Controllerism 101
Hey guys,
I’ve been DJing for about 2 years using a Serato + Turntable setup. Learnt to scratch and beat juggle quite well but after watching Ean do his thing, controllerism looks really interesting!
I’ve got the Dicers but looking at some more serious midi gear to learn on. Any recommendations?
the standard would probably be a Traktor Kontrol S4 because of its tight integration between hardware and the Traktor Pro software. both were made by native instruments, after all. there’s a 1 to 1 correspondence between what’s on the screen and what’s on the controller.
the great thing with controllerism is that traktor is completely mappable. all you really need is a decent amount of buttons & knobs and some imagination. for example take a look at dj storm eagle’s custom mapping for the numark total control. it’s a fairly limited piece of hardware but with a little creativity he’s able to get a lot more out of it. (http://www.djstormeagle.com/midi-mapping.html, checkout the youtube video).
check out all the djtechtools articles and videos, ean really pushes the limit with what’s possible. read a lot, practice a lot, and try new ideas. there’s no limit with controllerism.
You need to get a Midi Fighter (or two) 
there’s a midifighter mapping for Serato as well.
Like to see someone push limits on a Gemini first mix or whatever it called 
I didn’t really pick up on the Serato bit sorry. I’m not all that sure a midi fighter will offer much more than Dicers when using it with Serato. Faust and Shorti did a nice little routine with an X1 and Serato, but in the end I think what you really want is the incredible midi mapping capabilities of Traktor.
agreed!
+1 on stormeagle… I use an omni control which is basically a metal cased total control with a soundcard.. And after near enough making my own mapping I came across stormeagles which perfected my ideas by like 1000, for such a basic controller the guy really got creative and made it so everything can be controlled without touching the keyboard… Including effect select.. Song select.. Toggling stuff like cruise mode, snap and quantise.. To a feature I only recently after like a year of use figured out I had which is fine bpm adjustment which is done by shift button and jog wheel. Very good mapping if you ask me made me keep my controller
Dicetools opens up the Dicer a little but the size of the thing still limits it alot. Can’t really get much fun out of it.
Seems like Traktor is the way to go for Controllerists! This might end up being more expensive than i thought..
So should i just bite the bullet and get Traktor + Midifighter?
if you already own dicers, just make a mapping for them in traktor.
i was able to get a solid 4 deck control set up.
my goal for the summer is to take the djtt mapping and expand on it. for full 2 deck control.
not too hard. i just need to delete a loop roll button (1/3) and make it a shift key that activates the next set of layers.