Why 7-inchers?

[JussiK]

A massive 3 day house event next door (Carl Graig etc) and yet, Disco Obscura was packed from midnight till late. Crowd: 18-30 yrs, hipsters, scenemakers, goths, punks, club kids. The objective was to make them go what's the word in english, apeshit? with a relentless onslaught of banging 70's stuff treated like brand new music, only using as many 7-inchers as possible. Quite a few djs into alternative disco now think that 7"s actually work better on the floor than full long versions during the peak hours as they get right to the essence of the tune for instant maximum effect. You can also get more variety and title changes into the set. More quick mixing, more mad energy. And the scheme worked. Stomping and screaming, plus kids rushing up to take photos of the spinning labels. There were people furiously fingering their mobiles too, connected to Discoqs, Ebay etc. - I actually should have gone to the 136 bpm range right away but as "Assassination" by Calderon and Miro's peerless "Safari Of Love" simply had to be spinned, the very beginning of my set was midtempo and full long versions of everything. When the beats hit past 128 at 2 in the morning it was time for the 7-inch stuff for the rest of the night with few lp&12" cuts here and there in cases of having to wipe a brow and breathe for a minute. Playing the 45s gets tough after a while. I was a total wreck the morning after. Still, in the future it'll be more and more of stuff like:
I Romans: Squadra Speciale
Analisi 91: Disco Magic
Gloria Guida: La Musica E
David Byron: African Breeze (Uriah Heep guy goes serious disco)
El Tigre: Figure
Barbarella: Queen Of Love
Midnight Stud: Gloria
Lions: Football
New Paradise: Showman
RB Company: Surprise (instrumental)
Crupo C : Culto De Amor
Sluggers: Pigalle
Tonet - Memo

David Byron: "African Breeze"

[Bernie]

Jussi,

Excellent point. There is definitely something to be said about 7 inch singles not being overburdened with extended intros... and just featuring the heart of the song. My only gripe with 7" vinyl was the horrible sound quality of most pressings.

Thanks for sharing your playlist!

[JussiK]

Jussi,

My only gripe with 7" vinyl was the horrible sound quality of most pressings.

Paradoxically, if a 45 has a crappy sound quality it actually works better on the floor now, as the kids go for a raw gritty feel. The synths need to drill right thru their heads at extreme volume. I don't know...makes my ears hurt.

Yep, 45s are fun but just to break the formula it's also wise to suddenly go into a 16 minute monster like the original South African lp version of Soweto's African Warrior, and let it run all the way thru. The Warrior is quite the track actually, with incredibly fast fiery percussion breaks. This has the same afro-with-synths vibe as the David Byron track. Makes them groove and jerk insanely. One goth lolita girl danced so hard her elaborate black&purple Victorian dreadlock headpiece started to fall apart.

[skiddlybop]

Jussi, thanks for starting an informative and thought-provoking discussion. After reading and re-reading Vince Aletti's indispensible "The Disco Files, " I realize that 45s and non-remixed album tracks tell so much of the story of early disco, when it was the most diverse and unpredictable, and DJs had to scour their own collections and shop weekly for anything special. You can't get by with just the long album version of "I Like What I Like." Really, one needs the 45s of "Brothers and Sisters" and "Somebody's Gotta Go" -- which I found around 1980 at Joseph's Tape World in Brooklyn, along with a complete sealed Aretha Franklin album collection and a "Soul Makossa" 12-inch.Wonder where that JTW store stock went...Shoppers?

[drlove]

...and as I began my disco collection in earnest around 1991, when I was a near-minimum-wage office worker paying off college debt .....7-inchers were always LOWER-PRICED than the albums at thrift stores and rummage sales ......were much easier to store ......and when playing 'em, you could stack a dozen of 'em up on a 45rpm adaptor and play tunes by different artists consecutively without having to approach the stereo each time. Can't quite say the same for the 12-inchers.

[BrunoRepublic]

My only gripe with 7" vinyl was the horrible sound quality of most pressings.

This tends to be more of a problem with American pressings, since a lot of them used styrene (ugh!) instead of vinyl for 7" records, and that stuff wears out fast. 7" records can actually sound fine if they're decent pressings (admittedly, they often are not) and have been well-cared for (again, they often are not). Granted, many 7" records are much more compressed than their 12"/LP counterparts, but that squashed sound does have its fans. Then again, that's still far more dynamic than most recordings mastered in the past ten years.

What I would imagine would be tricky is mixing with 7" singles, both from the smaller size of the format, and the much shorter intros.

[JussiK]

Mixing with sevens can be fun. Best to think ahead with a couple of key seques practized at home. For the rest, slipcue. There's no other way for most of us really, it's not like there's more than one Jerry Bonham. But if you bring enough stuff with the same sound & speed, a passable set is not that hard to accomplish. It's not going to be 100% smooth but what it'll lack in finesse it'll gain in energy. The kids don't expect a precise performance if they see you do it with 45s. To keep spinning like that for more than a couple of hours max is very difficult, though. But then again, after that the crowd probably don't mind if the whole thing makes no sense anymore anyway, as long as you keep it Loud.

Below is a mix spinned with mostly 7-inchers plus a couple of shortish album tracks. No currently en vogue South American prog/psyche cuts there though, unfortunately, like there is in the more aggressively buzzing Notteke surf disco mix.

http://overfitted.ddcr.biz/?s=zoom+mix

[skiddlybop]

ITA, Bruno, and I have 45s of "You've Got the Power" by Su Kramer and a"Go Away Little Girl" by Steve Lawrence that could be pictured in the dictionary next to the definition of "cue-burn." I've more or less erased that problem by doing needle-drop vinyl-to-CD transfers in recent years with an Ortofon OM-Pro cartridge and stylus, which is relatively easy on your records when back-cuing to make trim your recording the neatest.