Don't Go Deaf

Waking up after a long gig you find a tiny mosquito has taken up residence in your ear. You can try to get it out, but no amount of prying will shake free this annoyance. The unfortunate fact is, you never will because the high-pitched hum doesn’t actually exist. It’s a very cruel trick your damaged ear hairs are playing on your mind. For most people who experience this disturbing reality, it dissipates after a day, but an unlucky few are left with it for life. For a dramatic and comedic version of this all-too-common tale, check out the movie It’s All Gone Pete Tong.

(cheeky cockney slang for “it’s all gone wrong”). It’s what happens when a famous Ibiza club DJ gets tinnitus and eventually goes deaf from extreme noise levels. Hollywood exaggerations? Well, the average DJ booth is usually around 110 dB. According to industry standards, you should not be exposed to that level of noise for more than 30 minutes at a time before permanent damage can begin to take hold. Got your attention? Well, enough of the gloom and doom. Here is the good news: There is a simple way you can not only save your ears but also significantly clean up your mixes at the same time. All you need to do is let go of those clunky DJ headphones and try out in-ear monitoring.

In the past 20 years, the technology of personal ear monitors has progressed immensely. The quality of sound is now outstanding, and prices are much more accessible to your average performer. In-ears typically range from $100 to $500, and a quality pair of mid-level in-ears without custom molds comes in at around $250. There are many different manufacturers of earphone monitors — or “canal phones” — and two main categories of technology: armature and dynamic. The majority of in-ears are made with armature drivers (developed originally for hi-fidelity hearing aids). Armature drivers provide a detailed, flat picture of sound but tend to lack lower frequencies. To combat that, higher-end models frequently employ several armature drivers in a single ear bud. As many as three drivers connected by crossovers provide a complete sonic picture, which, with a proper seal, can reach down to 10 Hz in some models

Shure, Etymotic and Westone are all strong companies that use armature drivers in models that many different types of performers have. In my tests, dual-driver armatures sounded detailed and precise. They make poorly recorded MP3s painfully obvious and long plane rides seem shorter. The only drawback is the apparent lack of bass in some models. In a club environment, that’s not such a big deal because the subwoofers fill in the missing low end, but for personal listening, some models might be too bright for some people’s taste.

 admit, this concept may require rethinking the way you DJ. Single-earphone cueing is impossible, and it’s impractical to continually put them in and take them out of your ears. But there are several workarounds, including mixers with split cueing and using the waveform displays in some digital-DJ programs to check the phase of a mix. They will all require some patience and a little relearning, but the payoff is worth the effort.

The possibility of almost completely eliminating the noise problem offers a glimmer of hope for many DJs, including myself. I highly encourage you to try out the technology on your own and see if personal ear monitors can help improve and extend the life of your DJ career.

Advantages of Mixing Externally

Audio Routing

Using an external mixer means that you’ve got clear dedicated hardware control and independent outputs for everything imaginable. This means routing to the booth, record outputs, master speakers, and headphone jacks all with clear related volume control.

Controllers tend not to have a dedicated output for everything because of the added complexity and cost they require. These outputs (especially the headphone) can often be quite a bit louder on full-sized mixers due to the fact that they always have full power. Many small controllers, like the Traktor S2, are forced to compromise on output levels due to the fact that they run on USB power alone.

Mixing Control

Dedicated full-size mixing controls on a well designed surface usually beat out controllers (especially some of the smaller ones which compromise performance space for portability). Having proper space between all of the faders and EQ are critical to keeping a good mix and feeling comfortable in the heat of a set. Many mixers, like the Pioneer series, have their own built-in hardware effects that make it really easy to add dynamics and flavor on the fly with complex routing possibilities. One example I love putting an echo post crossfader and then using the fader to cut out the track, leaving a nice echo trail behind. Try to set that up in DJ software!

Integration Possibilities

When mixing externally, the potential for experimentation with FX units and inputs is endless.  Many mixers have a full FX send/return, meaning that the world of dedicated effects hardware is wide open

Why digital Djing beat Vinyl

There’s no contest any more between vinyl and MP3 DJing, despite any misgivings die-hards may have about making the switch.

1. You can have all of your tunes with you everywhere you go

This is the biggie. The biggie with digital cameras over film cameras was: You don’t have to wait see your pictures. With MP3 DJing, it’s this simple: you can have all your tunes with you everywhere you go. Of course you still need to plan your sets, but to have that “I know what would mix well into this!” thought, and not have it followed by “Shit, I haven’t got it with me…” is, for me, the real big one.

(Actually, when I was a vinyl DJ, I knew I wouldn’t have that old tune that had just occurred to me with me. So in reality, for a long time after switching to digital, I used to have exactly that feeling, then suddenly realise that actually, wahey!, I had ALL of my tunes with me. This joy was then invariably followed by the thought “digital is the way forward, now why won’t everyone else realise it?” )

2. You can locate any tune immediately

Searching digitally is a great thing. With modern DJ software such as Serato ITCH, typing three or four letters, or a year, or a genre, or looking at last week’s set list, all means you can find any tune in seconds.

Now, personally I was always proud of the way I could find a tune in my record box fast. But that was out of say 80 tunes (or 160 if I had two boxes with me), and it still often took a minute of crouching down out of sight of the crowd, and out of touch with my club night. Digital?  You can search 50,000 records in sometimes 2 or 3 seconds. No contest.

3. You don’t have to put your valuable tunes into the hold luggage when you’re flying

Being able to tuck your laptop, controller, headphones and a change of clothes into a cabin bag and jump on a flight, secure in the knowledge that 1) You can be off the plane and in a taxi in 10 minutes, but more importantly 2) All your kit and tunes won’t leave your sight, is a great thing.And all of them had that ashen “I spent most of my money and half of my life finding these tunes, and now I’m going to let them out of my sight?” look on their faces. Bags go missing. that’s bad enough. But records? To start with, they really are truly nickable, and secondly, what good is your tunes turning up a day later when you’ve just missed a DJ gig? Unthinkable.

4. No relying on record companies to send you upfront and hard-to-find tunes

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, to be on the record company’s promotional lists was a major aim of many working DJs. It took years of effort to get in with all the right labels and promotional companies.

It was worth it, though: You got loads of juicy hard to find, upfront vinyl mailed to you practically daily. Lots of never-to-be-released exclusives, all for you! All you had to do was fill in reaction sheets to the tunes and post your top tens to various publications on a weekly basis. I used to get scores of records a week for nothing, and they made a major difference to the quality of my sets.

Thing was, the bigger the DJ, the more freebies. So while my DJ pals and I got some great music, sometimes only 5, or 10, or 50 of something would be mailed out, while we were only in consideration when they had maybe 100 or 200 copies of any given new tune. So if you weren’t in the top 5/10/50 DJs for that genre, no free tunes. You heard the tunes on the radio and in the clubs, but no copy of your own to play.

And of course, newer or smaller DJs got nothing at all, and were reduced to trawling the second-hand record shops for copies that bigger DJs had off-loaded for cash because they didn’t want to play them in their own sets.

While CDs and vinyl (don’t get me started on CDs…) are still mailed out, that stranglehold is now well and truly broken. Now it’s completely about connections that anyone can make online by putting the hours in to get to know their favourite artists and labels – and more to the point, by keeping their ears to the ground for new artists on MySpace etc. Of course, big DJs still get exclusives – but if you’re an MP3 DJ, it’s a far more level playing field than ever it was.

5. You can remix a tune on the fly without having to buy two copies

I often used to buy two copies of a record so I could create effects and mixes to make a tune my own. Whether “echoing” vocals by mixing them a beat or two apart all the way through, or lengthening breaks, or dropping acapellas over remixes, or removing dodgy bridges, such techniques are now far simpler – simply drag the MP3 onto both decks (or four if your controller allows it)