My New Denon Rig

It took me a long time to make the jump from being a digital dj to my hybrid setup above. Originally, my rig consisted of the Hercules DJ Console RMX unit and a laptop with all my songs stored on my laptop or an external hard drive. Here's a better picture of the Hercules controller I'm referring to.



The RMX has built-in sound cards and midi controls for controlling your dj software of choice. It lends itself best to Atomix Virtual DJ pro and the software comes pre-mapped to recognize and use the RMX right out of the box. I settled on Virtual DJ as my software of choice although you can manually configure and map the controls to other DVS (digital vinyl systems) like Traktor Pro.

Now that I have made the jump from digital only to the hybrid setup I have the best of both worlds. I can also easily run 4 decks as well. My setup is configured with the two Denon DN-S3700`s as decks 1 and 4 in the mixer and Virtual DJ`s two decks are routed to mixer channels 2 and 3. I can use either the 3700`s or the RMX to control Virtual DJ in this setup. However, in order to get rock solid performance on the road I had to upgrade the sound card solution and hand`s down the winner for this was the Native Instruments Audio 8 DJ external USB sound card shown below



Here`s a closer look at the media players and mixer in my current setup. Everything from Denon.





So why did I make the jump from such a portable system to the coffin style rig? A few reasons. The primary reason was reliability. Despite the RMX being a solid and professional midi controller with good sound and performance it has one serious drawback. If it isn't connected to a PC it doesn't function. It's not a standalone system. The laptop becomes the weak link in the chain and if for any reason you have a problem with the laptop during a performance you are going to lose sound. I've actually had to reboot during performances and those few minutes required to get XP fully booted will seem like an eternity with a crowd staring at you and thinking "wtf?" By incorporating CD/Media Players in the rig I can use rock solid stand alone players in conjunction with the software and if there is any glitch with the PC I can reboot in the background while playing my set from CD's or USB sticks connected to the Denon 3700's.

The other reason for upgrading the system was based on the philosophy from so many dj`s out there that if you can`t beatmatch than you aren`t a real dj. When using software only the task of beatmatching is normally left to the software to handle. You can set it for manual adjustments but frankly it is tedious and given the software does such a good job it makes sense to simply let it do its thing. The problem is you don`t develop the beatmatching skills you need if you come face to face with a cd player only setup at a venue that won`t support you running a digital system. There is debate out there given the prevalance of digital dj`s about the veracity of the whole "if you can't manually beatchmatch" argument and I will delve into this in detail later. However, suffice to say when you consider the bigger problem of laptop failures during live sets it only makes sense to master the skills required for using a standard setup of 2 cd players and a mixer.

I will also give you a closer look at each of the component parts of the system in future posts. In the meantime, here`s an older mix from February I had originally encoded in WAV format only converted to mp3. I`ll warn you there`s a couple of flubbed mixes in this one but barring that I hope you enjoy it. Please share any comments you have.

Phossl Fuel - Feb 2010 - Week 2





Phossl Fuel - Feb 2010 - Week 2.mp3