A couple weeks ago, we featured a DJ set by UK's King Cannibal, who uses some sophisticated techniques to digitally mash up his sets. Here is a video of Daedelus, another Ninja Tune artist who's making the most of digital DJing technology.
I'm no expert, but at a glimpse, homey's using two monome controllers [I'm not sure what the Akai controller is for] and a laptop that's most likely running Max/MSP.
The small monome is used as his mixer. He can control at least 2 channel inputs, and do some interesting things with auxillary effects. By shaking it around, he can control time and maybe amount of Delay. He's got a VU meter reading at the far right (which is bouncing up and down).
The large monome is kinda complicated, but he's gotta have a section devoted to recalling presets-- maybe that's the cluster of four cells at the top left. When he hits the left column, he's triggering a sample. The dot moves across the board and tracks individual samples as they play on their own row, synced with the global BPM. (I'm assuming dots move across some rows faster because the length of the actual sample is smaller-- so a loop that's 2 beats long will loop 2x as fast as one with 4 beats) The cool thing, though, is that not only can he trigger individual segments of individual samples, hence the stuttery beat-cutting, he can also re-loop that shit.
Usually loopers only let you loop from start times that are set, so back in the day, Scottie, Booman, and all these other dudes had to 1. figure out the BPM of their samples 2. maybe change the speed of the whole sample to fit a different BPM 3. cut the sample into like 8 segments and take it from there-- for each sample you wanna use!
So, at the touch of a button, this dude can "freeze" one loop at a time (or another way of thinking about it is that he's making "sub-loops") as he brings in new loops, all on different beats, and his totally sweet controller is giving him a graphic user interface that lets him keep track of each loop, switch them all up, and look like a wizard as he remixes on the fly.
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