It wasn’t easy, I’ll say that right up front. In fact, it took me a lot longer than some. I saw it happening, slowly at first, and suddenly it was extremely common to see Djs standing, ‘headphoneless’, behind a laptop clicking around on the screen, playing their music, or what looked like the latest playlist on iTunes, through the house system.
At the time, I was still dragging my record bag to and from clubs committed to the idea that in order to be a Dj, you had to actually play records. Mixing was a skill, a right of passage. If you could match beats, and creatively execute a set of well selected, sought after tracks, you were a Dj. All those hours spent digging through the crates at the local record store, listening for that hidden b-side with that perfect hook or funky breakdown to take that set to the next level, were all dissipating into hours spent searching the net for that latest download.
The analog world of vinyl was wasting away, more and more people were turning to digital. But for what? Why? How could they sacrifice that warm, full sound of vinyl and trade it in for the tin and ultra-clear, glassy digital tones of .mp3/.wav/etc, etc…?
It was a few years later that the interest in going digital suddenly hit me. Richie Hawtin had just released his Decks, Effects and 909 mix. We drove out to Rochester, and caught his show where I saw that the electronic music performance was (seamingly) easy to build on. You could incorporate several other methods of making music, and completely customize the set to your specific style. Other local Dj’s like Mike Parker had done complete live PAs and brought the studio to the club, but Richie was doing something that seamlessly incorporated the Dj set with the studio production.
I suppose the moment I noticed my own move towards a digital setup was when my laptop started coming to the gig with me. I was using it to record off the mixer using Ableton. Other than that, though, it was just another bag I had to carry, and another piece of equipment to setup and worry about.
