So with Final Scratch nothing has changed about DJing? What about picking up a 12" black circular piece of vinyl, putting it on a rotating wheel, seeing where the grooves for the tracks and breaks are, putting the needle on the record, listening for cue points, pre-matching the turntable speed to align the incoming track for beatmatching, and then, you know, mixing?
I'm saying nothing against the new stuff like Final Scratch. It is *new*. It is not a substitute for vinyl mixing with two turntables, *even using the same program material*. I've been a vinyl DJ for going on 27 years now (with a big break between my college radio days and restarting in 1993), and that's not going to stop. Just like people didn't stop using acoustic guitars because Les Paul and Leo Fender figured out a good way to put electric pickups on them, and then Jimi Hendrix turned the world upside down the way no acoustic can. It's not like I'm against technological advancement. I bought a Denon CD mixer when that unit first hit the market. Then I sold it within a year, even though it's more portable, more flexible and arguably a better overall unit than a cruddy old 1200 turntable. The point of things like Final Scratch should not be to play the same old stuff we do on turntables. That stuff co-evolved with turntables and DJ styles and audiences, and won't translate all that effectively to a new technology. That's what I learned from my Denon. I'm a little tired of the zealotry on all sides of the issue. It's tiresome enough from the vinyl die-hards, who claim to see nothing useful in the newer interactive approaches. It's downright silly coming from the people who claim that on-screen mixing is somehow totally superior to everything that's ever come before it. We can't hold back the future. Leo Fender couldn't have predicted Jimi, and the Technics designers in 1971 couldn't have predicted hip hop, house and turntablism. Why would we want to constrain the future of computer-based musical montage, whatever that turns out to be? phred
