All this talk about DJ Mixes has gotten me thinking. I haven’t even used the decks in several years. They are just taking up space. Whereas in the meantime I have been really wanting to buy a laptop, but never had the funds. I have recently stumbled across a good deal on a laptop.
It is unlikely that I will ever become a world renowned house music DJ, however I do quite enjoy production and I would highly value being able to track in Renoise while on my lunchbreaks at work…
So please indulge this highly worthless forum thread and answer the poll.
Sell 'em. Get the laptop and the cheapest component (un-amped) turntable you can find to run through your mixer when wanted/needed. I’m a record collector myself so I can’t imagine having no turntable at all. The USB ones are outrageously overpriced, tho.
The main hitch is that my girlfriend wants me to keep them for some reason. And I’m like, but lady, we don’t have enough $ to buy a laptop right now… How else are we going to afford it?
I bought my dad a USB turntable for xmas, I’ll probably go over to his house (with my future laptop of course) to dub some of my vinyl into wav’s. Might sell a lot of the records on ebay too though
I clicked “no” but I revoke that. Sell the fuckers. Get a few cheap belt driven ones with timecoded vinyl so you can use pirated software to mix and scratch mp3s.
i think its a bad idea to sell them, however this is more like why i wouldnt sell my decks :
firstly because you wont get what they are worth, so selling turntables to buy other USB or non-dj turntables is just stupid. you can hook one or both of your existing decks up to your setup, you do not need a USB deck or a non-DJ deck to do this.
i think its really useful to have a turntable permanently hooked up to your recording setup for sampling purposes, so at least keep one. ditch them and you will lose the fun of digging through crates of cheap vinyl for stuff to sample.
also you might actually want to listen to a record on vinyl at some point, seeing as vinyl is still the choice format which most underground electronic music is released on. okay so more and more stuff is available digitally, and pretty soon everything will be, but there is still plenty of underground releases from past years which will never make it to beatport or whatever. that goes especially for more interesting obscure stuff. therefore the only way you’ll find these is internet rips, which may be poor quality and won’t sound as good as vinyl.
these days you can use your decks for all kinds of fancy stuff, for basic mixing you have Serato Scratch and other similar devices. You can also use timecoded vinyls such as ms. pinky in order to use your decks as midi controllers. more and more people are looking for ways to add a greater degree of humanised control to their laptop music, and a turntable is a pretty good way to do this especially if you are already experienced in using it as an instrument.
DJing with decks is actually fun and fundamentally different to DJing with ableton live or whatever. Even if you get into that stuff it’ll still be fun to come back to mixing in the ‘old skool’ way now and then.
Having turntables and listening to music on vinyl is cool. Even though its way more convenient to listen to a big playlist of all your digitised records etc., sometimes there’s nothing quite like the exerience of turning off that thing with the screen and the noisy fan, dimming the lights, putting an record old jazz record on and smoking a nice long opium pipe.
However, laptops are pretty handy. And if all your records are house then i’d say better to burn them rather than sell them.
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