Jared is based in the New York City area. mixes | blog |
January 2008 So, where do we start? How about with who the hell I am. I mean, every random person in a goth/industrial club talks about themselves as a DJ because they own 50 CDs, downloaded around 100 gigs' worth of music and knows the name of the lead singer of VNV Nation. What sets me apart? I’m a DJ, obviously. I got my start in Albany, NY when I was in college. I started promoting for the local goth night, Abyss, and working with my dear friend Penny Green. After a few months of working I got bored with what the DJs were playing at the club, and my friends wanted to hear a lot of the stuff I liked, so I decided to start burning CDs of all the music I bought and downloaded. I bought a bunch of blank CDs and a pack of labels and got to work. In that pack there was a CD for a program called eJay. I installed it and never looked back. I started with one sound card so I didn’t have many options: start first song, stop first song, shift second song, start second song, stop second song, find cue points, start first song, start second song, start crossfader, sounds like shit, repeat. I would just try basic mixing, play with the pitch shifter and the cross fader and see what I could get. I started recording transitions and mixes, and eventually gave a few to a friend of mine, DJ Strange. He was running a club night in Albany called Coda, and I asked for a gig. He made me show up an hour early one night and spin before the club opened. I had to prove that I understood the equipment and rudimentary mixing. So I did. He gave me the gig and I got an hour on a Friday night in prime time. I had my whole set planned out, knew all the songs backward and forward. That was the beginning for me. I got a few gigs at Abyss while I was involved in booking shows, and eventually started my own night, Revolver. Eventually I was fired from Abyss, took over Revolver full time, and after some time started working for Abyss again. In my time I booked shows with some rather large names including The Cruxshadows, Ego Likeness, Terrorfakt, Psyclon 9 and Android Lust. In early 2007 I moved back to Jersey, where I got guest gigs at QXT’s, Abstraction in Long Island and Asylum Guild in NYC. In December of 2007 I became a resident DJ of Asylum Guild. That’s it in a nutshell. I am not the most experienced DJ, nor am I the most well known, but I have a good understanding of the art and technique involved in being a good DJ. One of those things is most definitely practice. Any monkey can get in front of a CD player and hit play. Hell, my music player on my computer has a beatmatching function. So, how does the new DJ compete in this world of experienced DJs and technology? Practice. I practice on a pair of Numark TTX’s (yes, those are turntables), a Korg KM-402 Kaoss Mixer running into an Audio8DJ connected to my computer running Traktor 3 and Traktor Scratch. As a controller I use a Korg PadKontrol. So, in effect, I can either spin on turntables, spin with the controller, spin just with my laptop (although I don’t), or put them all together and have detailed control over 4 decks simultaneously with over 100 effects at my fingertips. Now, do you need to own all of this stuff? Of course not. Should you own your own equipment? Damn right you should. Whether it’s a basic rack-mounted unit or a pair of Pioneer CDJ-1000’s and a huge Rane mixer or a laptop running VirtualDJ that you control with your mouse and some hotkeys—practice will make you a better DJ. It doesn’t matter whether you want to be a hip hop DJ, a techno DJ, an industrial or a goth or a metal DJ. Understanding the equipment will make you a better one. But the point of this is to be a good goth/industrial DJ. So first we must ask: What does that mean? to be continued.
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