Continuing with last week's theme of "reinforcing writing habits", here's another weekly post about whatever is on the top of my mind this morning.
I've been hosting Pulse Width Mornings, your favorite chiptune morning show(tm) for about two years now, and the entire time I've been using a Numark DJ2GO2 controller deck.
Its a really tiny thing, and I originally got it because of how my show was being produced. On Tuesday mornings I would wake up around 5am, get dressed, then bike down to the ferry where I would set sail for the San Francisco Ferry Building. The BFF.fm radio studio at the time was located there, and I didn't want to drag a whole-ass backpack when I my law briefcase worked just fine. So, the DJ2GO's tiny form factor fit this setup real nice.
But now, after all that time, my deck has finally died. Okay, it didn't /actually/ die. It still "works", just as long as you didn't mind having absolutely zero control over the tempo of the left deck. I don't mean that you could pick any tempo as long as it was +/-0 BPM, I mean the deck's tempo slider would pick literally any value for you. What modern convenience! Too bad I was hosting a morning radio show, not an avant garde performance.
Despite this, the deck was mostly stable enough to use for the show. I still wanted to get into "real" DJing, where you actually play around with the filters and EQ knobs and other things, but this deck didn't have that. I'd planned on upgrading to a "real" deck, like a DDJ-400 or DDJ-FLX4, once my dayjob paid out our annual performance bonus, but the DJ2GO had impatience. About an hour before I was set to record my show on an early Tuesday morning, the tempo slider became ungovernable. Nothing I tried could get it to lock in place. It was simply all over the place and I literally couldn't get a show prepared in time.
So I had to cancel at the last minute. Instead of recording the show, I jumped in and did research of what new deck I could get 1) quickly enough for another show 2) affordably before I received my bonus.
In the end, I settled on the Hercules Inpulse 300. Its a solid machine, two RCA jacks for audio output, and a 4 channel internal sound interface. Plus, its got all the knobs I need to really dive in on "real" DJing. With the EQ and the filters and all that stuff. I've played around with it twice so far in the past week since it arrived, and I'm rather pleased with it. It is much larger than the DJ2GO, of course, so my streaming layout will need some interesting ideas to make it work, but tonight is the first stream (twitch.tv/pulsewidthmornings) with it.
I'm excited to see how it goes. There's so much more to mixing than I've ever had access to previously and can't wait to try it out. Then, the next test will be tomorrow morning, where I do a Real Recording Session in the hours before work to produce the next episode.
Wish me luck.