant Emile Berliner tried improving the existing models by using a flat disc instead of a cylinder. His master platter was made of zinc covered with a thin layer of acid-resistant wax that was scratched off during recording. He was then able to mass-produce records in vulcanized rubber. Berliner named his invention the “gramophone.” These seven-inch discs had about a two-minute capacity and were manually turned by the listener at as close to 30 revolutions per minute (rpm) as they were able to get.

In the early 1890s, both the cylinder machines and the new disc-based gramophones were available and competing with each other, similar to the VHS verses Beta wars at the beginning of the video revolution.

Fig. 1.2. Disc-shaving machine. The shaving machine would smooth out the shallow grooves of the previous recording, making the wax cylinder smooth again and ready for new material.

The Columbia Graphophone Company was making some profit by leasing the first cylinder-based “juke boxes” to various entertainment facilities. The graphophone was no longer only a business instrument but had started claiming its place in the entertainment industry, with over 60 musical records available in the growing jukebox catalog. By the turn of the century, there were three major companies competing with each other: The Columbia Graphophone Company, Edison's National Phonograph Company (the two cylinder companies), and Berliner and Johnson's Victor Talking Machine Company.

One advantage of cylinder machines was their ability to both play back and record. The Edison cylinder machines came with both a recording stylus and a playback stylus, and various shapes of horns were available to contour the sound during recording and playback. The wax cylinders themselves could be recorded over up to a hundred times, provided they were erased properly using a disc-shaving machine (Figure 1.2).

Despite their better sound quality, cylinders were impossible to mass-produce and more cumbersome to store than discs. Berliner further improved the gramophone disc by utilizing an organic lacquer called “shellac,” made from crushed-up beetles, and by creating the master entirely from wax instead of the zinc-and-wax combination. These two improvements gave the disc a much clearer and more dynamic sound. But sound quality was still miles away from being pristine. The discs could only reproduce the approximate frequency range of the human voice, and were unable to reproduce the more extended high- and low-end frequencies of strings or bass instruments.

The Victor label turned this shortcoming into a commercial success and found its market niche by recording famous classical vocalists. Being able to listen to these world-famous stars in your own living room became “one of the greatest pleasures of modern life,” according to the ads.

The first hit record ever mass-produced was Italian tenor Enrico Caruso's 1903 10-inch disc on the Victor Red Seal label, the first record featuring the famous logo with the “His Master's Voice” dog.

Fig. 1.3. Kid Koala with his vintage Victrola. Notice the massive tone arm, the manual crank, and the storage space for records in the lid.

Victrolas, Albums, and Deccas

The cylinder's popularity took a big hit when the Victrola, a stylish and modern household record player, was released in 1906. It quickly established itself as the “must-have” home music product. Still, it took decades to put cylinders out of business for good (Figure 1.3).

Discs were now available in sizes of 7, 10, 12, 14, 16, and 21 inches, as well as double-sided formats. Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, released in 1909 on four double-sided discs, was the first record package called an “album,” as it resembled a photo album.

Just when science, art, and modern life seemed unstoppable in their progress, World War I shook the planet in 1914. Instead of spelling trouble for the fledgling record industry, tough times put music in even higher demand. The first portable player, called a “Decca,” enabled people to listen to music anywhere—even soldiers in the trenches.

It wasn't war that threatened to kill the record industry; it was the radio. If in the 1980s, “Video Killed the Radio Star,” then radio killed the shellac star for a while in the 1920s. In the early 1920s, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) started offering news, music, and entertainment for free through commercial radio stations. With the invention of the vacuum tube amplifier, radio reception and sound quality were improved. Live music broadcast over the radio sounded better and was more exciting to listeners than shellac discs on a Decca or Victrola, and record sales began dropping. The record industry needed a new point of attraction in order to win their audience back.

Technology to the Rescue

The early decades of recording consisted of sounds being collected into a simple horn, then mechanically etched into a disc or platter without the benefit of electronics. The condenser microphone developed by the Bell Laboratories in 1925 was capable of capturing the previously missing high- and low-end frequencies. Newly developed record players, known as “orthophonic sound boxes,” came on the scene that, for the first time, included volume knobs, amplifiers, and loudspeakers. After some miss-starts, lawsuits, and clumsy beginnings, the record industry and radio companies put their rivalry behind them (see Chapter 2), and radio stations began playing the newer, high-quality records, and therefore, promoting their sales. Eventually, radios and record players were combined into home entertainment systems, which shared a common amplifier and loudspeaker.

Just when everybody was recovering from World War I, the great economic crash in 1929 took its toll on the modern world, and electronic devices became luxury items that only few people could afford. Small companies went out of business while new mass market (and less artistically-oriented) companies emerged out of the financial disaster. In the USA, the “American Record Company” (ARC) was formed, while “Electrical and Musical Industries” (EMI) took the lead in Europe.

Overlooking Stereo

The 1930s brought crucial technical improvements to the music industry, but it would take a while for this technology to make its impact felt. In 1931, EMI researcher Alan Blumlein invented binaural or stereophonic recording. A specially constructed motion-picture camera captured Blumlein's stereo recording of a steam train puffing by in 1935. One can see (and hear) this historic recording at Dolby labs in San Francisco, and it still sounds pretty great.

Amazingly, the recording industry didn't see the commercial potential of stereo, and EMI would let the patent expire before stereo swept the world 30 years later.

In 1939, magnetic tape was invented, but the tape recorder was still in need of some major tweaks. At the same time, jukeboxes produced by Wurlitzer now featured multiple selections and were taking over America's diners.

But at the height of all these innovations, World War II came crashing through the door. Would human hardship and financial disasters terminate the record industry this time? Quite the opposite. Radio transcripts and top hits on 12- and 16-inch records were sent to Europe and the UK from the USA in order to entertain and cheer up the troops. These special discs were named “V-discs” for Victory (or for R...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I The Revolution
• II The Tools
• III The Skills
• Index