Well it’s certainly the immediate future of DJing anyway, but the leaked, teased, and announced Traktor Kontrol S8 can now be classed as available and should be languishing in your local DJ boutique today.
Promoting the S8 is Davide Squillace, who probably played an amazing set at Fabric in London populated by beautiful young people all transfixed by his tech house stylings. But for the rest of us reading this i.e. DJs with ready money who are being told that this is the future of DJing, it’s time for NI to show us why.
This is a glossy promo, filled with Minority Report style imagery, but doesn’t show us enough about what the Kontrol S8 can do. This was the problem the first time round with the Remix Decks workflow — we were never really shown what it was all about, thus uptake wasn’t and still isn’t really that high.
So my message to NI is this — the S8 may well be the #futureofdjing, and will certainly form part of it. But NI really needs to show us what’s so great about the S8 and the Remix Decks in general. Show us a full demo, and then tear it apart step by step so that we can all finally get it. NI is after all asking us to try out DJ gear without wheels or pitch, and that isn’t going to happen just by telling us ad infinitum that this is the #futureofdjing.
Anyway, if your gear acquisition syndrome is out of control and you absolutely have to own an S8, why don’t you push your credit card through the letter box of your favourite gear purveyor today, and then report back as to if you like it or not. We’ll be finding out soon as Jared will be putting it through his usual harsh test regime.