Migration to new host complete

At last the migration to the new host is complete. Now my blog is reachable at http://www.djnikhil.com/blog/

Helping people with discovering new electronic music

I have a lot of people asking me to suggest some good house music all the time. At first I though of posting a few tracks every now and then. But then I realized that Blip can be a really handy tool in doing this for me. I am gonna start posting new tracks to my BLIP account on the right side. Click on the my Blip.fm link on the right to see what track I am posting as well as listen to them online.

Learning out of playing Traktor Pro with Audio 4 DJ using keyboard mappings

At last I found time and patience to carry my 17inch monsterous laptop to the club and play a set of profressive house and old school hip hop. My setup is something like this.

Laptop to Audio 4.

Traktor setup to use external mixer.

Sampling at 96KHz.

DJM 800 for the external mixer.

Audio 4DJ connected to DJM using a pair of RC cables.

Getting used to playing this way was a little challenging and the pitch bends after the release were hard to estimate and acceleration was a little slow after delayed releases. But pitch setting was one of the best feature. I no longer have to look at my CDJ 1000MK3s to see how much pitch did I change. One of the main issues I faced was having the laptop on the side of the console. In Excess we have 2 EV monitor and they take up a lot of space along with the Cd players and the mixer. The club is really loud so it is mandatory to have the 2 monitor on all the time. Because of this I had to have the laptop setup on the CDbag tray that slides out on the side of the console. this was a little problematic with handling the bends and mixer. A way to hadle this is by using a laptop stand to go over the mixer. The unfortunate part is that we dont have goodlaptop stands available here in India. So I need to get a custom foldable one made which is going to take some time. But overall the control was a lot more easier. Song searching was smooth. No crackles as I had analyzed all the tracks before hand. I had the load markers set on a few tracks before hand and set a few on the fly. So that when I load the track into a desk, it gets cued automatically. This is a really helpful thing.

I can see a lot more people interested in Digital DJing and I would be really happy to help anyone who needs advise with the hardware or software. Leave comments with your questions and I will be happy to answer them.

Conclusions on Traktor Scratch Pro audio quality compared to Traktor 3.4

Alright, I had to get this thing out of my mind on what version to choose as the only version. Traktor Pro comes with a lot of enhancements as well as solid stability. But people have been complaining about the audio quality which is my main concern. So I sat down today and decided to make a set of 2 songs recorded through Traktor Scratch Pro and Traktor DJ Studio 3.4. The two songs I chose where “Going Wrong(DJ Shah’s Magic Island mix)” and PVD’s “Let Go(Club mix). The reason I chose these two songs is because they have an even balance of highs mids and lows. The following are the Audio settings in both the versions

Audio Interface: Creative EMU 0404USB

Sample Rate: 94KHz

All master limiters off

Auto deck gains off.

Keylock is set to minimum on both the players.

I recorded the mixes with exactly the same breaks, EQs and gain levels. And my conclusion is “Not much difference”. Traktor Pro does eat up a little life out of the track when it comes to the highs, but makes up for it in generating more lows. Remove the keylock completely and you get amazing quality.

The advantages I gained with Pro are:-

• Instant searching while typing(I just cant seem to find my CDs in my CD bag)
• Impressive keylock on pitch bending.
• Rock solid stability
• Superb effects, especially the dedicated filter knob which is my favourite.
• Convenient keylock knobs.
• Great analysis of track and the ability to manipulate the entire ID3 of the track.
• +/- 10% pitch control(Very handy in hip hop)
• Pitch bend sensitivity control
• CDJ like cueing (The cue point no longer gets set on the pause)
• Cue to load is bloody effective
• Looping is accessible in a faster fashion
• Faster analysis.
• Cruise control is very handy
• Low latency is impressive

Some of the drawbacks though are :-

• Distortion when playing a track and analysing other at high sample rate.
• Switching of output pauses the track for quite some time.
• Beat gridding still needs to be worked on. 3.4 does wayyyyy better on this part.
• Strutter like cueing is still missing using the mouse.(I need this for accurate load cues).

Overall Traktor Scratch Pro has turned out to be quite impressive.

Drop in comments if you need to add something to these conclusions.

Update on Traktor Scratch Pro with NI Audio 4 DJ

Alright, I received the new baby and took it to a private gig to test it on live cd players. Guess what. The time codes dont work well at all. The tracks play in way too garbled manner. Something is seriously wrong. But the following are the details of the findings.

I tried Audio 4 DJ on both Traktor 3.4 as well as Traktor Scratch Pro. Traktor 3.4 runs ways smoother with the audio interface. The sound is daym crisp. I was impressed cos it was crisper than the cd player. The Traktor Pro on the other hand failed to impress me to that extent. The mids and highs still need some improvement. If a track is getting analysed in the background, the sound distorts. This is something the software should handle.

I configured the keymap though to work with Pro and tried mixing. Truly amazing. Pro is damn good at keylock. Must try.

Will be writing a post soon on how to use Audio 4 DJ with keymapping with Traktor Scratch Pro. Will put up the keymap as well. Stay tuned or email me about more info by commenting on this post

Electro for the day

Downloaded this one just today. I love the vocals and the melody composition of this song. Must have for any DJ

DJ Antoine – In My Dreams (Dj Andrey Levskiy Bootleg Mix)

Electro for the day

I am playing a lot more Electro than any other genre these days. The crowd seems to be liking more of bouncy electro. Thats why I suggest this :-

Stim Axel – Snachala 2009 (Dj Viduta Remix)

What in my recent sets

There are so many tracks that people ask me for. The problem with them is that they do not keep themselves updates with the recent. So I thought I will start a section where I will start adding names of the tracks that are most recent and the ones that I play. How you get them is all up to you.

To start of:-

Chuckie Vs LMFAO- Let the Bass Kick In Miami Bitch (DJ Inphinity mashup remix)

Post regularity of a DJ

Its been soo long since I have written a post that I have forgotten the links I used to click on.   just kiddin. But definitely things have got a lot more busy for me these days. I am doing a sched of 17hrs on 3 days of the week. I cant afford to quit my job and also dont want to give up the club. Oh, BTW, for people who dont know, I am one of the residents of this club called Excess in Hyderabad. It is the biggest in Hyderabad and also the best. I am playing along side DJ Manish who is my very good friend.

Had to redo my whole music collection for the sake of the club. I realized that I had so much shit in my files(more than half was not playable.) I deleted of the stuff and rewrote all the cds. Its at last soo clean and the whole file is playable. The best part is that I have compiled all the music in to just 1 file of 256 cds. But I think this is not going to last for very long. Cos very soon, once I get a good audio interface(Audio 4 DJ mostly), I would start taking my laptop to the club. Solves all my complications.

Preparing to play some hard electro at the club tonight.

Some features I would like to see in Traktor 3.4

I really appreciate the amount of stability that was introduced in Traktor 3.4 from the previous version. I have used Traktor for an 11 hour session last night(5pm-4am) and it was ROCK SOLID. I didnt see any sluggishness or latency seeping as was the case with 3.3

But there are still some features that need fixing. This is a list of things I think NI should consider.

1. Presently the Tempo Range has options of +/-8,32,50,100 %s. I would love to see  a +/-16% on that list. I dont think 50% is a necessity. No one mixes at that big a range.

2. Traktor has still not worked on the Auto Cue feature when the track gets loaded into the deck. I think this is really important so that people dont waste time in cuing. I personally dont like to spend time in cuing . Especially in loud clubs where the tracks starting with faint intros are a little tough to cue accurately.

3. I think Traktor as a whole should get a better Music management system. Presently assort my music in the form of Genre, Mood, Energy, Latest, Anthems, BPMs(Hip Hop). I have a folder structure created for each one of them. But I think NI should think of something out of the box to let Traktor do the shit for us.
4. BPM detection is something which is quitetricky with Traktor. Like sometimes it should half BPM for some of the house tracks. I tried Mixmeister BPM analyzer and that thing was Dead Accurate on the whole of my Hip Hop collection which are usually tricky.

5. Hot Midi plugging does not work with all the midi interfaces.

6. One of the features I like in Traktor Pro was the ability to send the effect to the master rather than one deck. This was something which was easy to implement in Traktor 3.4. I would to see that feature in Traktor.

Please add to the list in comments if you think that I am missing something.