About Me

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I'm currently teaching myself how to mix. At the moment, I'm mostly concentrating on hard dance (145 BPM+) and Trance (135-145 BPM). I'd like to move into Drum'n'Bass and Hip Hop at some stage but am loving the faster stuff at the moment.

The Gear

Background

So what do I use for mixing?  Well I started out with an all-in-one setup from JB HiFi that had 2 CD players and a mixer all in one.  This was actually a great way to learn as the unit had no BPM counters at all - I had to learn from scratch how to match beats.  Of course, being very cheap it had issues.  In particular a slight, half-beat, stutter when switching from internal memory/cache to reading off the CD.  This would throw off mixes and was a great way to learn to fix things rapidly on the fly.  Not so good when DJ'ing your mother-in-laws 50th birthday!

So once I decided to get serious I needed something more professional.  Pioneer leads the way in DJ gear but also commands one hell of a premium on your wallet.  As I'm not planning on reaching the club-level, I didn't see the need to learn on Pioneer gear.  So, I decided to go Denon - mostly because the DJ stores were having sales around the times I was upgrading my gear!  While I admire the Denon gear for its Price v Performance / Features, I'm no fanboi.  If someone is getting into DJing and wants to end up in clubs, I'd recommend starting on Pioneer as this is what almost every club will use.

So what exactly do I use?

  • Denon DN-S1200 CD/Media Player
  • Denon DNH-S5500 Media Player
  • Denon DNX120 Mixer
  • Denon DN-HP500 Headphones
  • HP 6710b Laptop (Music Management)
  • Apple MacBook Pro 15" (Recording and audio visualisation)
  • 2 x 320GB USB Hard Disk Drives
  • LiteCase Road Coffin
 The DNS1200 is a combined CD and media player which means it can play from CD's or from an external USB storage device.  I primarily mix from the external hard drive on this one.  I do have the odd track on CD but most have been moved across to HDD.  The main reason for this is my other deck has no CD player in it.

The DNHS5500 is a media player that has the capacity to act as 2 decks in one.  So if the DNS1200 ever goes down, I can play an entire set from this one player.  As it has no CD player, I use an external USB hard disk drive to source the media from.

Both of the above decks has the capability to be used as controllers in digital DJ software like Traktor or Serato (among others).  I'm not currently using this kind of setup though.

The DNX120 is a very simple, 2 channel mixer.  It seems to be better suited to scratching than long, slow trance-style transitions.  Either way, this is a brilliant mixer to learn on.  It has no advanced features - just 2 stereo audio channels and a mic channel.  You can hook four devices up to this unit but only mix between two at any time


 

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