A trip through DJ booths: 1976 - 2016

Modern dance music was in full swing by the 1990s. Acid house had ended, but DJs like Sasha and Tony de Vit (pictured) were establishing the cult of the superstar DJ. Unlike the leading booths of the 70s, the DJ’s concern was less with the club’s sonics and more about mixing tunes on the ones and twos and getting carried away in the booth. Super-clubs kept the sound processing gear away from the direct control of the DJ. Technics 1200s or 1210s were by now industry standard. Tape machines were no longer required as the top-loading CDJ-500 had been introduced a year before and was the tool of choice for playing tracks fresh from the studio, acapellas and sound effects.

While CDJs would later go on to run Technics out of most booths, the 500s were tricky to mix with thanks to a clunky jog- wheel that couldn’t yet mimic the effect of a turntable – and for most of the 90s, Technics remained the main player of choice. The 500s did, however, have Master Tempo, the button that kept tracks in key when you changed pitch. Pioneer’s other great innovation was the DJM 500, a four-channel mixer with terrible sound but which became an instant hit thanks to an effects section that could sync with the BPM of the track playing. Cue pissed DJs the world over drunkenly thundering the delay effect until your ears threatened to melt.

The direction of the DJ booth had already been changed once by Richie Hawtin in the 90s with his ‘Decks, FX and 909’ CD. In the mix (and later on his Mixmag Live CD) Hawtin used effects and the TR-909 drum machine to mutate a DJ mix into something new and different. It wasn’t an entirely original idea – DJs like Larry Levan had been experimenting with effects a lot earlier – but in the early 2000s Hawtin went a step further by helping give birth to Final Scratch (which later morphed into Traktor Scratch), a system of DJing that used control vinyls to play the music on your laptop via turntable. And so a nightmare – and an epiphany – were unleashed simultaneously. As each club system differed wildly, often leading to complications with its set-up, normal DJs became plagued by their laptop colleagues fumbling with wires and asking to play one more track as their laptops failed to sync with the vinyl code being emitted. Tour managers went from being rare commodities to standard fare for the biggest stars as DJs relied on their trusted sidekicks to figure out for the tenth time that weekend why the hell nothing was playing out of channel two. On other hand, when Traktor vinyl worked it revolutionised the DJ’s life, allowing them to bring their entire record collections on the road and add effects or loop all within this new, neatly synchronised world of digital DJing. Those who couldn’t handle the technical bother were being very capably seduced by the ever more powerful CDJs. DJs like Erick Morillo (pictured) or James Zabiela became masters of the loop and cue function, and Traktor wasn’t the only thing to polarise clubland.

Earlier in the 2000s another Hawtin-associated product, the Allen & Heath Xone mixer, went head-to-head with Pioneer for the hearts and minds of the headphone-clad elite. The easy-to-use, all-analogue and great-sounding Cornish mixer was to usher in a new trend that would bear fruit years later in the analogue revival – and indeed in Richie’s own MODEL 1 mixer (see p.74). But that change would take some time to happen. In the 2010s digital DJing had gone even further as Traktor turfed out control Vinyl in favour of single deck controllers like the X1 –and big-room masters like Marco Carola, Loco Dice and Luciano were seduced by its ability to combine loops of tracks into endless on-the-fly remixes and saturate breakdowns with more effects than ever. Beatport had become the main arena in which producers battled to out-sell each other, and notch their way up DJ polls. DJs had long since dumped actual CDs for USBs with the arrival of the CDJ 2000, and Traktor’s vinyl loving followers flocked to Pioneer and its accompanying software, Rekordbox. The Digital DJ controller became the hottest bedroom DJ toy as consoles were mutated with sample pads and syncing threatened to finally kill off the art of beat-matching so painfully cultivated by the New York DJs of the 70s. For many, though, something just didn’t feel right. Endlessly scrolling for tracks in Serato, Traktor or on CDJs had scrambled the memories of DJs who now relied on playlists to tell them what to play. And the super-clean, synchronised world of the digital DJ became too sterile for many to stomach. Disco, house and techno purists like Ricardo Villalobos and Harvey were all along still playing vinyl and having to contend with older and older Technics in clubs that sometimes lay unused for weeks.

But the signs of a shift for a breakaway tribe of DJs back to the world of analogue were heralded by the steady resurgence of vinyl. Sales of records, which had reached an all-time low in the mid-2000s, now became another sign of the DJs’ rebellion against digitalism. Like the Xone mixer, the hands-on joy of mixing records and tweaking synths brought the world of tangible music and audiophile sound back into contention, with DJs like Motor City Drum Ensemble (pictured) leading the charge.

Represses of popular vinyl releases can now match or exceed the number of purchases it takes to make a track
No 1 on Beatport, and being No 1 on record buying sites like Juno or Decks.de is just as important a production publicity crutch. Rane celebrated this new trend with their MP2015 rotary mixer which brought the beauty of the Ureis and Bozaks
of the 70s and 80s back into the spotlight, and Technics reopened their doors for business. For some, the art of DJing had come full-circle, back to where it had begun in the 1970s: pulling out a record, and letting the music do the talking.