NYC Remix Hotel and Dub Wars Wrap-up

This past weekend was a DJ’s paradise in NYC as Remix hotel made it’s yearly stop in the city. Now in it’s 4th year, the event features the latest technology and gear for dj’s and dance music producers There was also a lengthly list of seminars and panels covering topics ranging from sound sculpting to breaking into the music industry.

The SAE floor is cleared out and vendors move in for the weekend showing the latest gear and software. Apple had their own room devoted almost entirely to Logic Pro. Coincidentally, Apple just added a profile on Sasha who talks about his dj rig and making the transition to dj using digital music interfaces. Check out the article here.

At this point, vinyl, the old dj standby, is losing ground every day to digital music innovations. Several years ago, a small Dutch company called N2IT developed the first turntable/digital music interface, called Final Scratch. It used analog records on turntables to control the playback and cueing of digital music files. In essence it emulated what dj’s could already do with a heavy box of records but instead kept all the music on a lightweight laptop. Final Scratch was sold to Stanton, who now produces it. Speaking with the Stanton rep. he let out the they are close to releasing the next step in hardware for Final Scratch. He wouldn’t talk about any specifics but did say it was probably integrated with a mixer. In other words, the controls in the software would be able to be changed via controls on the mixer likely using a firewire connection. Right now no one has anything even close to that on the market.

The other really innovative product at the show is Pioneer’s new flat panel PA speaker. Measuring in at only about 3 inches thick, the 3 foot wide by 2 foot high speaker projects sound from the front and the back. They only weight 21 pounds and have a concealed handle in the top. While really cool in both looks and function, at $1,500 each, they aren’t cheap.

DVD is also fast working their way into dj’ing. Lots of digital turntables featured DVD capability, allowing for the mixing of not only audio, but video at the same time. Pioneer’s DVJ-X1 even allows for time-stretching (slowing down or speeding up the video and audio) without losing the key of the music. The rep mentioned that a lot of broadcast news companies are using the DVJ as it makes doing slow motion on the fly easy. So this technology is finding it’s way out of the nightclubs.

Speaking of which, Friday night was the 1 year anniversary for the only Dubstep event in the city, Dub War. The event took place at Avalon and was pretty interesting. Dubstep is raging in the UK at the moment and slowly growing here in the states. The best thing about going to a Dubstep night is that rewinds are encouraged. Rewinds occur when a really good track comes in over the sound-system. The crowd does a bit of yelling, the track is re-wound and played from the beginning. It’s an interesting bond that forms between the crowd and dj when it goes off right. Someone was even handing out sheets of paper with a large number 5 printed on it to encourage audience voting.

Dub War was interesting on friday in that the crowd was really mixed and into hearing the music. It took me back to the early house days in the late 80’s. It’s a scene for now that’s not contaminated by the trend followers or fashion victims. If you haven’t checked out what dubstep sounds like, barefiles is a good resource for past radio shows and dj sets.