Last night I watched the DJ Techtools Kontrol S4 tutorial. I am still waiting for my S4 but wanted to watch the DVD in preparation. I was a vinyl DJ back in the 90’s but had to retire my 1210’s a few years back due to a demanding career and a growing family. The S4 will mark my return to mixing and I am as excited as a hammer at a nail convention.
I generally don’t spend money on educational products as I lack the attention span to sit and watch/read anything “learny” and consider myself to be smart (or dumb) enough to work things out for myself. I made this purchase as Ean’s approach and style on the youtube clips really resonated with me.
The DVD is an hour long and broken down into 16 sections, beginning with the basics of the unit and rapidly progressing through the major features. I have watched pretty much every S4 video on the net and while some of the material in the DVD is covered in clips you can download for free, the DVD provides a cohesive walkthrough of all the basics plus some tricks and tips I had not seen before. I would highly recommend the DVD to anyone who has just purchased an S4 or is waiting for its delivery. I intend to re-watch the DVD again when my S4 finally graces my home with its presence.
Ean is knowledgeable, charismatic and most importantly, real. As a Brit living in the USA I quickly tire of watching overly produced starchy Americans telling me what to do. Ean is someone you could foresee going out for a beer with. He is also very watchable and clearly knows his onions (and potentially other vegetables too). The editing is a little rough in places and the content jumps around a little but that wasn’t a problem for me. There are moments when things clearly don’t work out quite as planned but Ean rolls with it which does much to show his skills and the ability of the S4.
DJTT is apparently working on another DVD and I would love to see:
In-depth walk through of the effects, how to build up chain effects and mapping them to the controller. There is a youtube video by armyofone that walks through how to build a sweep. I would like to see Ean do a few like this.
Beatgridding with complex tracks. I have been using the demo version of traktor pro while I wait for my s4 and am finding beatgridding complex drum and bass beat patterns fairly challenging. Most of the videos out there concentrate on simple house tracks which is only semi-useful for me.
Track and playlist management. I have seen lots of discussion on this subject and while there seems to be no single perfect solution I would like to see Ean cover some of his approaches/ideas. For instance, Traktor + Itunes.
Controller customization/mapping.
S4 + with additional pieces of kit such as the Midi Fighter, Mashine etc.
I could go on but you all seem like a decent bunch of people so I will shut up now. I will put together more posts once I get the S4 and re-embark on my journey back into Djing. I will be using a Toshiba laptop so I know I am in for a fun time but my level 5 geek skills shall prevail (there’s that smart/dumb thing again). I have already created my dual boot system and have stripped the soon-to-be Traktor partition down to its bare bones. If any of you would like me to write about a specific aspect of my S4 learning curve – please let me know and I will see if I can oblige. I am not an expert or superstar DJ but would be happy to share my experiences if people are interested.
Thanks for the review Smitten i have just received my s4 last night enjoyed it and really loved the dvd and i would def. buy more if Ean would release another one specially if he keeps it up as in the 1st Dvd
Great first post, and i’m sure i’ll be bugging you sooner or later for some tips / help! As a beginner I picked up the S4 tutorial as well, although at a section or two it was a bit too fast for me and I had to go back and re-watch what had just happened, it is a great and worthwhile investment!
Support DJTT + learn! What more could you ask for .
I am waiting for the DVD too,since i will be ordering the S4 next month hopefully.
Watched the two clips from the DVD in youtube and i think it will be very useful to me.I love watching videos like that,so it will be entertaining too.
About that Sweep effect video,i have watched it before and it is awesome.I would love to see a future update of Traktor where they have included a White noise effect,but i don’t see it happening anytime soon.
am gonna try that out tonite will let u know how it went
until then this is how i did it in the past couple weeks
i have came up with a tricky way on the S4(actually a dumb way) i just record white noise for different lengths then play them as samples and add fx kinda of annoying specially that u need to put a shortcut playlist just for white noise to keep things organized but its the only method i could come up with since am new to digital djing
Although I haven’t tried it yet I don’t see why the effect cannot be configured on the S4. At the end of the day its just a set of midi commands and the S4 handles midi. For instance, I saw a post somewhere about freeing up the gain controls on the S4. I think once that is done (although I am sure you can use almost any nob)you could map everything Armyofone did to that nob. If I find the time (I have 2 year old…) and figure out how to do this I will post what I can. Let the games begin…
We should partake in a big nod of respect to ArmyofOne who came up with this in the first place. We need more people like her posting.
i totally agree and i have seen the same traktor mapping that removes/replaces the gain button not sure whom it belonged to (might be Armyofone’s mapping)
but i ignore how i could go further with that mapping and changing it to instead sweeps fx or white noise atleast (might require the super knob mod)
midi controllers are great but i think there might be some limitations from traktors software side not sure tho
P.s: i really appreciate & respect the work of people out there releasing midi maps for free, keep it up guys hopefully i can do same soon
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