I have been looking that the new MOTU Traveler for a while now… drooling over its amazing ability, portability and the fact that it can be 100% firewire powered. Some days I would just dream about getting a Traveler and an X-Session USB controller and think about hooking up a killer live rig for doing shows.
Last week I was booked to play a gig at the False Walls photo exhibit and house warming for the new False Profit headquarters. Dre asked me to play a downtempo set, which I have a nice little selection for, and then I realized, fuck it, go buy the rig. So I ran to RobotSpeak who happened to have all my desired gear in stock and for an unbeatable price.
At the same time I grabbed a copy of Native Instruments Traktor DJ Studio 2.6 so that I could try my hand at laptop djing. That evening (Friday, day before the show) I dropped by the studio and I sat down and ripped some of my favorite tracks from vinyl. Initially I tried ripping it via the Traveler to the laptop, but found that the laptop was a little chunky to handle the playback so I will need to sit down and tweek some settings later on. Anyway, since I was in the studio I just dropped a stereo line to the patch bay and ripped away.
The next day we started wrapping up show 11 for the Lab Report and I then headed home to play with my new rig. After a few hours of learning how to build beat grids, assign controls to the midi rig, and just getting a feel for it I had to whip up a set.
I had a little bit of success with beat-matching with the tool, but I realized that after 8 years of djing everything was hardcoded now and I don’t really think to myself, this is slower or faster I just do it instinctively. Too make a long story shorter I just put together a set using ambient intro/outros together to make a seamless set, called it a day, packed up the rig and headed to the event.
The show turned out really well, everyone thought I was crazy for trying out a new rig after owning it for about 24 hours, but it was fun. I can’t wait to spend more time learning the system because this will allow me to play a ton of music I have never owned on vinyl (nor able to find), play my friends music and also play my own stuff. Should be a lot of fun.
2 Comments:
The set rocked, and it was also great to have you on the scratch deck with Toast remixing all his material using Live. You're both inspiring!
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