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Turntabalism for Dummies

The basics of scratch DJing explained - By Morgan, Jul 17, 08

This Friday is the China final of the 2008 DMC championship, an international competition featuring DJs from around the world. Sponsored by Techniques, finals are also being held in the UK, Canada, the U.S., and Australia, among others, with winners going on to compete at the world finals later this year in the UK.

Basically the competition judges DJs on skill, artistry, and their ability to "beat juggle," with the rule that the program "Serato" isn't allowed. Serato, I gather, removes the possibility of human and technical error. The China final hosts over 20 DJs from all over the country playing five minute sets, and it's all judged by DJ Shortkut from The Beat Junkies, and DJ Swift Rock (Vestax World Champion).

When I was a wee lad in Jah-nah-dah, I remember going to one of these DMC things and being fucking bored to death. Basically, it's 900 DJs playing similar sounding stuff, some more fluently than others, and a big TV screen shows what they're doing on the decks. Then some dude gets a trophy.

Anyways, I figure I didn't like it, not because it's not my kind of music, but because I didn't really know anything about scratching or what "beat juggling" was, and I couldn't really appreciate the tremendous skill involved.

But this year I gave it another shot and went down to The Lab to get V-Nutz to show me what exactly all this DJing business is about so I'd know what's going on.

Below is the fruits of that journey, which might help you out if you -- like me -- know absolutely shit-all about DJing, scratching, and beat juggling.

V-Nutz: So what do you want to know?

SmartShanghai: How do you make the record go wikka-wikka-wikka?

The Set-Up:

The basic DJ set-up is two turntables on either side of a mixer (as pictured above). The sound comes from the turntables and is fed through a mixer, which combines the two audio signals, and then out into the speakers. The knobs running from the top vertically down the mixer manipulate the equilibrium levels of the audio signals (bass, middle, treble), the two vertical levers at the bottom are for volume control, and the horizontal lever at the bottom is called the "cross fader," and that controls which of the two records playing is heard through the speaker. If you move the cross fader from left to right, it fades the record on the left out and fades the record on the right in.

Scratching:

So you get that wikka-wikka sound by moving the record back and forth with your hand. Pretty basic. I knew that.

What I did not know, however, was that you can manipulate that scratching sound with the cross fader, which clips and chops up the wikka-wikka in various ways according to however you jimmy with this cross fader. V-Nutz showed me about four different ways to manipulate the cross fader that produces various different types of scratching, but apparently there are like 80 different techniques that you can do. My favorite was something called "the crab" (I think) in which all four fingers are used on the cross fader in quick succession like tapping on a table.

When he was showing me all this, it reminded me of someone showing off how you do moves on Street Fighter 2. Like a "haroken" is down, diagonal, and right on the joystick with the punch button... scratching is pretty much like that. Left hand on the record (joystick), right hand on the cross fader (punch and kick buttons).

Beat Juggling:

So this "beat juggling" is the really hard thing to do and it's a main component of the competition.

Beat juggling is this: two of the exact same records playing at the same speed on turntables one and two, and the DJ creates a unique composition by manipulating the mixer and the records themselves. When you see DJs stepping side to size, going back and forth between the two records real fast, they're beat juggling. It's called juggling I guess because doing it is like trying to keep a ball in the air -- trying to maintain the flow of tempo but layering on phrases of music taken from the records.

If you look at the above picture, you can see that there are stickers on the faces of the records themselves. These mark the position of specific audio content on the records (a particular snare drum here or a high hat there) and the DJ layers these -- pausing, back spinning, delaying the record with a finger -- and restructures the song itself.

The compositions are structured along the repetition and laying of musical bars (a phrase of music): listen for a bar repeated four times, then two times, then one time. That's one general trajectory of beat juggling.

The real difficulty involved is being able to maintain the flow of the beat, but also thinking fast enough and broad enough to see where these samples are on the records and layering them accordingly.

Or to revisit the Street Fighter analogy: it's like trying to fight yourself using both Player 1 and Player 2 controls.

Here's an interesting thing I read about beat juggling on wikipedia: "The inventor of the technique, DJ Steve Dee from Harlem, NYC, referred to it simply as bringing "The Funk" out of a record."

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So those are the basics. Now all you have to do is spend 12 hours a day doing it in your parents' basement for a few years, refining your skills. Or you can just head down to the Zhijiang Dream Factory on Friday and watch China's best do it for you -- which is what I'll be doing, beer in hand. After party at The Shelter...

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