Back home

so I (finally!) got home after a 21-day business trip in China. Having stayed at too many hotels while putting up with too much restaurant food can really get to ya. Fortunately the food’s been good for (for the most part) this time. With just a few days left before I officially return to work, I’ve spent the better part of the past week trying to get my home life back in order. Macbook’s now back and running (minus the soon-to-come brand new battery), internet should be back (hopefully) by next week; another DJ gig tonight…everything’s (almost) back to where it should be. This time I’ll be home for a good while.

there might be a trip to new york and Europe in the coming months. But for now I’m all about being comfortable at my home turf.

M and I and an interesting exchange over the Mac or PC debate. He had a point about ‘’paying extra for a user-friendly, hassle-free experience’’, which I think make sense in many levels. He also made it clear about how much he likes the Apogee Duet, which might just convince me to take over a piece of that from a poor friend of mine… the mac vs. everything else debate is always gonna be around though…

Old Guard of the Old School

I’m a regular on our Nclosure program – a 3 hour gig with a good friend/music maestro Stingrays behind the deck. For the past 8 months or so he has continued to crank out incredible sets after sets, with a setup that’s half old school and half modern technology – two 1200s, a DJM600 and a grex ultra controller (now that’s a rare piece of gear). So we went into a discussion about the rapid progression of DJ technology, and how vinyl DJ (and people DJ with turntables) is like lost art these days. We went on and discuss how technology shouldn’t be the DJ, rather it’s us people that do the Djing. He obviously felt that nowadays we got too much DJing done on (and by) the computer. While it’s nothing wrong to embrace modern technology, it’s something else to get lost in that technological storm and forgot about the fundamentals.

I came into the DJ world with very little reservation of what I would be down the road. Perhaps that’s the mindset that has kept me open-minded while aiming for a musical direction. DJ technology has progressed in the speed of light, with new stuff coming out on a (seemingly) daily basis. So why get too caught up at something that waits for no one? Why spending way too much time on looking for the right gear instead of perfecting what you already got? It felt like a lot of people (that includes me) have not put enough time and effort into their music, and that’s quite a waste of time. Gear talk wouldn’t elevate your music by leaps and bounds. DJing is a craft that require good taste and skills, much like cooking. It’s far more important to ‘’cook up’’ great sets than to browse online and collect second hand and subjective experience on our tools. I gotta keep that in mind.