Ah Ms. Pinky eh! I’d love to have a play on that. I used an old copy of Final Scratch when I was DJing in Poland - it seemed quite responsive and stable, but there was definately a delay because the timing even on simple transform scratches sounded slightly out. I’m looking at Serato at the moment, I’m a big fan of rane and I’ve heard good things about it. Ms. Pinky does seem the cooler of the three, and I’m learning Max/MSP/Jitter for my digital arts degree so it sort of makes sense.
I tend to use the EQ a fair amount in my sets, my mixer has three-band upfader eqs on each channel and a really nice VCF filter built in so you can get some really smooth mixes, especially with stuff like Breaks or DnB. For scratching I don’t tend to use it that much, I’m less of a battle DJ more of a kind of live mixtape guy (Lots of quick mixes, accapellas, instrumentals etc) so I use it to get things to sit nicely together.
Is the SK5 the stanton mixer? I’ve wondered about adapting audio mixers to act as a midi controller because I’ve got an old Gemini UMX5 scratch mixer lying around. It’s a nice little thing, pretty sturdy but pretty basic too so there’s probably a lot of space inside the box. Do you have any tips or any resources that I could look into on the subject?
This Hotcakes thing sounds good. I’m very interested in the whole digital music phenomenon, and have been hashing out ideas for underground distribution networks for months! I’d love to hear more about what you guys are doing. I go to quite a wacked-out art’s college that’s full of incredible musicians who don’t seem to have either the commercial viability to attract attention from labels or an independent platform to get their music heard. Myspace has done a lot of unsigned musicians, but the site is bloated and spreads it’ net too far resulting in less features for dedicated musicians, especially DJs.
The infiniums look great, I’m not sure how keen they’d be to sell me only 7 65mm faders tho, maybe I could blag them as samples or something…
Serato scratch is the dogs bollocks! I live with a DJ who got one of the first units and have played with it a bit. I haven’t tried FS or Miss Pinky, but Serato scratch get’s huge props from me. The interface is excellent, stable as hell and very responsive. I’ve seen it being used by some very good sctatch DJ’s and it seem’s fine. One thing I have to say about Serato Scratch is the sound quality is amazing. I don’t know if you know who Serato got their name? The Protools (and now also Logic) plug-in “Pitch ‘n’ Time” which is the BEST time compression/expansion and pitchshifting software avalible anywhere! If you want to know any details I’m happy to tell you what I know about, Serato is a New Zealand company and (which I also am) I’ve talked with the developers about the nuts ‘n’ bolts of how it works
Yeah i have all three here and can say that Final Scratch and Tractor ended up in the cupboard first and then Serato followed, Simply because the latency is slightly higher on both of those and the sound quality of Final Scratch is absolutly terrible.
I use Ms Pinky with DJD and designed my own interface for it, It is perfect for MIOS users because you can build the interface to have as many of the features you want and even make it look like your MIDIBox
I’m also more of a quick mix DJ than tablist really, My best mate is one of the best tablist in the world though DJ Haste.
Don’t worry about the Infiniums because you can order upto 15 directly from there website and there is no lead time either
I know this for a fact because we have done it a few times now building prototypes for various crap
The choice between Serato and Pinky really is subjective but if you get a really nice low latency ASIO card Pinky will be lower latency and Pinkys pink vinyls are perfect scratch weight but make sure you get two of each if you order, The black ones last a whole hell of a lot longer and are great for quick mixing
If your learning MSP then really there is no other choice simply because you get the sorce of the app and you can mix anything in MSP.
I’m getting Pinky implemented in Synthmaker too at some point because that is my modular of choice.
