A compact, motorized DJ controller purely for scratching?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

A compact, motorized DJ controller purely for scratching?

I tried posting about this in the “Midi Fighter resources etc” section and my thread never seemed to get any attention, so I guess I’ll try talking about this here.

Ever since seeing the Numark NS7 and V7 I have been obsessed with them and have been wondering why more companies haven’t tried to make USB DJ controllers that actually provide their own momentum. Everything else out there just has a dead, static platter, or in the best of cases, it has a static platter but has a touch sensor on it so that it knows when it’s being touched in order to engage the scratching or stop the movement of the MP3 in the software. The VTT101 by DJ Tech (a company not related to DJTT) has this, but in my opinion it still can’t come close to a device that actually has perpetual rotation. They made a USB turntable for scratching timecode discs as well… and so does everyone else out there, and every time I go on places like the Traktor forums posting about this kind of stuff, that’s what I am told to get rather than continuing to hope and wish for the industry to cater to my personal wants, but I don’t have that kind of money nor do I have the kind of desk space to accommodate two 1200s plus a mixer, let alone the NS7 which, while small, is still pretty huge. I just want a small controller that is for one thing and that is scratching in Traktor (and at present, the NS7 and its new spiffy remake do not support NI’s software, only Serato).

I also recall messing around with a demo of a unit way way back in 2008 at a Guitar Center that used a laser to read the side of a moving platter, later found out this was the Technics SL-DZ1200.

Photos-01
Photos-011772×1772 210 KB

This thing was genius and I’m surprised more people didn’t try to copy it… I mean, basically what you have is a motorized platter with adjustable speed settings and a what amounts to the laser in an Optical Trackball Mouse reading the dots on the side of the platter.

I really wish that DJ Tech, or DJTT or anyone out there would make a compact controller for scratching that mimicked this kind of ingenuity. I mean, basically all you’d need is a housing the size of a Midi Fighter (or if that’s too small, the size of an Akai MPD18), a motor inside of it, a 45 record sized platter with a pattern of grooves on it and a laser sticking up from the housing to read the movement of the platter; what speed it’s moving at, whether it’s going backwards or forwards, etc etc… You wouldn’t even -need- a timecode disc because the grooves on the platter and the laser reading them would be what told the software where in virtual time it was at… hell, the disc wouldn’t even necessarily -need- to be 45 sized, it could be CD sized and still work fine, and the smaller the platter, the less motor strength needed to spin it around.

Why isn’t someone out there doing this already???
Seriously, why? Copyright / patent issues?

If some hobbyists out there can make something like this out
of an old discarded hard drive and an optical mouse’s laser

what’s stopping DJTT or someone from making something
like what I’ve been talking about???

EDIT:

Just now learned of the existence of the Stanton SCS.1

Holy crap, and here I thought the NS7 / V7 was the
only controller with motorized platters. If this came
in a 45 size, used USB instead of Firewire and had
its own crossfader, I would be in love…

2

I appreciate what you’re trying to get made, but I fear you’ve misunderstood how spinning platter controllers work.

There’s no lasers involved in the SL-DZ (except in the CD drive). It’s all mechanical.

Keep in mind that when you scratch, the platter itself should continue playing at a constant speed, and not move back and forth. Only the ‘record’ surface should be changing.

Any tech which reads platter movement would achieve nothing.

3

@Mojaxx - so what you’re telling me is that the SL-DZ did not use that little cylindrical nub with a laser in it in the left side to read rotation, so if it wasn’t that, then I’m guessing it worked more like the NS7, where the spindle is actually what’s being read (platter underneath continues to move, but the stopping or rotating of the spindle dictates the action). From what I have seen of homebrew stuff, though, it -is- possible to create a device where what is being rotated is scanned by an optical mouse’s laser.. theoretically, if you could make a device like that with a motor in it that gave it various speeds, and maybe had the laser scanning a secondary piece with a grained or grooved side that went on top of the base platter - then could it not be feasible?

My other thread probably asks for something even more unlikely…

4

FYI, the performance of the SCS1 was…unfortunate at best. It had all sorts of motor cogging issues, and the MIDI output was never supported well enough by any software to be good for scratching at all. As well, its discontinued, and the software will never improve.

Your best bet would honestly be to pick up a used V7 and call it a day. The scratch market is too small to ever support anything more (and I say this as a guy who has been scratching for 20+ years).

5

That -is- unfortunate… I just saw one on Ebay for $190, but knowing this and
the fact it’s confined to Firewire is discouraging. This seemed like the only real
bet for something with motorized plats that would also work in Traktor.

[quote=“Professorbx, post:4, topic:65106, username:Professorbx”]
Your best bet would honestly be to pick up a used V7 and call it a day. The scratch market is too small to ever support anything more (and I say this as a guy who has been scratching for 20+ years).
[/quote] - V7 was also discontinued, you’d think that since Numark brought out the NS7 II, they would make a MKII of the V7 as well and update it with the same stuff. Even if I managed to save up the dough for an NS7 II, or manage to find a V7 for cheap, I’d still be tied to Serato and would not be able to use Traktor, not unless someone out there manages to come up with a hack to make it possible. (There was a guy named Quartz who had been working on a workaround, he eventually gave up because it was only a non-public beta in which this was ever possible… an associate of his, Hedgehog, took up the reigns and is trying to get it to a point where it’s useable, but so far I haven’t heard much about that.)

You know what, forget the motorization aspect… if the Midi Fighter guys could just put out a unit with a static jog that had a pressure sensor to let it know how aggressive / gradual you want your stop / grab to be, I’d be satisfied with that… I saw this for really really cheap on Ebay. Review: DJ-Tech VTT-101 Mini USB Scratch Controller - Digital DJ Tips But haven’t heard much good about it… apparently the jog is anything but hi-rez.

6

I know it’s not “compact” buuuuut:

3900_top.jpg
3900_top.jpg460×514 57.4 KB

7

It’s nice, it has motorized platter, but… it’s massive.
And it’s in the range of $800… u.u

8

The Denons are big (10" platter) and no cheaper than a TT and TSP, but they are nice :slight_smile: (I’ve got a pair of 3700s)
Iirc Hedgehog was running an NS7 with Serato to play Traktor timecode signals into TSP as a workaround for the NS7 or V7.

As a cheap alternative the Tonetable app isn’t bad but you still need to shell out for TSP and will probably end up buying a TT or motorized CDJ and scratching with timecodes eventually.

9

Last I recall he was working on a legit solution to getting Traktor to read the NS7 platter properly.

http://www.skratchlounge.com/index.php?/topic/11554-ns7-ns7-ii-traktor/#entry100615

10

Here lies a problem: Motors with the torque required are big and heavy.

another of the problems is that in order to use a tracking/encoder based system that you are limited by regular old midi so accurate scratching isn’t possible (at least with Traktor) unless HID or 14bit midi is implemented and enabled I believe ?

I came up with a concept of using a hollow motor shaft, set the traktor deck on pause and the encoder rotation would move the playhead forward/back however the motors and motor controllers themselves are pretty damn expensive for a proof of concept, and I just tested it with a cheap encoder but it worked - albeit really stuttery .

Another idea that might work in a system was the Tascam TTM1 or something along the same lines that outputted directly into a computer (or sound card!) however i don’t believe anyone ever got one working over USB (although some were trying).

The beauty of that simple concept was that you only needed a platter surface (of any kind) and sit the TTM1 on the side of the turntable - to was just an encoder unit that converted the data into a readable format for the vestax cdx5.

But damn they wuz ugly !

11

get yourself a proper turntable, period. There is no point in trying to mimmick the real deal, it’s never gonna be the real thing.

Besides, why don’t you get yourself a small Controller like the kontrol S2, s4 or one of the serato DDJ-S series, if you really only wanna scratch you can do just fine on that, there is no need for a moving platter especially if you’ve just started learning to scratch

also what’s the problem with being tied to serato? I have both Traktor and serato and use both for Gigs, depending on my mood.

have some delicious static platter scratching:

12

There is NOTHING limiting about “regular old MIDI”, and absolutely no reason why accurate scratching can’t be possible using it. The problem isn’t MIDI, it’s the software developers not selecting and supporting a standard for high resolution platter messaging.

13

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=500292700064&set=o.446440350014&type=3&theater -
^Watch this… and then feel sad that it was never pursued.

“Quartz: The true performance comes in when the HID support is added. No one is saying anything, except Numark claims Q1 support for the NS7 in Traktor. That’s all I know for right now. One of the biggest reasons I started this project was to show how much power the NS7 standalone can have with Traktor over Itch. All the myths that were floating around about Itch being the only app to be able to provide low latency and tight platter control needed to be smashed. So, to re-iterate what I did, the beta I’m demonstrating (in the FB video) has HID controls available in it. So I’m still using 98% midi for everything, I would say even 99%. However, the 1% - 2% of HID control was used for platter control and a few minor mixer controls, due to direct mapping.” I had the platters, everything working but it wasn’t available to the public at the time and was based on the old Traktor Pro."

From what I gather, the -only- reason that Traktor support for the NS7 fell through was because whatever piece of code in the non-public beta of TSP that DJ Quartz was using got abandoned. It’s really bizarre to me, considering all the hype (screencaps of said hype were in that link to that thread on Skratchlounge) that both Numark and N.I. had going about platter support for the NS7. I can only speculate as to why though… to me it seems apt to compare N.I. with Nintendo, and Numark + Serato with Sony - during ye old “Snes Playstation” debacle. N.I. realized maybe it wouldn’t be so much of a good thing for them if support for the NS7’s motorized plats -did- happen, and just stopped trying.