The future of DJing...?

One of our fabulous DJs, Warren Wong, recently passed this along, which we had seen before but thought, what the heck, maybe you'd enjoy it too!It's funny how when CDs came along, many DJs (especially club DJs) thumbed their noses at them and remained vinyl purists. But, as years went by and new generations of DJs came up the ranks who had grown up with CDs, more and more you'd see them on the biggest stages. The demand for proper tactile control of them was met, mainly by Pioneer, who made the best CD players that were specialized for DJing.

The vinyl purists largely remained unimpressed, though some began slowly and quietly converting, especially when the ability to burn your own mixes on recordable CDs came along.

Now, however, a new standard has emerged: Serato Scratch Live, the Fender Stratocaster of the DJ world. You can go to practically any nightclub, high school dance or wedding venue on a given night and you will see that at least half, if not more, of the the DJs are using Serato. It is a software program that gets it right, allowing complete, realistic tactile control via proprietary coded vinyl, CDs, MIDI controllers or even your computer keyboard. Whatever input medium you like, Serato's going to work, and work well. There are other players in the DJ software market: Traktor, Virtual DJ, PCDJ, MegaSeg and Torq, to name a few, but they are all lagging dramatically in market share.

Anyway, enjoy this video! It shows what can be done when a DJ application is used on a monitor that is large enough to be usefully converted to a touch-screen input device. It is functional and looks pretty cool, huh? Practical? Well, that's another question, but keep your eyes open and you may see this out and around sooner than you think!

töken experience from yöyen munchausen on Vimeo.