A story that has written itself is the perfect way to end the week. And an excellent piece has landed in my social channels courtesy of Native Instruments. The real boundary pushing wow factor of the upcoming Traktor Kontrol S4 mk3 is the new Haptic Drive that delivers physical touch feedback through a motorised jog wheel. And NI has written a blog post that goes into the story of the Haptic Drive, especially the research that went into making it a reality.
This isn’t one for the gear nerds out there. You won’t find out the inner working of their trademarked and probably patented tech without buying one and busting out a screwdriver and soldering iron. But what it does do is offer useful insight into how NI works (not all companies are the same) and how the Haptic Drive became a thing.
Speaking from literally seconds of direct experience on a visit to NI UK, the haptic drive is incredibly clever. The session was a short sharp shock of numerous new NI products that didn’t really allow for a full processing of what we saw. It’s one of those ideas that requires some thought to see the full potential.
But give me a day with my hands on a fully finished and working version and I’ll be able to give you a list of clear use cases for it, as well as ideas for future uses, all of which I imagine have already been thought of by NI anyway. I will do my best to bring some new ideas to the table though.
It is nice to see a company like NI switching from the infamous “look mum, I´m djing with no hands” to haptic technology. They finally realized people want to touch, to feel with their hands, whatever the thing they are doing. Touching creates sensations, and sensations create memories. Burn all that crappy and creepy S8 and S5 aberrations, djs want to experiment with ther senses.
When were they “DJing with no hands”? I think you’re talking about Beamz.
Well, call it “beat mixing with no hands” if you please. I personally consider beat mixing an integral part of djing because, as I said, it creates sensations and sensations create memories. So, yeah, if you beat mix without using your hands (other than pressing a button), you are loosing an important part of the djing experience.
You’re basically saying that Richie Hawtin is less of a DJ than Laidback Luke.
Yep, exactly. Well, at least Richie did awesome techno turntable sets back in time, before he went downhills with that beat synced minimal crap. Now he is just a “performer”.
While I agree that Beat Mixing should be a skill, I don’t believe you need to do it in this day and age. Since I’m not wasting time beat mixing, I can do other things like creating an underlay beat with Maschine or re-mixing live. DJ’ing is more than just mixing 2 tracks together anymore.
Are you really sure all that other things you mention are adding something better to your livesets than a proper song selection and mixing abilities? Are you really sure the crowd prefer listen to Maschine patterns or amateur remixes over the songs they know and love? Also, are you really sure beat mixing is a “waste of time”? I strongly disagree. Djing is all about music, not technologic bells and whistles. You can just not get close to a properly professionaly arranged, mixed and mastered good track with it. It just sound bad, it is detrimental.
Neither Ray nor I are DJs, apparently.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BoMCkHVllD8/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BoGaxOOAewa/
Neither, you both are technicians now (a good ones, BTW). Did I already say I miss the good old Skratchworx times? :-P
EXACTLY. The technology is irrelevant — all that matters is the music. If any DJ, regardless of technology, played a tune I love, then I’m dancing. Be it Qbert on 1200s, Carl Cox on CDJs, Laidback Luke on 5000s, or Dan and Ray on their wall of buttons — the music matters, not the medium.
If this is still an issue 15 years after the digital revolution, then DJWORX still has a lot of work to do.
Not exactly, change the process and you will change the output. Too much technolgy distracts from the basics: the music and the dj abilities to create a liveset, the ARTESANY; specially when technology usurps it. Being able to “touch” the mix imprints a subliminal print in the overall performance. An organic, personal, human one. NI is starting to understand it, but there is still a lot of work to do :-P
There’s no artisanship in beat matching. It’s a rote mechanical skill, like washing clothes or harvesting wheat (both of which, you’ll notice, have been automated.)
If it makes you happy to beat match manually on whatever medium you use, keep doing it, but there’s no need to tear down the choices of others or suggest that they aren’t DJs because they don’t fit the paradigm of what you think a DJ is.
I’ve been DJing for 19 years; in that time I’ve played school events, house parties, raves, warehouse parties, bars, and nightclubs. I’ve played music that I loved, and music that I didn’t even particularly like. I can play pretty much any style of music if I have an ample supply of it, and I can use mix techniques appropriate to the music I’m playing. I’ve used turntables, CD players, computer-based systems, iPad-based systems, standalone controller systems, and MIDI controllers. I’ve beat matched manually, and using the assistance of various sync systems. The way I do things now is different than the way I did them five years ago, which was different than what I did five years before that, which was different than what I did five years before that, and so on.
I like music. I like playing around with other people’s music. Sometimes I even like making my own music. I’ve used systems that are unarguably disc-based, and systems with nary a disc in sight. Through it all, I was, am, and always will be, a DJ.
Literally, anybody can be a DJ these technological driven days, but not everybody can be an artisan. If you think beat matching is comparable to harvesting wheat, you still have not fully understand the nuances of human mind response to artistic manifestations, no matter how many years you have been DJing.
I feel that differences in terminology are at play here. To me, beat matching is simple — on one level you lock beats, but a deeper understanding of music means that you lock beats on the one and in phrase. But just about all software can analyse your music, grid it, and when sync is pressed should beat match music perfectly. And as I’ve always said, if it can be automated, then it’s not a skill or craft.
Now knowing how to mix is something else entirely, and this is where the craft comes in. What to mix, when to mix it, for how long, with or without filter or effects… this is where the human element comes in, and most likely where software won’t impact for a very long time. Software already does a reasonable job of suggesting what to mix, but software can’t see the crowd or sense the room and mood.
Given the rise of machine learning though, I don’t know how long the need for a human DJ at every party, show or event will last.
Take into account that it is also possible to automate art and crafts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENdET29kzdQ. But the result is cold and soulless because of it perfection and lack of emotion. You guys are assuming there is no difference between a manual artistic task and it automated version, but there is. And our minds, in the deep of it counsciousness, know it.
What you’ve shown there is a glorified music box. It has zero human interaction apart from a pressing a start button, which is the DJ equivalent of a completely prerecorded set. It’s not even close to a DJ mixing.
I could ram home my feelings for days, and write essays about this. But life is too short. Even if I don’t agree with your feelings about beat matching vs mixing, I love that you’re so passionate about your craft. I’ll carry on analysing music and using sync when it’s available, and using my ears and hands when playing vinyl.
Of course, it was just and extreme example. Technology is not able yet to fully replace a human DJ. Song selection and EQing are still inside the creative area, and machines can not be creative (yet). But with all this computerized mixing we all are now more machine and less human. And that is not good, in my honest opinion. Keep rocking those vinyls!
“And as I’ve always said, if it can be automated, then it’s not a skill or craft.”
You just lost all credibility with that statement.
Six years after stating the same thing loud and clear in my first sync button piece and many times since, my credibility seems to be doing just fine thanks.
I agree with Mark, manual beat matching is less a skill and more an attribute of a more creative or “artisan” DJ. I do praise other DJs for beatmatching manually, I come from pretty far before the sync button. But, my garage door opens automatically and even when I didn’t have the automatic opener I didn’t consider opening the garage a skill.
Nobody pays for watching you open your garage door. DJing is a completely different thing. Auto beat-mix imprints a mechanical, cold, unnatural character to livesets. Manual beat-mix imprints humanity, imperfection, groove to it. That is, EMOTION. But well, to each their own.
Nobody pays to see beatmatching either. But people pay to see DJs. Stop getting caught in nuances in the overall deeds of DJing because a massive majority of the audience wouldn’t be able to tell if a dj is beat syncd and imperfections can be attained by shifting a beat grid a little left or right while synchronized.
The majority of the audience is high or drunk. But they all are humans and have conscience and subconsciousness. A beat synced set doesnt FEEL the same as a manual beat mixed one. DJs have fail to notice it… at least until now. We will see.
Incorrect, literally anyone can do the act of DJing that doesn’t mean they are actually a DJ. That’s like saying a kid kicking a ball in his back yard a starting center.
I think you need to re-access you criteria for what being a DJ actually is (completely removing beatmatching from the idea). The philosophy hasn’t changed in the decades from what I’ve seen, only the technology around it. There are people skills, mechanical skills and tons of abilities that are only learned by experimenting, practicing and playing in front of live people – they don’t come from streaming in a bedroom or making mixtapes. The necessary skills aren’t things that come naturally and technology has very little to do with honing those abilities.
You are wrong. A DJ who doesnt know how to EQ properly, or read the crowd, or make the liveset flow, etc is a bad DJ, but still is DJ. But before all this sync madness, a pal who didnt know how to beat mix just couldnt even be considered a DJ at all.
“There’s no artisanship in beat matching.” you never got to watch Laurent Garnier mix back in the day did you?
No, but that’s irrelevant. Beat matching is making two songs go at the same speed, and synchronizing the drum beats. That’s it. Phrase matching is lining up the phrases on your two tracks so that major structural changes happen at the same time in both songs (if you’re talking about most dance music, anybody who can count to eight can do it.)
A computer can tempo match two or more songs easily. Add a beat grid that identifies where the beats are, and it can beat match. Add phrase information to that grid, and the computer can phrase match. A computer can do all these things because they are rote mechanical skills, and they can be broken down into simple algorithms that are easily represented mathematically.
The mix you, I, Laurent Garnier back in the day (I assume he’s gone to seed, otherwise you wouldn’t have specified a time frame), or any other DJ might make using these skills together with other, less mechanical skills would be a work of art. Whether said art is considered the work of an artisan or dull, disposable trash is largely a matter of subjective perception (as is the case with most art) and not particularly germane to the main point:
Beat matching is not special. It is a rote mechanical skill. Matching beats does not make any DJ special. The things they do after they’ve matched beats might make them special.
You’ve written us an essay, but a simple no would have sufficed ;)
So what you are saying is my 30 years experience is useless and that I am a crappy DJ because i’ve evolved. How do you know my music selection sucks? Clearly if I keep getting gigs that I must be doing something right – and getting gigs over the competition? I mean you are probably right, my mixing likely sucks and remixing abilities is likely pretty bad, I mean why the heck am I charging for my crap? I’ve seen the light, i’m going to just mix 2 records together and sit there staring at the crowd….. I suppose you think drinking while DJ’ing is cool too?
Nope, I am saying you (and lot of DJs) have lost something important in the process. Evolving is not always good. Two records is all what you need to make the crowd dance, nothing else. The rest is just the icing on the cake, when used properly. You dont need all that funky stuff, really. You are in the risk of disconnecting yourself from the mixing task and get trapped inside a solipsism.
Well if evolving is no good then you should use phonographs for mixing. You’re not a real DJ if you can’t beat mix on a phonograph.
That is called a “reductio ad absurdum” fallacy. Evolving is good, but sometimes it can have drawbacks. There is no drawback when changing phonograph technology with turntables, but believe it or not, there is an important one when jumping into synced beat mix. Our minds prefer little imperfections over completely quantized sounds. Our minds prefer emotion over cold and mechanic algorythms. DJs are spoiling themselves forgetting what made their task interesting. Staring at laptop is not.
so What your say8ng is the 20 to 40 seconds you Are beat mixing 2 quantized tracks is different than when the computer beat mixes the same 2 quantized tracks ? Also you know how dance music is made right? Using cold and mechanical algorithms From 0s and 1s from a cold metallic or plastic laptop.
Firstly, depending on the genre, mixes can last from few second to several minutes. In Techno, Progressive Trance, etc is very usual to have three of four minutes mixes. Secondly, of course it is different. That is what you fail to understand, although the track is quantized, the beat mix is not when done manually. There is a more or less wide window for imperfection, you have to rectify the mix by yourself from time to time, creating small sound variations. That means two beats never sound exactly the same when two tracks are mixed because of these little time shifts. This was also even more appreciable with turntables due to it wow & flutter. Lastly, what made DJing interesting in electronica genres was the mixture between a cold and mechanical artistic manifestation (the music created with machines) with a human (the DJ). The DJ added humanity to it and made it interesting to WATCH.
Good grief… Fine – you are a better DJ than me because you use turntables and I don’t — better?
Nope, what makes a DJ great is the music, that is, the song selection, and the ability to create a flow and stablish communication with the crowd. It is possible to do horrid turntable sets and awesome controller sets. I dont DJ anymore, but I really cringe in pain when I see DJs performing boring and lazy sets that lack of emotion, risk, and passion, with everything perfectly beatmatched by a computer. But of course, DJs can still rock it if everything else is on spot. I am not doubting about your skills, just wanted you to understand my point of view.
Mate, wax cylinders or GTFO.
A phonograph is the old word for turntable ….the word you are looking for is gramaphone. We all mix on phonographs …..and by the way beat matching on gramaphones is no different to a belt drive gemini from the 80’s I’ve done several times when i’ve played in Germany.
The ability to play two records at the same tempo is a skill, …..but it’s one that’s relatively easily learnt. And automating that part of the DJing process isn’t really a biggie.
Song selection, EQ , Phrasing, Scratching & all the other new aspects of DJing that technology has given us. …..yep! they’re still skills.
I said that I AM NOT WASTING time, what you choose to do or not do is your own business. That 20-30 seconds I save from beat matching, I can cut up a track and layer up a funky new beat, I’m taking it to the next level. I’ve done beat mixing 2 records/cds together for years and sometimes had 3-4 going at the same time, i’ve mastered it, I’ve chosen to further my skills and not be the guy who just mixes 2 records together like the other 20 in the area, I have differentiated myself from the norm, and for the better. Imagine mixing 2 old disco records together, you have to constantly keep an eye on them so they don’t drift, now that they are locked by software, I can add in a modern beat or sample and make it an even better mix. People will remember and talk about — ” did you hear that awesome version of Dancing QUeen?”… because it’s unique to my skillset, no other DJ has that mix and thus becomes a value add when booking gigs.
Youre taking nothing to the next level…please take your bells and wistles to Saint Elsewhere…that nonsense gets boring
you haven’t explained your comment please elaborate
respect the skillz https://youtu.be/8q0fKqICI84
From the audience’s perspective, out of two DJs the one that rocks out the better party is the better DJ. The technicalities of DJing are of no interest to the audience. Some people prefer to mix tunes manually, and that’s fine, others don’t. I can beat-match but I prefer to use sync just because it’s quicker. I’ve found manual beat-matching to be a useful skill to have for example to sync two pieces of gear that are not digitally connected, otherwise I have little use for this skill now that I play digital audio files.
Shame they won’t be at BPM – I’d love to try one of these.
The story behind NI getting their heads out of their rear ends and realizing that controllers without Jog-wheels is a road to unsustainability.
The market has spoken. And jogwheels / turntables have won over buttons.
I like to think of it as now we have both. You can have platters and jog wheels only, you can have grid controllers, or you have both living in the same unit, hence the popularity and growth of controllers.
The scene is now a rich melting pot of technology, with excellent options for all tastes.
Market research teams don’t turn me on for this sort of stuff. Make exactly what you want to use as a DJ, and do so as a design auture. If not, hire someone to design the concept who has the obsessive, singular vision for what they want. Don’t create a concept by committee and market research.
Also confused as to what haptic response is supposed to be used for, deaf DJs or DJs who can’t be bothered to cue with a pair of headphones? In a venue I need more stuff vibrating?
“Where does the joy of the DJ come from? Where’s the real fun, the most engaging elements, the most important parts for people, so that they can just DJ and have a good time.”
The joy of ‘of the DJ’ comes from actually DJing. It doesn’t come from laptops, sync, BPM counters, moving waveforms, or not using headphones.