at the moment i have a pair of cdj 400’s djm 400, kontrol x1 and tsp. i was thinking of of selling off my gear and getting a controller because i have to pay off my tv and macbook. i also am more into the digital way of djing controllers really appeal to me. i just didnt want to buy them because no1 in my area uses them everyone is still rocking cdj 1000 and djm 800 and nothing else. thing is im from australia and we dont have many stores where i can test the gear. ive been looking at the vestax vci 100 and was gonna buy it untill i found out that the pitch faders are hopeles which makes beatmacthing difficult and apparently the vci 300 is much better for this. has anyone got some opinions on this? can you beatmatch on vci 100? and what is serato itch like? does it compare to traktor and is the sound good from the vci 300 it will only be used for bedroom use
Unfortunately I don’t use the vci’s so I don’t have anything constructive on that front, but as a side note when/if you decide to sell your djm 400 holla at me!
I’m also from aus and was in the same position before I bought controllers, I just watched as many vids and read as many reviews as I could and compared and compared and compared.. Not much else you can do if you can’t physically test them.
Pitch faders on controllers as a whole are pretty shitty but you can set the sensitivity good enough for a rough beat match and go from there. There are so many tricks you can learn to get around just mixing basically beat matched songs as well so it’s a bit of a trade off. - Just re reading what you wrote, they’re not hopeless in a sense that beat matching is hard, more that it’s no where near as accurate as say a cdj1000, may take some adjusting though like anything.
Good luck with your decision man, there’s a shit load to choose from so don’t get locked on one idea too quick!
I had CDJ 1000’s and a DJM 800, sold the lot and bought a VCI 300 and a Macbook Pro for about half the cash I got from selling them!
Went for the VCI 300 over the 100 mainly because of the pitch faders and the jog wheels. The pitch faders are incredibly fine and accurate and the jog wheels feel almost identical to CDJ’s.
Couldn’t be happier with it. I find it so much more fun to mix on than CDJs and so much more portable to take to parties.
I had planned to leave it at home and just bring my laptop to clubs/bars and use Serato Scratch Live with CDJs or 1210’s, but I love this thing so much I don’t want to mix on anything else.
I do sometimes get envious of the features in Traktor when I read articles on here as Itch is fairly basic but the advantages of the 300 are more important to me
As I said I haven’t used the vci’s, though wouldn’t you agree than most controllers leave a little bit to be desired on pitch faders compared to a cdj 1000? Considering there isn’t a lot of space on most controllers there is usually a smaller fader. As I said it’s not any more difficult to beat match, just not as accurate imo anyway
are the vci 100 really hard to beatmatch on? i was thinking of getting the dj tech tools version that has had the firmware update the only thing that is holding me back is the low bit midi signal. i dont want to be using sync all the time. if i bought the vci i would keep my x1 for effects and loops as such. and id have a fair bit of cash left over. i wish i could hire one from a store near me but none have them
