Wednesday, October 8, 2008

 

Why DJ D-Styles Should be Fighting Crime in His Spare Time



D-Styles is my favorite scratch DJ. His skills in pure scratching can compete with just about anyone on the planet. I'm sure he could put a few recent World DMC winners to shame.

That said, he also accomplishes what most other scratch DJs either don't or can't: he uses his turntables, mixer, and records to chop samples in a live context and create new songs.

The above video shows him doing some of my favorite material of his. He's basically starting by drumming, that is, taking a drum sample on a record and creating an entirely new beat by scratching it. He has a sampler attached to a foot switch that loops the new drumbeat that he just created. He then scratches records with melodic jazz samples and cuts the samples up to create new melodies. At one point in this video, he actually layers a few melodies on top of each other using the sampler.

What you're seeing here is D-Styles doing live in a few minutes what many producers need to spend hours in front of a computer or hardware sampler to accomplish. He's truly taking scratching from the wikki-wikki sound (that, honestly, most people are tired of) to a new level of melodic sophistication.

Comments:
can I just say that live sampling like this fucking rules? That's why watching Battles live is so awesome for me - watching the build-up from little pieces.
 
Yeah. In this day and age where "live" electronic/producer acts are oftentimes just DJs and producers pulling loops in Ableton, it's really refreshing to see someone who can recreate this music and show the creative process in a live context.

PS. Battles is the proverbial bee's knees.
 
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