I’ve been searching for a tape measure to make a drawing…
Done!
Just the basic dimensions. You can cut away stuff to accomodate gear/lighting/electric installation etc. You need to make a lid of some sort on the top side, buy that’s gear dependant, so I didn’t bother to sketch mine.
Boarderbas’s setup history
updated, see bottom of this post
As I enjoy reading other people’s evolving setups. I decided to browse some old HDD’s for my setup history.
First, let’s cover the “why”.
My brother and his friend used the basement of my dad’s office for spinning trance vinyl on gemini stuff. I was still listening to Nirvana and had NO interest in trance whatsoever.
I went to Berlin for a boy’s weekend out with my friends. One night got completely out of hand. I enden up in the infamoust “Maria am ostbahnhof” club at the centannial party of the “shitzkatapult” label. I am fairy certain somebody drugged me and I woke up enlightened to the minimal techno Nirwana.
After that I got into the Dn’B scene and listened to mostly underground and experimental electronic music every weekend. Started to go to psytrance festivals etc.
Then my study days were over, got a job, moved back to my home town, where I had loads of time on my hands. My brother went on a world trip and I promised im to entertain his friend whom he used to DJ with. He persuaded me to buy some stuff as well.
I allready knew I wanted to go digital, but decided beatmatching skills were the first step, so…
I bought two SL1210mkII’s in mint condition with ortofon concordes for way to little money, exploiting one very hung over seller, who started to grasp how low a bid he agreed on right about the moment I walked out of his appartment.
Pulled a similar trick on somebody selling the (legendary in NL) Dateq XTC mixer.
I stacked 6 still full moving boxes and got me a DJ booth. I have no pictures of it in full, but I made a picture of one of my homebuilt longboards on top of it.
Bought a crate of 100 very mediocre techno vinyl and learned to beatmatch and mix.
I designed a DJ booth and by some bizarre devine way, just before going to te other sode of the Netherlands I found a second hand add of somebody who had build exactly what I wanted, had exacly the same gear and lived in the town I was just going to drive to. So I came home with a DJ booth.
I never intended to become a vinyl based DJ, so after I was satisfied with my skills and had some money I decided I needed a XONE:3D. I had no clue what it did exactly, but saw some people doing stuff and having setups that I liked. So after a few weeks of hunting the secondhand pages it was there. Shortly after I moved to my GF’s appartment.
So there the 3D was. Tried to marry it to my Vista laptop but failed. Partly due to my inexperience and partly because of the 3D drivers I did not manage to get it to work. I used it as a mixer for more than half a year as I was traveling a lot for my work and did not have the time to tend to it. Then I decided it was time to either make it work or sell it. I installed xp on my mini 12 inch centrino laptop and got it to work finally!
Built my own (awesome) map. Then the sample decks and sampler came to traktor and decided I needed more buttons, so I used the 3D’s gameport connection to make a seperate controller for master gain and sampler:
After learning to work with the 3D, the lack of onboard soundcard channels started to annoy me. It has only 3 stereo digital channels. Also the Early versions of the 3D had the pots and encoders way to close to eachother, so I sold the 3D for a good sum and then bought an abused 4D for about the same. The 4D was cleaned and caressed to mint condition again.
So I bought a house, did a full rebuild of it and my GF offered me the use of the full attick for making a man-cave. Needless to say the booth ended up in the living room.
Repainted it and there it sits:
(more info in this thread DJ TechTools Forums)
My ultimate goal was to get into music production, so taking baby steps, I bought a Maschine.
It sat on top of the sl1200 decksavers for a while. It needed a stand. Christmas holidays gave me the time to make it. I wanted it half hovering over the right turntable.
I wanted it as low as possible, but that would not let me take of the TT dustcap, so I made it hinge (sorry, crap photo)
Next step was to make a second laptop stand…and get better pictures.
Wicked, I want my decks setup behind the tv like that, play cool visuals when having a party 
Cool history, thanks for sharing step by step details, always fun and educating to read how people got into it all and how it all progressed. Cheers, man!
Some insight on that homemade controller would be interesting.
Look in the 4D user manual. It provides a wiring scheme. It’s just a standard joystick port functionality to accomodate 4 buttons and 4 pots.
The thing I really like about the 4D is that it does not imply a workflow. It provides you with a selection of buttons, faders and knobs, footswitch control, more connectivity than you can ever need (even more if you are willing to open it up and replace some jumper settings, which they actually encourage in their manual!) and these seemingly useless things like a game port, which is just there planted as a little seed to spark creativity. You can hook up any analog controller up to it and it works. No driver, no soldering, no setting up. Genius.
It will not likely be outdated by software soon. There IS no software. It’s equally happy in controlling Reason as it is controlling Traktor. It just sends midi, and it does it really well.
Cool! Thanks.
Updated, see opening post!
Love the little MIDI thing standing on xone deck saver
Thx. It’s an easy thing to do. Actually there’s nothing Midi about it. Just switches and pots.
Updated the post a bit removing typo’s
What did you use as its “brain”? LeoBodnar’s circuit boards?
No brain needed, read the thread. The 4D has a joystick expansion port which allows you to directly connect 4 pots (2 joysticks x/y) and four buttons (joystick jump/fire). See attachment.
As far as I can tell, more elaborate joystick controllers use the Midi-in functionality of the gameport. The 4D only supports Midi-out.
The boards of Leo Bodnar are all USB. This is just a classic gameport like the one you’ll find on 80’s PC.
I do have some plans for a more elaborate controller. Using the 4 button signals as a 4-bit digital readout, up to 16 buttons are possible. The mapping required puts me off a little. I rather spend my time mixing.
I do not gig a lot, but whenever I do, the people running the gig love it as it controls my master volume. They just like the idea of being able to change the volume without bothering me mixing. Never happened they really did, they just like the idea.
Well, I’m a 90’s kid so IDK what a gameport is 
. Cool gadget nontheless!
Netjes hoor!
Looks great, man! I tried the upper deck down as low as possible but kept rapping my knuckles on cuing, etc. I’m assuming you use the jogs on the mixer for that? I ask because I’m in the abyss of setup indecision…
I’ve to yet extensively test it, but all seems ok. I do not use the jogs for scratching or beatmatching.
I’ve made the stand approx 10 cm higher. Temporarely fixed it and looked at my workflow on both Maschine and TT’s. Lowered it 3cm and repeated the process.
Finallydecided on the height. Then discovered it was too low for the decksavers, so I cut the chamfer on the profiles.
As for the Maschine positioning I am really, really happy. You should come and see!
And I should make better pics. It’s so much nicer as it looks right now.
@Tekki; Tja, dat moet wel, anders krijg ik moppers van de vrouw!
Hahaha, so recognizable! 
That’s why I am soooo glad with my mancave in the attic.
[family guy talk] Well I choose to have it in the livingroom. My GF watches soaps and knits while I jam with my headphones on. I’m not the guy to lock itself in its attick while the family is downstairs [/family guy talk]
The key to having it accepted was to buy my GF some records and give her her own section in the record holders below. Believe me when I say it hurts a bit when your professional DJ stuff, painstakingly layed out to drop the sickest beats is used to play ABBA or Grease, but its worth it!
updated the opening post
Added a second laptop stand, made some better pictures!
@ Mods: Can you remove the idiotic attachment thumbnails on the bottom of the OP? The attachments are long gone…