Starting a Digital DJ Setup

 

 

 

Get some CD turntables. If you want to dive straight into the most modern technology and start becoming one of the DJs illuminating by the glow of a Macbook on stage, then you're going to need to start with a good pair of CD turntables.

• The good news? These are incredibly versatile, useful, and can hold an incredible amount of music. You'll have literally thousands of songs at your fingertips, ready to mash-up beats and verses in crazy combinations, as opposed to being stuck with the crate-full of heavy vinyl you'll have to drag to the club with an old-school set up.
• The bad news? These are expensive. At the low-end, a single CD turntable can cost up to $700, making an investment for a pair neighboring on the ridiculous. For this reason, many digital DJs prefer to line-in a laptop and play sound files directly, or use Ableton Live.

 
 

Get some DJ software. Serato Scratch Live or Traktor Scratch are typical digital DJ packages that allow you to do everything that a vinyl DJ does on his mixer and turntables on your computer. You won't be able to have the same kind of touch available to tactile records, but you can still approximate a lot of the same distinctive sounds and effects, especially if you have a digital turntable or some other way of mixing the sounds manually. 

 

 

 

  Consider a digital turntable controller. There are also devices called DJ controllers, which are almost exactly like video game controllers (in that you use them to plug into your computer, basically). They don't actually play music in and of themselves, but you can use them to simulate the action of mixing on real turntables, but while playing MP3s or other sound files from your computer set-up.

 

 

 

 

 Just line your computer into some speakers. At the most basic, being a digital DJ might mean hooking your computer up to a set of good-quality speakers and pushing play on your pre-mixed set lists. It's not the most fun way of playing a DJ set, because it doesn't allow you to read the crowd or acquire any of the skills and touches that an analog DJ has, but it's a popular option, increasingly.

 

 

 

 

 

Get a digital interface. Regardless of what kind of turntables you're using, if you want to use any kind of software while you're on stage, you're going to need to invest in some kind of digital interface that connects the RCA-style ports on your hardware with the USB ports on your computer. A lot of these will also come with DJ software, like the Traktor brand. 

 

 

 

 

 

Get an external hard drive. It's good to have your tunes backed up on an external hard drive that you can carry around with you and not bog down any of your hardware, or your computer. A Seagate One Terabyte hard drive is almost impossible to fill up, and super-compact and easy to set-up, making it a good investment for digital audio files.