Prehistoric Disco DJ mixing

[Nano]

I don't know if this was already a topic, but what the hell... Marky seems surprised for there being DJs not counting BPMs in the golden days of disco. I went around DJs in my country at that time (and tried to be one myself) and never heard anyone talking BPMs, in fact I never knew that term until the "house" boom in the late 80's.
Right then, you just trusted your memory and sometimes "tested" mixes in your head before actually trying them (I'm sure I did!). And there was even a time when turntables with pitch control didn't exist...
And that's the point of this topic. I remember some tricks DJs used to alter the speed on their primitive turntables: like putting a paper towel (or better, a sugar envelope like the ones in coffe house's tables) between the disc plate and the base of the turntable, to make the plate reduce the speed a bit (the more you pressed it inside, the slower the pace). Or putting some heavy coins/metal stones over the disc itself (in the middle) for the same purpose. For speeding up? Nothing better than the old finger pushing the record forward in circles (wich required good pulse for the DJ).
Do you remember other tricks like these?

[Masdefi]

On 2002-10-14 11:34, Nano wrote:
I don't know if this was already a topic, but what the hell... Marky seems surprised for there being DJs not counting BPMs in the golden days of disco. I went around DJs in my country at that time (and tried to be one myself) and never heard anyone talking BPMs, in fact I never knew that term until the "house" boom in the late 80's.
Right then, you just trusted your memory and sometimes "tested" mixes in your head before actually trying them (I'm sure I did!). And there was even a time when turntables with pitch control didn't exist...
And that's the point of this topic. I remember some tricks DJs used to alter the speed on their primitive turntables: like putting a paper towel (or better, a sugar envelope like the ones in coffe house's tables) between the disc plate and the base of the turntable, to make the plate reduce the speed a bit (the more you pressed it inside, the slower the pace). Or putting some heavy coins/metal stones over the disc itself (in the middle) for the same purpose. For speeding up? Nothing better than the old finger pushing the record forward in circles (wich required good pulse for the DJ).
Do you remember other tricks like these?

ha ha ... very funny.. I have never heard of that.... the only thing I do is to put a paper between the turntable disk and the record in order to reduce the friction. But sometimes there's a record not perfectly plane (a little bit conical..) so the record won't start!!!!! It just slips on the plate: what to do in this case??????

[QUINNY]

In the UK BPMs became commonplace in 1979, after James Hamilton of the Record Mirror started quoting them on all the new Disco releases he reviewed. He was a fantastic record reviewer and ardent black music fan, blessed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the disco scene since the year dot.

With fixed speed turntables (which are what most discotheques had at that time), BPMs came into their own. The most effective way of mixing on these decks was to creep up by 1 or possibly 2 BPM with each record. The trick was to get the beats matching at the edit point by letting the next record catch up. 1 BPM difference was just about O.K for a short beat mix whilst the catching up took place. I always found physical handling of the turntable to be a recipe for disaster.

BPMs, not a perfect solution, but could be highly effective.

[totoman]

I used to love reading Record Mirror and particularly James Hamilton. I used to keep all the review pages he did and still have quite a few somewhere at home. It was the one Pop magazine that interviewed the soul/dance artists who were in the charts etc.

Whatever happened to James Hamiltn, he wrote for years in one of the magazines after the demise of Record Mirror then disappeared. The reviewers after seemed to mock him which I thought was really unfair.

toto

[PhyllisHyman]

Sadly James died a few years back. I too used to read his column. It was amazing when he started bpming every 8 bars so a bpm for a record would read 120-121.5-120.5-119.75 etc!

[DJ Jimmy M]

Well, I never count BPMs, i can tell an aproximate when I hear a song. When I mix i basicly make it work however and make the BPM's match and also, you can mix almost any music and any track together if you do it right..lol, for instance, I have mixed a mellow sad song (Hello Again by Neil Diamond) into "Call Me Tonight" by Cerrone and it went..rolf. All DJ's out there should study the arts of the great Bobby Viteritti and you'll see anything is posible if you make it work somehow.

DJ Jimmy M

[nrgbeat]

DJ Jimmy, I think we should make you an honorary "Trockie" along with Keefe and Marky.

[Nano]

Hey! I just remembered another trick I came to myself: mixing with a cassette deck. A DJ friend and I had some cassettes made at clubs by other DJs, some of them with tracks he didn't have in his vinyl collection, but we wanted to use them anyway. So we searched them, hitted "pause" and waited to fire them into the mix. Now comes the good part: if the tape song was too fast to mix, I lowered the "pause" key a little until it reached a point when the tape did pause, but the key didn't lock. Doing this and waiting some nanoseconds (self-pun intended) I let the key go up again and the tape starts again... This takes a little practice but you can make it syncro the vinyl speed: what you do, basically, is putting more space into the beat. I even used to mix tape-to-tape like this.

Nano (cheap DJ)

[NickNack]

On 2002-10-17 19:29, Nano wrote:
Hey! I just remembered another trick I came to myself: mixing with a cassette deck. A DJ friend and I had some cassettes made at clubs by other DJs, some of them with tracks he didn't have in his vinyl collection, but we wanted to use them anyway. So we searched them, hitted "pause" and waited to fire them into the mix. Now comes the good part: if the tape song was too fast to mix, I lowered the "pause" key a little until it reached a point when the tape did pause, but the key didn't lock. Doing this and waiting some nanoseconds (self-pun intended) I let the key go up again and the tape starts again... This takes a little practice but you can make it syncro the vinyl speed: what you do, basically, is putting more space into the beat. I even used to mix tape-to-tape like this.

Nano (cheap DJ)

Oh you weren't alone here. I remember those nights mixing from tables to reel-to-reels or cassettes. Guys would come in the clubs with demos. I used to lightly put my finger on the feed reel and 'drag' it until the beats matched. :grin:

[QUINNY]

Well Nicky you're gonna love this!!
In '84 the club i worked in invested in (among other things) a big screen video projection system. We were ordered to play at least 3 videos per hour. Screeeech!!!!!
Hold on a mo'.
Two major problems:
(a) Video players aren't instant start
(b) the sound quality in the early days was crap.

After a year or so I did manage to mix in the odd video, but it was so hit and miss.
To get over the sound quality issue, I'd buy the 7" and sync that with the video soundtrack live each time. That worked unless the video wasn't the 72 mix which quite often it wasn't.
Eventually, I did the transfer of Hi Fi sound at home and mixed 3 videos together (with jingles!). Then the video quality suffered! Arrrrghhhh!
To cut a long story short, it was fun, but damned hard work and a wind up for sure. About 3 months before I stopped DJing we had a LaserVision player installed. They were excellent quality, but not without their own specific problems.

[djoem]

all the double records so u can get the echo wax paper as slip mats, nickels on the arms for weight i would sit there and count beats with a stop watch lol those were the days :lol:

[PeanutVendor]

I think one of the things about starting out in the days before BPM and varispeed turntables was that you were forced to look for the musicality of the tracks - to use intuition, timing and musical synergy to create an adrenalin-causing 'change up' to the next song without the benefit of speed adjustment. I would liken this to being forced to learn to compute mathematical calculations in the days before pocket calculators were invented! It is an important brain-connection in the learning process that seems to be missing in the techno age.

I would not be without BPM's or my trusty 1200's now, but I do not regret having been forced by circumstances at that time into the discipline of having to go deeper into the musicality of the grooves in my head in order to get the effect on the dancefloor. Maybe every DJ starting out should be forced to do 6 months without BPM's or varispeed turntables to bring out their 'musical' side. That'll learn 'em !! 8)

[JussiK]

Like most who spinned back in 1977 I got started with no varispeeds. What I do remember distinctly were the coins and thinking what the fuck are those for. Also, right by the roll of toilet paper serving as cleaning equipment there was the metronome. Anyone else used those to try and detect the correct BPMs? James Hamilton did explain the use of them and stressed the proper way of starting the counting. - I used to scribble tried and tested seques on inner sleeves of albums or 12-inchers. Looking at those now there sure are titles I wish I hadn't programmed so much, like did the dancers really want to hear Instant Replay for 3 months?