– Hey, guys, Phil Harris here
from beginnerdjlessons.com. As many of you will know, I've recently made the switch from working with regular
controllers and Serato, to working with CDJ 3000 and Record Box. And I wanted to make a quick
video just to run through the seven most interesting things I've noticed from going from that setup to this setup, sit-up. We should all do more sit-ups. Let's get on with the video. (bright electronic chime) Hey, guys, I wanna start this video by saying that I absolutely love deejaying with these DJ decks. There's something really
awesome about them, they feel so professional. So I wanted to just say that
before I go any further. Because a lot of these things I'm now about to tell you about are, I suppose you would say, negative things.
Because it's things I had to get used to, things that didn't make any sense to me coming to these for the first time. First thing I noticed is the size, right? These things are huge. Now, just to give you an example I've got two other decks with me here. These are my trusty DDJ-SX2. I'm just gonna give you a size
comparison of the two, okay? So that's the one, and that's the other.
You'll see that they are significantly… Look at the jog wheel next to each other. It's the one thing I really noticed is these things are really chunky. And I've just got another
one here, the DDJ-400s. I mean, look at that, the size difference is just unbelievable. I know that seems like such
an obvious thing to say, but it was the first thing, when I took these out of the box, I was like, "Oh my gosh, these things are
absolutely freaking huge." I'm not gonna dwell on that point, it's just one of the
first things I noticed.
Let's move on to point number two. Okay, so point number two is this, I'm used to with controllers, having touch sensitive jog wheels. And what I mean by that, is a song's playing and
you touch the jog wheel ever so slightly and
everything comes to a halt. That doesn't happen with the CDJs, right? With CDJs, they're mechanical jog wheels, which essentially means it's
actually pressure sensitive, not touch sensitive.
Now, when that comes to
doing things like scratching and stuff like that, it's like, whoa, I've actually got
pressed down on these things for it to function the way I want it to. For example, watch. I can press this sample here. I'm just gonna set it off
and touch the jog wheel, and you'll notice that it still plays. I'm touching the jog wheel now. (electronic music) To make this even even weirder, I'm actually gonna spin the
jog wheel back while it plays, and you'll notice, it won't reverse because I'm not putting
enough pressure on it.
(electronic music) That's really bizarre, for someone like me who is
coming from controllers to CDJs, you've got to actually put pressure down. So watch, I'll put the pressure down now
and it will obviously work. (music skipping) You see how weird that is, so I just wanted to say that it's something I've noticed. Especially from doing a
lot of scratching recently, that's something that I've picked up on. I was like, "That's unusual, I've never that before with any of the controllers I've used." Okay, let's move on to the third point.
The third thing I noticed, and this is a bit of a gripe that I have. Coming from controllers were
hot cues have a gate effect. What I mean by a gate effect is you press the button
and it plays the sound. And you take your finger off the button and it instantly stops. I've become very used to using this, and I enjoy the fact
that you've got that gate that you can play as much
of the note as you want, and then you take your finger off. You can't do that with these CDJs, at least these CDJ 3000s you can't. You press a hot cue and that's it, the song just plays. (electronic music) There's no way you can
turn it into gate mode, it's just not allowed to do that. Which I'm like, "Why wouldn't they just
allow you to do that?" Now just to give you an idea of why I find this kind of annoying. Say you've got like a melody,
and you've chopped it up, and you're going to play
that melody back differently.
So we've got this melody here. (electronic music) Now something I'll do quite
a lot is I'll chop this up, so I'll kind of go. (electronic music) And what you will instantly
notice is annoying is I might want to leave
a bit more of a gap with that sound. Suddenly it starts playing other notes, which ruins my new melody, right? Because I can't stop it playing, it just plays straight away. So that's kind of annoying. Now I know one work-around here is you just press the pause
button after every note. You can go. (music skipping) But it's annoying having
to do a work around, why is that function not? Why can't we just select that? I'm not going to bang on about much more, but that's one of the things
I noticed was I was like, "That's weird, right?" Okay, let's move on to the next one. Okay, point number four. Weird thing I noticed about these DJ decks and I was like, these are
broken when I discovered this. If you put it from vinyl
mode to CDJ mode here, you'll probably already hear that, right? (music skipping) It starts skipping.
And I was like, "They've
sent me a broken one. I've got broken DJ decks,
that's a pain in the ass." But I did a bit of research and apparently it's supposed to do that. So let me explain, in CDJ mode when you
press pause on a track it plays like half a second
of the track on loop. Listen. (music skipping) Really, really weird. Now, apparently it comes
from an old school thing where a lot of DJs
wanted to be able to hear the exact point they're on. Maybe they didn't have wave forms, or something back then. And they could put it
on and they could hear for exactly where the
click of the kick was. So say they didn't have a wave form, you could press play, and then line it up using the sound.
(music skipping) Then you hit that cue point, and you know you're at
the beginning of the kick. (music skipping) Like that. Apparently that's where it comes from. But these things don't even
have CD ports in them anymore, and I was just like, "That really confused the heck out of me." And I would never, coming from a controller and Serato, would ever need to use that function ever. Especially now we've got the wave forms, I can see exactly where the
beginning of the kick is, and can line it up perfectly with that. So that was another thing I
was like, "What the heck?" When I came to these DJ decks, something I'd never experienced before. Let's move on to the next point. Okay so the fifth point
is that on the CDJs you can't reorganise tracks on the fly. Now I know everyone's going to start banging on about the Denon's, but I'm not talking about the Denon. I'm talking about the CDJs. You can't rearrange tracks.
Now if you're deejaying live and everything's a bit more spontaneous, that's not a problem. Because you're just scrolling
through different tracks, and whatever, you just find
the next song that you like. However, for most of the DJ sets I've been doing for the last year have been for YouTube which
are very premeditated DJ sets. I know straight away which songs I'm going to be playing in what order. I've probably even rehearsed the blend that I'm going to be
doing, not even rehearsed.
But I know what I'm going
to be doing, you know? And now when I was working with Serato, I get all the songs on Serato, of the songs I wanted
to put on the DJ set. And I'd try out a few different ones like, "Now I'm going to
try that song to that song. No, that doesn't work. Okay, just delete that song. That one works better, drag it up." And I'm doing a lot of
work on the fly on Serato, which I always kind of took for granted. With CDJs it's a lot different, you can't reorganise tracks. So say I want to just play
around with a DJ set on these. It means I've got to get
the songs onto an SD card, bring the SD card, plug
it in, try stuff out. and then make a note of the song order.
Take the SD card out, go back over to the computer,
rearrange the songs, take the SD card. You see where it's a lot of
back and toing and froing. It means a lot more work
is done on record box, and less organisational
stuff is done here. Now, big shout out to Priyon Joni. I spoke to him the other day and he told me a really awesome tip. Which is you can actually
plug your computer with record box straight in as a source. So what I mean by source is, what you'd usually do
is you plug in a USB, or an SD card as a source, right? And what you can do is
if you plug record box and you put it on export mode, you can click it on
this thing called link.
If any of you want to know
how to do this, let me know, and I'll write it in
the description below. But I didn't want to spend
too much time going over it. But it allows me to have my
laptop as one of the sources, so I've now got playlist
directly off my laptop. Which is really handy
for YouTube deejaying because of the reason I just said. If there's a song I want
to change the order on, I can just go over and change the order directly on record box and
it will change on here. However, that's not always the case, if I was now to go and DJ somewhere else and I was taking my SD card with me, I wouldn't really have that functionality. Well, I could have it, but you better off taking an SD card. So it's just another little
thing to bear in mind, is it's easier to kind
of plan YouTube DJ sets on Serato and a controller
than it is on record box.
On the CDJs I have found
in my opinion so far. Right, let's move onto the next point. Okay, the next point, you're probably wondering why the heck there's this wire hanging down. Now this is something I absolutely love slash dislike about the DJ decks, right? When I used to record my DJ sets before to post on YouTube, I'd record straight off the screen, right? And I'd record the audio through Serato, you can't do that with these. I had to go and get this thing
called an Evermix, right? Which now plugs directly
into the back of these. Now it was a pain because I had to go and get
this thing and it costs £120. But actually now I've got it, I absolutely love it. Because, the reason why
it's all the way up there, I can stream high definition, high end quality music straight from my mixer, straight into my phone.
Which is exactly the thing you'd use if you were to stream
something on your mobile, or something like that. But it works so well, and it means that I can
now film DJ deck sets with just my mobile and this. And the quality's going to be perfect, which I actually have come to really love. But at the beginning I was
like, "Oh, that's a pain. I've got to go and buy an extra thing now to actually record stuff." Something I didn't really know
about before I moved to CDJs. But now I've got it I think it's cool, and I just love the fact
that I've got HD quality straight from the decks
straight to my phone. And you can record mixes, listen to them off your phone. Blah, blah, blah. Stream stuff. Love it now. But at the time didn't know about it. Let's move onto the next point. Okay, point number seven is this. Something I do buy a lot when I DJ is I will swap a track out by just loading a new track.
So there's no gap in the music. It's like one track has continued playing, load another track and that
track instantly starts playing. It's a really good thing to do if you're doing mashups
and stuff on the fly, to just quickly (clicks) swap
a track out on this deck. Now, obviously if I was like James Hype and I had like seven of these, right? You can just do that on yet another CDJ, but I don't do that, I've only got two, and I'm used to just
deejaying with two decks.
With Serato, you can just load a track in and it loads from a certain cue point, and continues playing from that cue point. Which is really good for
doing these fast mash-ups. But with CDJs, it's not actually possible to load in a track at a cue point and have it play from that cue point, as far as I'm aware. But the one that you can do is you create these things
called hot cue banks. And essentially what a hot cue bank is, inside the bank you can load
several different tracks and each track will have a
different hot cue attached to it. And then when you load that
hot cue bank into the CDJs, what you can do is, I've
got an example here. I've got two hot cues, A and B, A will load one song and
play from a certain point. And B will load another song and play from a certain point, watch.
(electronic music plays) Which is exactly the function I wanted, but here's the snag. As quick as these things are, and I understand they're significantly faster than the CDJ 2000s. It's still not fast enough. I noticed that when I was
doing this with Serato it was like, (clicks) boom, instant. I hit that load button
and (clicks) in it came. I was good to go. I noticed with these, it's
just a microsecond out, it's not the biggest deal in the world. Just means you have to
do a bit of beat matching after you've hit the button.
But it's not instant, I did notice this. So watch, I'm going to
press hot cue A now, and I'm going to count. One, two, three, four, one, and I'm going to hit
the second cue point here, with (mumbles). And you'll notice there is a lag, it's only one or two seconds. Yeah, I know, first world problems.
But the problem is it's
still not right on the dot. If these still cannot compare to a laptop, which is ultimately quicker. Let me show you. (electronic music) You notice that little delay there? Weirdly, it's quicker
going back to song A. Watch, I'll do the same thing back. (electronic music) Weirdly, it's quicker going from B to A, but you'll notice it's not perfect. Something that I noticed, it's like, "Oh, that's a pain." You'll notice in my last mix, I kind of had to filter up before I hit B, which gave me enough time to…
While it was high passed, beat match it back and then
bring it back down again. So it was less obvious that
there was that delay there. So there we go, that was
another thing I've noticed. Other than that, I actually think these
things are freaking awesome. A couple of things I love about them, love the big jog wheel. Everybody complains about
the hot cues being up here, like, "Oh, you're going
to get in the way." What you don't realise from YouTube is that there's so much freaking space. Look at the size of my hands here, right? And everyone thinks you're going to be knocking the jog wheel and
stuff when you play with them.
You're not at all, there is a comfortable
amount of space up here. And you are not going to knock anything. Screen really, really love it. Jog wheels feels like
absolutely like silk. Watch, I can put the job wheel down to the lightest setting now. Unless you're going to
turn the volume down. But these things just spin forever. They're so nice, they're just so nice. This thing sound quality is amazing. Really loved the features, love the fact you've
got this track pad here which you can touch the
add in different effects.
That's really awesome. And something else
which I just have to say is they just look the business. They're just wicked, they're just fun. You're looking down and they just look absolutely ridiculously good. I'm going to do so many
more videos on this but I did want to just
make this quick video. It's probably not quick at all. Telling you about the seven
things that were my right, Oh my gosh, I didn't
realise that moment, okay? So there you go. I think these things are awesome, but those are my seven things I noticed. I know a lot of them
are actually negatives, but I actually absolutely
love these things. See you in the next vid. Why not go and watch this video right now of me teaching my wife how to DJ.
See you tomorrow, ciao
(imitates fart noise)..