Reports
DJ TechTools has teamed up with Mono to produce a high-quality bag for large controllers like the Native Instruments Kontrol S4. Mono are the team behind some of the nicest bags in the industry, and after we created our own S4 shoulder bag, they offered to take it up a notch with their signature design and construction. The resulting product is super-impressive and quite possibly the best looking way to travel with a large controller. To celebrate this announcement, DJ TechTools is offering a special Winter deal during this December.
Richie Hawtin was attending this year’s NAMM. Next to meeting up with the big boys, he also got in touch with DJTechtools own Ean Golden and the famed MIDIfighter controller:
NAMM is the years premiere event where all the music related manufacturers descend upon Anaheim California to present their newest equipment to the distributors, stores and general public. It’s a mad house with everyone presenting their take on a small number of similar ideas with each company positively sure that their product is the best and that they have a magic crystal ball telling them what the consumer (us) will want next. Most of the time the manufacturers are living in their own dream world, promoting ideas that are either out dated or from a distant parallel universe, but there’s still no shortage of chatter, praise and pure determination to push their latest updates on the attendees hoping to make another sale in order to keep the whole industry plodding forward. Thankfully, in between all the bartering and schmoozing you can find a few dedicated companies, both industry standards and small startups, with inspired ideas that are genuine and will help push the creative use of technology forward.
For the DJ/Performer, NAMM 2011 definitely heralded the year (finally) of the digital controller. With turntables and even CD players finally moving to the side (if not to the back of the booths), the NAMM floor was filled with companies flogging every type of digital DJ/performance controller imaginable. From the ‘First Mix’ controller (http://www.geminidj.com/firstmix) for the next generation DJ, to even Pioneer finally realizing that their CDJ’s were not the answer most people were looking for and finally offering not 1 but 2 controllers each specifically setup for Traktor and Serato respectively. In between the avalanche of controllers there were also various (mostly) unsuccessful attempts to update the DJ Mixer, various plugin developments and some interesting new hardware announcements.
Continued on Richie’s own blog.
Just a short photoshop sketch I did for one of the boards I frequent:
One of my duties on the DJTechtools forumboards, is being a moderator. I try to keep everything neat and friendly.
Every now and then I tend to do a small and humorous sketch in photoshop.
This one was a little bit more based on the DJTechtools target audience, Digital/MIDI DJ which use .wavs or .mp3s to spin their tunes in DJ software.
The DJ software often depicts these as waveforms in the Graphical User Interface for easy handling.
It basically comes down to one geeky and goofy family, hence the obvious spelling errors, the reference to the DJTechtools boards by adding the ‘play/pause’ logo to the surfboard, the digital waveform projected over the real wave and a MIDI Shaolin for my personal touch.
With all the MIDIcontrollers that people can get in the nearest musicstore or webshop, it’s getting easier to get yourself a MIDI controller that fits your needs.
But what if, you find that one controller is getting close, but is not close enough. At that point you can choose to DIY a modification to multiple controllers, or even build one from scratch.
Enter Ray, who as Controlled Demolition is the current BeatBattle champion in Germany.
Even though the Akai APC40 came close to his liking, he thought the Akai APC 40 was not enough.
The Akai APC40 is one of the best designed controllers for Ableton Live, Ray thought it was still lacking control.
He decided to merge this controller with an Akai APC20, in order to fulfill his needs.
He merged these two and decided to call it APC80. Many think 40+20 would be 60 but, being that this modification leaves you to dabble with a grid of 80 buttons, this name only seems logical.
I had the change to get to know Ray through MIDIfight club, the party that had me going to spin tunes in Tresor Berlin earlier this year. But all I can say is; this remarkable cool guy has devised a beast of a controller.
Here you can see both Ray and the APC80 in action. I have to warn you though, all speech is handled in German, but all commands are done in MIDI. And you know the creed: “In MIDI we Trust!”, right?
One and a half years ago, I had the opportunity to look at some blueprints supplied by Native Instruments. The concept blueprint was than called Traktor Pro CTRL.
It was delivered in print, as that I was able to check the blueprint in 1:1 format. (real- sized print) This basically came down to an A3 format paper sized controller.
After reading through the specs, it became apparent that the controller would also feature an on board soundcard, cue section, effect section, EQ section, crossfader and above all, 2 decks.
Native Instruments than asked all fellow thinkers to answer an online questionnaire, in which we would share our views on the blueprint.
One of the more frequent answers would end up to be;”make it 4 decks”.
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Almost 14 months later, rumours started to turn up, pictures and youtube vids were getting leaked. It seemed that Native Instruments was getting ready to unleash a new breed of MIDIcontroller with accompanying Traktor Software.
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More and more information was being spread, and I was still bound by my NDA with Native Instruments. So I was not able to spread my knowledge on this matter.
With the 1st of November set as release date, all information is already open to the public, and I guess I am allowed to share this little story.
Demos are starting to turn up through the Netherlands and through twitter we had the opportunity to check out the Native Instruments Kontrol S4, as it was called now, at ToneControl.
This cool company that arranged a demo night last Monday and My buddy Marc and myself wanted to check it out badly. The demo night turned out to be a minimeet of the AboutDJ.nl forums, as that Wesley(dj_wb) and René(Rendoe) were there too.
Leon of Native Instruments, brought in by company owner Toon, was a great guy that showed and demoed the little beast.
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First thing I did was actually whip out the old design blueprint and compare size and layout. The size was the same, buttons were not changed that much, but, as mentioned earlier on, two decks were added, not to mention the all new looper, that basically adds a virtual fifth loop deck, that can be used as a layered looper.
(Think photoshop with image layers, or your average DAW software with tracks.)
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Leon guided us around many features of the software and controller, and even left us some time to play around with the controller.
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It’s hard to believe, but at first I was only in it for the software. After playing around with the controller for a while, I am actually thinking of selling my current setup and buy this bad boy!
Here’s the rest of the pictures worth sharing. Props and thanks goes out to Toon van Veelen too, as he supplied a few of the pictures featured below, and ofcourse being awesome enough to arrange this demo evening!
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My buddy Marc asked me to do a birthday bash with him. Usually this alone is reason enough to join, being that we always have a good laugh when doing these kinda gigs.
Added value this time was the promise of closing down the night with half an hours worth of deep house.
Cool thing was, that the birthday boy, who turned 40, had a recorder recording along.
If you like the tracklist, be sure to check it here!
(the recording has a bit of a raunchy bass, but I then you will this 30 minutes of nice deephouse)
