My next blog post was due to be about the variety of DJing equipment that I've owned over the years, and how I've ended up with my current awesome set up... But my experience over the last few days has inspired me to shelve that one for the moment and change the subject slightly. This post is less about Funk, more about lack of it.
Technology is a wonderful thing, and I make no secret of the fact that I'm a bit of a gadget geek. Digital DJing, aside from the obvious advantages and expanded possibilities that it offers, is the perfect way to indulge in my twin passions of music and geekery. My current setup is advanced, carefully thought out, expensive and almost perfect. Almost. Over the last few days I've been having sync issues. Without going into too much detail, I have two Macbooks - one powerful new one for DJing, and my previous older one for other stuff. I use the older one for day to day sorting out of tracks - beatgridding, tagging etc in order to keep the DJing laptop fresh and used only for what I bought it for. I then sync my music collection between the two via personal cloud so that changes on one are automatically copied to the other. This usually works pretty well (although recently it's been a bit slow), but over the last few days it's kind of come crumbling down. I'm not sure what I've done, but it's got confused somehow and isn't working properly. No data has been lost (I'm very, very careful about this sort of thing), but it's a headache that's stopping me from mixing. I'm reluctant to do any DJing when the collection isn't fully synced as I've lost data by doing that before, and it's currently copying the entire collection back on to both computers excruciatingly slowly. All I can do is wait, and hope it works. It's already gone wrong once which led to me having to start the whole process again, so here's hoping.
What this highlights, aside from my obvious incompetence at true geekiness, is a modern DJ's increasing reliability on technology, and their increasing vulnerability when it all goes pear shaped. Luckily I haven't had my equipment crap out on me during a live gig for a while (it happened to me during a competition once, it wasn't good - hence the expensive macbooks that I've used ever since) but this has been, and is continuing to be a pretty annoying experience. I would say it's making me yearn for the simpler days of two turntables, a mixer and a stack of vinyl, but it's not. Digital DJing offers so many more possibilities, and is definitely the way things are going. Don't get me wrong, there will always be a valid place for those who choose to keep it old skool, but with my limited budget I'd never be able to collect and mix the range of funky music that I currently can if it wasn't for digital. The digital DJing artform is very much still in its infancy, and problems like this are a fact for those of us near the edge of what's possible, but would I go back? No way!
But most of all, it's reminded me how much I love DJing - not being able to do it all week has left me at a loose end, and I'm itching to get back behind the (digital) decks and crank up the Funk again!
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