In the first part of “History of DJing” we saw the genesis of the art of DJing, how it grew and opened up a whole new era of musical delight. iCrates picks up the saga here, documenting everything from the 60′s to the modern day. We include all the details you might not be aware of about one of the most trendsetting musical practices of all time and provide a general overview of the different branches that grew from spinning vinyls.
Throughout the 60′s the practice of DJing kept evolving. Night clubs and discotheques existed all over Europe and the U.S. and the vogue of DJs helped spread this new culture around the globe.
New technological developments began to push the focus towards DJ performance. The arrival of the first DJ mixers with pre-cue listening lead to the earliest imperceptible mixes with b.p.m. synchronization between two turntables. However, its progress was hindered initially by the boom of rock and roll bands in the mid 60′s, with clubs booking mainly live band sessions. This consequently lead to a minor breakdown of DJ culture until funk, soul, disco and its derivatives, and by extension DJs, seduced audiences back into the night clubs once more.
By the mid 70′s most parties revolved around a DJ culture enriched by a significant new tool; the maxi-single. The 12 inch vinyl plate held only one or two songs per side, leaving more space between the grooves, therefore providing a much higher quality and volume of playback. Its longer duration also created the possibility of extended versions in the hands of remixers blowing up the sync-up-two-vinyls experience for dance-floor lovers. Remixes and DJs started flourishing again, and subsequently became the club scene’s closest ally for the coming decades.
Maestro Larry Levan and early DJ culture
A good example was Larry Levan, resident DJ of the renowned underground club The Paradise Garage in New York. As an exponent of the disco movement rooted in New York’s Bronx, his eclectic sessions and dance remixes made him the king of turn-plates and the perfect reference point for the club culture of the following years.
A new division of DJ virtuosos began exhibiting all kinds of new tricks and ways of using the turntables that soon converted the plates into musical instruments themselves. A man called Grand Wizard Theodore invented the scratching technique by chance and started implementing it to give a modern twist to his mixes. A while later he invented the needle drop technique which consists of letting the needle drop at a certain point while the record is spinning without it having previously been cued. This allows the DJ to make fast changes to the music and generate abrupt and interesting rhythms.
At the beginning of the 80′s techniques like “Beat Juggling” became more common as a fingertip sampler to create new rhythms and melodies out of other records. DJ Steve Dee, creator of the “Beat Juggling” technique, first called it “The Funk”, using the same record on two turntables to extend a beat by manually switching between the turntables which played the same beat or vocal phrase of a song to create a loop. Soon many turntable magicians like DJ Kool Herc followed Dee’s DJing methods and new musical genres began emerging. Breakbeat soon became one of the dominant movements of the 80′s and was followed by a mass of disciples who invented “Break Dance” as a way of moving to these new beats. What began by chance with Theodore performing scratches let DJs open a vast portal to new music genres through backspins, slip-cueing, needle drops and pauses by diversifying the original rhythms recorded on the plates.
All these fresh techniques also set the origins of a new concept of DJing in motion known as Turntablism. This extended to hip hop culture with hit songs like Sugar Hill Gang’s Rappers Delight, Grandmaster Flash’s The Message or Africa Bambaata’s Planet Rock and movies like Beat Street, Wild Style or Break-Dance.
Beat Street Roxy Battle
But soon the glory of vinyl and DJing hit another stumbling block. In the mid 80′s, in the hands of the major record labels, the arrival of the Compact Disc made most people think the vinyl was finished and that the CD was the format of the future. Record companies stopped making vinyl and as a result most releases were digital produced. The public was forced to turn their backs on vinyl in favour of this new iridescent format. However, a response didn’t take too long. New independent labels in the hands of DJs, producers and vinyl lovers around the world bore great resitance and stood up for vinyl culture.
Suddenly an avalanche of new music genres filled up the dance floors again utilising the same DJ techniques from the 80′s. The music scene went from merely pop, funk, soul and disco to a broad palette of new trends like house, electro-funk, techno, acid-funk, I.D.M, Italo-disco, with vinyl playing a fundamental part in all of them for DJs and musicians alike. From reggae came dub music, which was created by using the riddim (basically the drum and the bass) of a record, pitch-bending it down, and adding new lyrics and a whole lot of delays. Speeding up those same riddims led to jungle. Further along the line jungle turned into drum and bass and consequently, mixed with the irregular drum patterns of 2-step, laid down the roots of what we now know as dubstep.
Old School Ragga Jungle
By the the mid-90’s electronic music was exploding. New York, Detroit and Chicago established the electronic scene in the United States, which was soon to be joined by Berlin in Europe. This was the empire of electronic music, where DJs and vinyl were the irrefutable kings of almost every club cabin in the world. CD’s were no longer recognised as a viable medium for DJing. Even small clubs had to have turntables to preserve their integrity within the DJ community.
At the end of the 90’s the technological boom driven by the World Wide Web made free access to music universally available. This peer-to-peer digital revolution was led by programs such as Kazaa and Napster. As the price of hard drives dropped dramatically so it became clear that people were beginning to prefer having their entire music libraries in digital format.
However, by the start of the 21st century technology had reached a point that finally made the original vinyl DJs more inclined to embrace digitalism. This came in the form of the invention of a system which emulates two turntables with vinyl plates and grooves that carry out time codes without the need to have the music physically pressed onto vinyl. The plates are used as controllers of a software program which allows DJs to load digital audio files and play them as if the music was actually on the vinyl, letting the DJ scratch, backspin, tap, walk and do almost everything a proper classic vinyl and turntable could do. The fact that professional DJs could carry less and travel lighter without having to check-in parts of their beloved music collection (which exposed it to many risks like bad treatment and even theft), has garnered a certain trust in this new technological format.
Nevertheless, despite technological advances that try to tease our ears no format available can compare with the satisfaction of finding a good vinyl, feeling it, appreciating its cover art, reading the credits and smelling the brand new package, never mind the exceptional delight of playing it for the first time. Thankfully, there will always be a few sagacious ears to stand up for the history of DJ culture and its beloved vinyl.
