UK DJ Fred Again.. recently posted a live stream of a rooftop party he DJed at in London (you can see the City Of London skyscape in the background), where he appears to only have a Pioneer DJ DJM-450 and a single CDJ-2000nexus media player set up to mix on.
Of course, Betteridges Law of Headlines is immediately applied to this story, but watching the set does make you consider what’s really needed to mix your music.
Throughout the set, Fred relies heavily on the mixer’s Pioneer beat roll effect routed to the second deck to loop a eight beat measure of the track for the blend. It’s a very clever use of minimal equipment. Later in the set, he does plug in a keyboard synthesiser to improvise some piano house chords over the top of the music. And the crowd loved it all.
It’s easy to think that more choice means opportunities to be creative. More features. More controls. More music. But the reality is that creativity often comes from adversity and restriction. The rave scene came about when kids found drum machines, synthesisers, and four-track recorders. They learned to overcome the limitations of the equipment to do so much more than it as designed for. Even now, the Amiga tracker music scene harnesses the spirit of that hacker culture.
Of course, pared back setups have been a thing since the beginning of the art. There’s a local event in Huddersfield called Axis Valv-A-Tron Sound System where the DJ plays reggae, funk, soul etc on a single turntable and microphone. This sort of equipment was pretty standard in the early days of clubs and dance halls.
Laidback Luke also recently switched to mixing on an iPhone with a Reloop Mixtour Pro, a small form-factor controller co-designed by himself and Reloop, which may have a very minimal hardware setup, is actually hugely powerful software that can do most anything the desktop app does.
In the end, the most important thing is to find the equipment we are most comfortable playing on. I had this when I first got my hands on the Traktor Kontrol S8, and when I reviewed the S5, it was clear this was enough to maintain the workflow I wanted without overdoing the controls. In the past, a basic setup was the norm, not the exception. Us older DJs tended to cut our teeth on a cheap pair of turntables and a simple mixer. In fact, EQ controls were quite often a luxury!
Sets like this one get noticed by other DJs for the right reasons. There’s no arguments about the sync button, no gatekeeping or brands, just an appreciation of the pure skill of track selecting and blending music.
