vci-300 mk 11 or S4 for djing organic/irregular rhythms?

[eleven11]

Over the last 3 years I've been putting together sets for dance workshops that I lead, using the edit options on itunes to get something close to a fluid mix. Considering the extremely limited options with itunes I do well with it and people love to dance to the sets. I've been following this site and reading the forum for about 6 months and I'm nearly ready to buy a controller to move into the live djing, but I have a few questions that I'd love some input on.

I'm considering either S4 w/Traktor or VCI-300mk 11 w/itch

Here are my specific djing needs/desires

1. My sets have a wide range of music - world music, drum and bass, breakbeat, hip hop, downtempo, blues, leftfield and more. The tempo changes a lot over 2 hours, sets start off slowly, and build into very fast psytrance, d&b etc, then drop down back into really slow stuff at end

Which controller/software combo does best with sets that have wide variance in tempo and mixing songs from world music etc that might have irregular rhythms and not be on an exact beat

2. Although I appreciate the potential that's offered by all the options with the S4, in the near future I would mostly be happy just to mix great music well. Don't see myself spending a ton of time learning about effects in the first months as I prefer to spend the limited time I have searching out great music to dance to, but also don't want to spend months getting used to itch if I'm going to outgrow it too fast.

3. I have all my sets organized in itunes. Is the new traktor pro as good as itch with itunes integration?


thanks for sharing your experience

Luke

[Ando]

the vci 300 offers you the basics you want. If you aren't eager to learn effects and dont need more than 2 decks the s4 will be more than you want/need.

i have never used itch, but i used serato at a friends side and really liked the tight integration of itunes, i still miss that in tp2. you have all your playlists in itunes, you will be annoyed when integrating them into traktor.

maybe someone else can tell you something about the pitch range and if itch can handle 30bpm steps.

and should you decide to take the vci 300 and you want to play with effects at some point: Vestax VFX-1

[Poulet Blanc]

I think for your style a VCI-300 is more usefull, and it's alot cheaper.
Super cheap VCI 300... http://www.tonecontrol.nl/nl/product...estax-vci-300/

[thisisian]

If you come from a background of mixing on turntables, & riding the pitch fader for tracks with varying BPM's. Then the VCI 300 is as close as i've got to using turntables & a simple two channel mixer on a (non motorised platter) controller.

The S4 is great (I have one, but used to own a VCI 300), but it doesn't feel as "turntabley" as the VCI.

[haze324]

VCI-300 and Itch is MUCH more user friendly when playing multiple genre's.

Also the BIGGEST advantage of using Itch over Traktor with that type of music is the beatgrids are elasitc. Meaning if you have a sont that has a 117bpm and at some point it drifts into 118, then 118.5 then back to 117. You can set the grids to those tempos' and sync your tracks. With Traktor you can only have a grid set to 1 BPM, 117 throughout in other words.

[VirtualLogic]

Have u considered mabey the numark ns7 ?? It would be a beast for multiple genre mixing

[Ando]

VCI-300 and Itch is MUCH more user friendly when playing multiple genre's.

Also the BIGGEST advantage of using Itch over Traktor with that type of music is the beatgrids are elasitc. Meaning if you have a sont that has a 117bpm and at some point it drifts into 118, then 118.5 then back to 117. You can set the grids to those tempos' and sync your tracks. With Traktor you can only have a grid set to 1 BPM, 117 throughout in other words.

you can have multiple beatgrids in one song in traktor, but you have to set them by hand.

[eleven11]

thanks for the information and advice - I appreciate the time you took to help me out

just went ahead today and ordered the vestax 300 mk11

hopefully the learning curve on it is fairly quick, and I'll be ready to use for festivals I'm playing at in a couple weeks here in Northern California

cheers

~~Luke

[Grifff]

I bought the 300 mk2 in about January. I was recently having a bit of buyers remorse because of all the hype I've seen about the S4, especially when I saw that the Kontrol S4 was selling for $899 (which is about £550)

Overall it's a good little controller and it hasn't failed me yet. I can't really comment on the S4 though because I've never used one