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Dan Morse·
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CDJs and turntables banned from Berlin club booth

Every few months, some hoo-hah blows up when a venue or promoter stomps their feet in a hissy fit and declares they “don’t want to see a controller/laptop/whatever in their booth” or that real DJs should know how to use CDJs or GTFO. Some quarters of the scene nod their heads in agreement, yell “PREACH” and continue to draw stick figures on the walls of their caves with their own faeces.

But one club night (Liquid Sky Berlin) has decided to buck that archaic trend by embracing the diversity of [native..?] instruments that we, as DJs and electronic music performers, have at our disposal by kicking media players and turntables from their booth.

A good thing

Speaking as a someone who runs a night, I know full well the hassle of limited space for your space shuttle controls, but we’ve always done our best to accommodate the needs of DJs and artists that come to perform. We even sacrificed the shape of the dance floor to make use of a long bench for our equipment.

Looking at booths in the mainstream however, there will always be the bulk of DJs that are happy to use the house setup, sticking a USB drive in and mixing from A-to-B, and that’s fine. Some of my best friends mix from A-to-B. But there’s a definite culture of hostility towards anyone that dares to stray from the expected norm, that either makes you completely unwelcome, or forced into established conventions.

Band camp

Here’s a scenario for you:

You’re in your late teens, you’ve been in a band with friends for a couple of years, and finally get offered your first gig at some dive in town. You’re all excited, and on the day, you duly pack up your beat up old van with your worn out drums, guitars, harmonica, mics, amps, kazoo, etc. You get to the venue early, nerves twisting your insides, grab a pint at the bar, when the manager comes out and says “I’m afraid there’s no room, so you’ll have to use the house instruments”. Your heart sinks, while your guts fly into orbit. You weren’t expecting this! Can you even get this old crap working?

But don’t worry, that’s almost never going to happen. Bands are expected to bring their own gear. In fact, they’ll want their own gear, since it’s what they know.

See also

And with such a wide range of equipment available to DJs, shouldn’t we be able to bring our own gear too? Of course, there’s no harm in learning a wide range of gear, but your instruments were tuned by you. This is actually something I ran into at BPM over this week: Denon DJ gleefully let me step onto their stage to do a set on the Prime setup. I had my USB key. All my preferences, music, playlists were ready and waiting, but when I got up there, I realised: The mixer preferences I’d spent a couple of weeks tweaking don’t get transferred! It’s just enough confusion to throw you off your game slightly.

I’ve come to realise that this hostility is partly why people are a bit ashamed to bring their all-in-one controller to a gig, opting for the house CDJs, even though they might not be as comfortable for them to use. We are literally conditioned to be off our A-game by this obsessive culture of only letting certain gear be considered professional.

So I say “well done” to this small Berlin event, for setting a precedent and making the wider range of new DJ tools completely welcome. Maybe they’ll even have room for Ray’s setup, one day.

28 Comments

  1. Good for them! I’ve done wax and plastic and now into digital. People need to get over it – usually the ones who complain are the ones who are afraid of change. Embrace it – at the end of the day the dance floor could care less what you are using. However manufacturers need to start making these things smaller – there’s no need to have them this huge. The VCI-400 and S4/5 / Denon MC6000 – are the perfect size controllers. Not too big or small and have lots of features. If you want to add more you can without breaking your back.

    1. Or the ones complaining don’t in fact own records or turntables themselves, they just like mouthing off on the internet to people about it. I still buy the odd vinyl now but if a Track is on Traxsource or Beatport why the hell would I want to pay 4 times as much to have something sat in my house that’s pretty much useless at most venues I play at anyway.

  2. Reading between the lines, I’m getting the impression that Liquid Berlin is aiming more towards hybrid DJ/production performances instead of just pure controllerism. It’s not that hard to see where they’re coming from. I too have noticed that there is some correlation between gear and style. Those who have the most unique style often tend to develop unique workflows that require specific setups.

    However, when I say “unique” it does *not* mean the same as “better”. Just because someone has a unique style and workflow, does not mean their mixes are to everyone’s liking.

    I fully agree with Dan’s analog about band instruments. As much as I’d love *not* bringing my own gear, 9 times out of 10 there’s something wrong with the venue or rental gear. It’s either broken, poorly configured, obsolete or otherwise not meeting professional standards – or all of the above.

    Call me a snob, but there’s no way in hell I’m playing with a crusty, 25-year old Gemini with missing knobs, bleeding faders and the mild electric shock every now and then.

  3. It’s 2017. Let people play on whatever they want.The controllerism movement has been around for the better part of 2 decades. If promoters and venues aren’t making space in their booths for people to bring their own equipment, they are behind the times. God forbid they book an act like Skylab 2000 that requires a full stage for his live performance gear.

  4. fck berlin and fck those damn vinyl elite wankers!!!
    vinyls are expensive and we are in 2017, get over it
    a lot of people can’t afford vinyl & vinyl players and play 100x better sets then these frkn audio nerds
    real recognize real, it’s about the music

  6. Why not just say they’re not using DJ’s anymore. You don’t change the gear… you decide what kind of performers you want on stage, and there’s never been more than an empty stage for performing musicians. Whether they play acoustic instruments or use computers to create sound was a question in the early 80’s. Nothing about that is different now, except that now everybody wrongly call themselves DJ’s. Why are those people so ashamed to call themselves artists, musicians, song writers, producers… that they feel the need to call themselves something they are not. I really don’t get it.

    1. Much of this depends on how you define DJ. I feel that the literal adherence to the “disk jockey” name is outdated, if only because there are so many different ways to play music to a crowd now, and the technology and medium really doesn’t matter. The crowd will decide if you are DJ or not. And if someone chooses to turn up with a laptop and some controllers and knock out tracks, loops, and samples to a packed dance floor, that makes them the now all encompassing term of “DJ” in my book.

      If I can turn the question around to you — why are you so resistance to calling people who play other people’s music on things other than CDJs and turntables DJs? Are they not doing exactly the same thing as “DJs”, just on different gear? Is the essential skillset not the same? It’s a genuine question — I really want to understand how people think and feel about this.

      1. To be more precise. I’m definitely not against any tools what so ever as long as you use them as a DJ. It’s when you use any tools to do something else, and still call yourself a DJ i’m against :) . I started with a Dual cassette deck and a belt driven turntable with no pitch, and have used pretty much anything that plays music since. The definition of a DJ that I learned 33 years ago, still hasn’t changed.

        A DJ’s unique skills is deep knowledge in music, and to know how and when to play what to whom, and that doesn’t specify anything about what equipment to use.

        Technical skills is of course part of being a good DJ, but it’s not a unique skill and as important as being a turntablist or controllerist. Nor do I need to make music, that’s not what DJ’s do. Some can do both, but pushing play using dj equipment because you can’t perform your own music live, doesn’t qualify anyone to call themselves DJ’s. Here’s where it get’s interesting with setups involving gear that you can perform your own creations with, as a performer, like any musician. No need to involve DJ gear at all. Hybrid performances may do, but most producers are too lazy to make the effort, unfortunately. I think that’s what this club is all about, and that is good. Still, it’s not DJ’s they want to perform in this club, hence my statement, and therefor I think this header is most of all a PR stunt.

        So, that’s it. There’s good definitions for most things, and I prefer to use them. I am a DJ. I have the knowledge and the ability to play almost any kind of dance music to any kind of audience in all ages. I have pretty good technical skills, enough to play in a lot of the better clubs in the south of Sweden, but I’m not even close to do any routines the way turntablists/controllerist can do, and I don’t need to. I wouldn’t dream of calling myself anything but a DJ, because it’s exactly what I am. That’s why I can’t understand why anyone would want to call themselves DJ’s if they’re not. And I don’t understand why anyone else would want to do that either.

      2. without a disc there is no such thing as a Disk jockey, thats a simple fact. lets call people who press knobs playing pop music entertainers

        a keyboard player can entertain a crowd that doesnt make the keyboard player a DJ

        1. What’s the difference between an orchestra and a DJ? None — they both play other people’s music to a crowd. But playing music is not the same as performing music. And if we’re talking about keyboard players, how’s about this for blurred lines?

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCR09c8zAAo

          Definitely not a DJ, but performing in a similar way, and getting the same reaction from the crowd as a DJ does.

          Bottom line — there is no black and white for me. DJ is an all encompassing term with many shades of grey, constantly redefined by an ever-changing pool of technology and methods of music distribution. The common thread is playing other people’s tracks to a crowd, and that’s what a DJ does.

          You may choose to stick to the literal initialisation and have that define you, but we’ll continue to serve every kind of DJ (disks or not) and whatever that name continues to evolve into.

          But opinions vary.

    1. I love how NOBODY raging here even knows who & what Liquid Sky Berlin is, and why they can get away with it. If you’ve been making techno before it had a name, you can dictate all the rules you want ;)

  8. “You DJ with short wave radios? You are welcome.” Wow, could this club be any more pretentious? By the way, DJ is short for “disc jockey” so they should probably not use the term “DJ” in their long, douchey and pretentious list of what they consider acceptable, considering that none of the mediums in their list utilize discs.

  11. I love how NOBODY raging here even knows who & what Liquid Sky Berlin is, and why they can get away with this. If you’ve been making techno before it had a name, you can pretty much dictate all the rules you want ;)

    1. So its either use CDJ or Turntable or connect an iPod?? nothing in between at all.
      That’s like telling a Footballer who hasn’t made it in the Premier League that he can only play for the local pub team.

  13. I don’t even know how this is a debate in 2017. 99% of any of us reading these forums will only ever gig in crappy bars with janky house gear. About the quickest way to fix crappy house gear is to plug a controller into the aux input of the house mixer and get on with the set.

    1. I go one further and get rid of the house mixer and plug my controller directly into the systems balanced connectors.
      unfortunately its still a thing and I often get comments about ‘real DJs using records’ etc.. one night in our bar is dedicated to such an event where only vinyl is used which whilst I respect them for doing it I don’t so much respect their opinion of DJs using other medium. Im way past the days of lumping 50kg of records up 2 flights of stairs to get to a DJ booth.