The MusicTech BPM Blog – Saturday

Well what a day it’s been, the first day of BPM 2013 got of to a fantastic start with a throng of folks descending upon the NEC in Birmingham for the first day of this three-day DJ’ing expo.

All the big names were in attendance, Korg, Pioneer, Denon, Novation, Ableton.. and of course MusicTech!

Our stand was inundated with people asking questions about our new website and our recommendations for the best DJ and mixing gear available, and quite a few of our favourite were on show today.

Right behind us were Novation who were showcasing their latest releases. I managed to get my hands on the Launchpad Mini and really had a blast – composing a s**t-hot drum and bass track (even if I do say so myself!) very quickly, a truly fantastic tool for speedy composition. Chris gave us an overview of the relationships between the Launchpad Mini, Launchcontrol and the Launchkey also (we’ll get the video of that up tomorrow or Monday)

Liam gave the first of his three day seminars today in our sponsored learning zone (the red zone, if you’re here be sure to come down and listen in) focusing on ‘Music Making for the Mix’ it turned out to be a big draw and many pro DJ’s and DJ’s in-training gained new skills, hints and tips from our resident tech-head!

We also caught up with DJ Spoony who was, demonstrating some of his tech setup, performing over with Pioneer and generally being massively entertaining. We asked DJ Spoony if he’s a fan of  the BPM expo ‘Yeah yeah man’ he told us ‘It’s great to see so many different DJ’s and companies all under one roof sharing the love’

‘I’m using Serato DJ and the Pioneer DDJ SX’ he said when asked what gear he was using today, ‘but I’m just going to head over an take a look at Maschine, I’m really up for trying that out – it looks really interesting but normally I use Pioneer and Westend DJ gear’

We managed to get a bit more time with the legendary DJ Yoda straight after a blistering and hugely enjoyable performance – See below for our interview: (Videos coming soon – watch this space!)

Wow, the audience really went for that, How was that for you?
Great man! I love it when the audience gets involved, I like to just mix it up a bit and get creative y’know – see what works and what doesn’t I like to just improvise stuff and mix things together then and there and it’s a lot easier now being a VJ than it used to be.

So what gear are you using today?
This is the Pioneer SX, and I’m using Serato video now – it’s just so flexible and it’s really come a long way. When I first started it was with VDJs, and DVD is a much clunkier medium for this sort of thing. I used to have to wait for the menu screen to come up on the DVD and select the right chapter. It was really tedious! It’s much smoother now with Mp4s on my Macbook.

I imagine being VJ is probably twice as hard and requires double the attention to detail that a ‘normal’ DJ would need?
Yeah there’s always a lot to do but I do like to keep busy and it definitely keeps me on my toes. I’m not one of those DJs that just stands there and waves my hands around like an idiot. I like to put the work in!

So you’ve been around for well over a decade, how have things changed?
Oh things have changed massively, year in, year out – some really huge changes have taken place in the DJ’ing world. Mainly for the better, I’m always trying to adopt new stuff and bring extra elements to the shows that I’m doing.

Who here are you most interested in checking out?
Well I want to have a look at it all really, there’s so much to see but I do want to stop by Senheiser and also the Novation and Ableton kit that’s around is really interesting, those are the brands that really interest me.

We’ll bring you more tomorrow and a full overview next week – in the meantime check out some more of these shots of a truly awesome day.