Anyone scratch in here? If so what are you like with your 2 click flairs (or anything more than 2 click), but NOT using 2 fingers to achieve it? This has always been a problem for me, when its to a fast bpm my wrist goes stiff after doing it a few times in succession. To like around the 80 bpm (or 160bpm as you can use the half time tempo) its fine, but around the 130bpm mark its nightmare. I always gotta use 2 fingers to achieve it repeatedly if I want clean cuts. So many people bust out 2 or 3 click flares without needing to use 2 or more fingers (technically anything more than 2 fingers is a crab), and they do it with such ease. Just wondering if anyone suffers the same problem as me or if not can you lend some advice on any exercises I can do to keep my wrist loose enough to not have to use 2 fingers.
I can transform no problem all day long, but the 2 click is pretty much double the speed.
ITS SO FRUSTRATING!
Practice. That’s the name of the game. Believe me, anybody can skratch like anybody, just some people need more practice than usual. I thought the exact same thing with the triple click. Keep at it and you’ll get it.
What helps me achive any skratch is practice at around 70 bpm, then move up 1 more bpm every minute. If you stumble at say 90bpm, go back down 10 bpms and work your way up again.
I just tried it and I can go on and on with 77bpm. Only 8 or so bars on 85 before my wrist/arm starts to really burn. I’m very rusty and I’m on my VCI-300, which the crossfader cut aint great. Gotta go to work, but when I get back, I’ll see if I can upload a video.
What you should also check is the height of your mixer and decks. Too high makes me worn out quickly. I am finally at a stage where my scratching does not sound shit anymore. My mates are actually digging it…haha. Thats a step up for me. I can only use my right hand on the mixer to cut. Not the other way round. But thats ok with me. I aint going to be entering any DMCs.
When i was first learning the 2 click flare i had a really hard time but, what helped me is i learned how to do tears first then tried one click gestures to transform the tears, got good with it, moved to 2 click transform tears. and then re-tried the the 2 click flare. its really all about your timing and thinking about when to open and close the fader. best advice is just keeeeep at it. remember…pull back and close fader at the end of sample, push forward and re-open close to the begining of the sample. hope this helped!
Amen lol, theres not really a whole lot of talk about scratching around here which is a shame, hope to see more of it
If anyone thinks they can cut up good and wants to do a post/video about some scratching techniques they are more than welcome to contact me and ill help organize it !
Any scratch heads in London?? I’m fucking dying to hook up with someone in order to learn from each other. I got one pal who is really good but is proper flakey. I know another dude, who across the board (scratching, mixing, use of equipment, tune selection) is probably the best up and coming DJ I’ve ever seen. He lives in my town but he’s one of these ultra too-cool-for-school kinda guys that doesn’t hook up with anyone.
Better still, if there’s a few peeps wanna hook up as a group I’m bang on renting a rehearsal space once a month or some shit, purely for scratch improvement.
Yeah! Def looking forward to learning some shit from ya’ll. I played musical instruments my whole school career and miss that rocking out performing part of it. DJing has always felt like i was just playing someone elses tunes. Now…with going digital and getting my scratch on…it finally feels like my own thing going down. Fuck yeah baby!
[quote=“BentoSan, post:12, topic:8548, username:BentoSan”]
Amen lol, theres not really a whole lot of talk about scratching around here which is a shame, hope to see more of it
If anyone thinks they can cut up good and wants to do a post/video about some scratching techniques they are more than welcome to contact me and ill help organize it !
[/quote] As soon as i can get a high quality camera around me i will definately have a tutorial for crabbing,chirps,flares, click orbits, and tears up.
also guys, watch DJ Shortee’s tutorial videos on youtube. She makes the explanation of how to pull off techniques very easy to follow. I promise if you listen to what shes saying and practice (spaced out sessions so you dont wear yourself out on the same scratch) you’ll see results very very quickly. For you guys on here scratching timecode watch those markers on your records!. for you VCI300 scratchers, watch the digital decks with markers not the waveforms! waveforms will handicap you eventually. listen for the scratch dont just move your hand in gestures that seem like theyd make a good sound. damn…im so happy im not the only one on here!
Yeah, the lack of a decent camera is in my way too. I have my laptop’s built in cam, a 3.1MP Canon that can take like 30 seconds of crappy video, and my phone which takes crappier video yet, LOL!
Any brilliant ideas on how to make decent video without $$ is much apprieciated!
There’s a bunch of things I’ve been wanting to share with the community for a while, but…
I agree with what everyone has posted above. It has a lot to do with the height of your equipment, style of crossfader and plenty of practice. I never really had anyone to show me scratching when I started out and there weren’t any videos(or internet) to show me the way. I simply listened to a scratch and tried to emulate it(very tedious process..lol) Now…I’m no Q-Bert, but I could do a few things here and there. Now that I don’t scratch as much, I find my shit isn’t as sharp as it was, but it’s starting to come back. Try to over-exaggerate the moves, making them painfully slow until you can do a few without mistake. Slowly increase the speed until you’re comfortable and so on. After a while, you’ll be stabbing on songs that are well over 130bpm(“ghettotech” for me). Also, there are plenty of videos around that break it down too. Good luck…glad to see there are some more “scratch” guys on here.
