What is Digital DJing?

Digital DJing (or CPS DJing as it's technically called) is the art of playing or mixing using a computer.

There are several advantages to digital DJing:

• Your setup takes up very little space. This is preferable to lugging around a crate of vinyl or even a couple of cases full of CDs (and possibly your decks!) to each of your gigs.


• You can search through your music and load music into one of your decks in a couple of seconds, rather than a few minutes it might take you to go through your record or CD collection.


• Current DJ software gives you a lot more information on the structure of your music than hardware-based players such as CD and/or vinyl. On most DJ software you can see the waveforms and the beats, so you can quickly cut to a breakdown and be alerted when a track fades out. Current leading DJ software products are : Traktor and Virtual DJ. DJ software also gives you features such as precise looping, sampling and FX controls.


• DJ controllers are available that allows you to control your DJ software with high precision, and can be customised to your personal choice.

• You can use products such as Sereto Scratch to hook up your decks (vinyl or CD) to your laptop, so you can mix MP3s on your decks.

There is are two main disadvantages:

• A lot of DJing is about the image - it's a performance and the crowd expect you to be looking like you are doing something when you are up in the booth. In clicking on a laptop, you lose some of the showmanship of traditional DJing.
• Some older DJs and club promoters look down on digital DJing, and it may be difficult to land a residency at your club if this is the case.

Whatever your opinion, Digital DJing is here to stay. Professional DJs cannot afford to ignore it any longer. Stay tuned for what you need to know about this new and exciting way of DJing.

Ground Loop Isolators, and why you need one.

"Ground Loop Isolator". Sounds scary and technical, doesn't it? But don't worry, it's not the crucial component Scottie needs to repair the warp drive in this weeks episode. So what, then, is it?



First of all, I'm going to explain why you need one.





This is a standard UK plug. Your plug may vary, but I'm going to keep this UK-specific.

Each plug has three wires - one for each prong. The live wire - which carries the electricity for your appliance, the neutral terminal, which isn't actually used, and the earth (or ground). You can see the terminals on the diagram.

Now if you look at your laptop power supply, where the laptop plugs into the power supply, you'll notice that it seems that only one wire fits into your laptop. This wire is actually split into two terminals - live and neutral.



But there is no ground terminal or wire. So your laptop is not properly grounded.

Yes Dave, you're saying, but so what? What does all this mean for my DJing setup? Well, it means that the little amount of excess electricity on your laptop has only one place to go, through the lead to your soundcard into the club mixer or PA that you plug it into!

This manifests itself as the light hissing and screeching when you plug in your ungrounded laptop into your amplifer/PA/mixer. So that's why you need a ground loop isolator. It stop this excess electricity leaking into your audio channel, by making sure your laptop doesn't ground itself on your playout system.

You can pick up a basic GLI from Maplin.co.uk for about £10. This is what I use, and really I have had no problems with it at all. You can get better quality GLI by searching around but to be honest, I'm not sure whether you need to pay extra as it seems to do exactly the same thing.

So if you're experiencing hissing and screetching on your club playout system, get a ground loop isolator first, and see if it fixes it.

Scottie would be proud.

Digital DJing - David Craddock's Setup

This is the setup I use to DJ every week:

We have:

1x Compaq PP2140 Laptop
1x USB 2.0 PCMCIA card
1x External USB2 LaCIE 120GB HD
1x Faderfox DJ2 MIDI Controller
1x Creative SoundBlaster Live USB multi-channel soundcard
1x Optical mouse

with Traktor DJ Studio 3 Software, and ASIO drivers for the soundcard.

This is my laptop. I wouldn't recommend it, as it only has 2 USB 1.0 ports. I have to use a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card to connect my LaCIE HD to it. If you're going to buy a laptop, make sure it either has a Firewire port or several USB 2 ports. Firewire is faster and recommended, but laptops that have Firewire are more expensive. You can get a decent old IBM Thinkpad with several USB 2.0 ports that will do fine, and is only a couple of hundred from EBay. Not sure how much the Compaq would sell for now, as it's a couple of years old.




This is my soundcard. It's a surround sound consumer product. I wouldn't really recommend it for serious use. Its main advantage is that it's multi-channel - ie: it has at least two seperate channel outputs, so I can use one for monitoring and connect the other to the mixer. You can pick one up for about £60 nowadays.



My portable hard drive. I would recommend a portable HD to store your music if you have more than one computer. Even if you have lots of space on your laptop's HD, it is easier to connect it up to your main workstation at home, transfer your music to it, and then put it in your gig bag. Cost: £100 2 years ago, but you can get bigger HDs for this price now. Just make sure it is USB 2.0 or Firewire, or there will be an unacceptable delay in queing up tracks.





This is my Faderfox DJ2 controller. As you can see, it has all the standard mixer functions, with volume faders and the all-important crossfader. It also has play, que play, pause and pitchbend buttons. It is designed for Traktor 3 so everything works with Traktor 3 out of the box. It is battery-powered, you have to buy a seperate powersupply which I haven't got yet. Despite this minor annoyance, I'm happy with the Faderfox, and would highly recommend it to people that use Traktor DJ studio. It costs £120.



The M-Audio Uno is a compact MIDI to USB controller. You use it to connect MIDI devices to the USB ports on your computer. I have no complaints with it, it's small and does its job well. £40.





Traktor 3 is my favourite DJ software. It allows up to four decks, and probably more functionality than you'll need. I know that Nick favours VDJ, more about that later :) Costs £70 for a full lisence.

My setup works well for most situations. I use my Faderfox for venues where there is enough space, otherwise I just use Traktor with the mouse.