🎛️ Back On The Decks

If you have been around here for a while, you might remember that, way back in my very first blog post, I mentioned that I used to DJ and produce music. Well, after a long pause, I am finally back at it - and this time around, I want to actually stick with it and, quite importantly, document it.

This post is a bit of a fresh start for me, so bear with me while I find my footing again.

The History

As mentioned, my journey with music started somewhere around 2005, when I first started getting into DJing and music production. I had my first official event in 2007 - at barely 15 years old, together with a mate, as the “DanceCore DJs” - and for a few years I was pretty deep into the whole thing.

It was not only the playing. A couple of us also ran a small online radio station, back when Winamp and Shoutcast were how you listened to music on the internet, and I was the one keeping the platform running as much as I was one of the DJs on it. Over time I drifted more and more towards the production side, and a fair amount of what came out of that still lives at music.bobalazek.com.

But then, as life usually goes, the passion slowly took a backseat to other things - university, work, my career in software engineering. For the better part of the last decade or so, I have been pretty much out of the game.

The Gear

Now, let’s get to the fun part - the equipment.

When I decided to get back into it, I started out modestly with a Pioneer DJ DDJ-FLX4 controller. It was a great little device to ease myself back into things - compact, affordable and just enough to get the basics right again.

I have been enjoying the journey so far, and as I got more comfortable, I started to feel the need for a bit more. So, not long ago, I upgraded to the Pioneer DJ DDJ-FLX10.

It is a whole different beast. The jump that actually matters is not the extra buttons - it is the two extra channels. On two channels you are always mixing out of something to get into something else. On four you can let a track breathe underneath while you set up the next two, which is a completely different way of thinking about a set. I am still learning all of its ins and outs, but it is exactly the kind of step up I needed to take this seriously again.

The other thing you can spot in that photo is the turntable, and that one is not new at all. It is a JB Systems T2 direct drive, and it is about twenty years old at this point - the same one I was using back in the DanceCore days. It has been moved, boxed up, stored, and dragged back out again, and it still spins perfectly. There is something quite satisfying about the fact that the oldest thing on the desk is the piece I have never had to replace.

The Vinyl

Part of getting back into this was going through the boxes and dusting off the old records. I have around sixty of them, and they had been sitting packed away for the better part of fifteen years.

They are overwhelmingly Hands Up and Eurodance, because that is exactly what I was buying and playing as a teenager. What you can see on the wall is only a part of it - the rest is still in the box, and I rotate them when I feel like looking at something else.

A few that made the cut: two Scooter twelve-inches (“The Question Is What Is The Question” and “Jumping All Over The World”), Kate Ryan’s “Voyage Voyage”, Rocco & Bass-T’s “Alright”, Manian’s “Turn The Tide” with the Cascada remix on the A side, Wasabi’s “Ready 4 Take Off”, a DJ Andy Garcia versus Hands Up Squad plate, and a small stack of Balloon Records releases. If you were anywhere near a German or Dutch dance chart in the mid-2000s, none of this will surprise you.

It is not a collection I built to be impressive, and I am not going to pretend it is rare or valuable. It is a snapshot of what I was actually into at fifteen, which is the only reason it is worth putting on a wall. Some of it still gets played on the turntable. Most of it is there because walking past it every day is a decent reminder of why I started.

The holders are 3D printed. I could not find anything off the shelf that held a twelve-inch the way I wanted - flat against the wall, nothing covering the sleeve artwork, and cheap enough to print a couple of dozen of them - so I designed and printed my own. That is very much the recurring theme of this whole hobby for me: if the thing I want does not exist in the shape I want it, I will just make it. Which, as it happens, is also how the next post starts.

The Persona

Whenever I jump back into something, I like to have a clear identity for it - a persona that helps keep things focused and consistent. So I am setting up my sets under a fresh persona, something new for this chapter of the journey. I will keep the name under wraps for now, but I am excited about where it is heading.

The Tools

One of the things I quickly realized when getting back into it is how much I rely on having my library in order. It is not just about playing tracks - it is about knowing what you have, what goes together and how to build a set that flows.

Some of that is just knowing the map. Which is why I ended up writing one down: a genre reference covering the styles I actually play, with the tempo ranges, and where each one tends to land in a set. It started as notes to myself and turned into something worth publishing.

The bigger piece is the library itself, and the way I go about keeping it in order - describing every track by what it actually does in a set, and letting the playlists fall out of that rather than filing anything by hand. That whole approach deserves its own post, and it gets one next.

The End

That is where I am at with the journey so far - back on the decks, fresh gear, a twenty-year-old turntable that refuses to die, a wall of records from the first time around, a new persona, and a proper system for keeping the library in order. I plan to keep documenting the progress here, so if you are into that kind of thing, stay tuned!

I hope you enjoyed this blog post and I will see you in the next one!