*Photo by Alexander Synaptic (ektoplazm.com)

A story :::

Last month I DJed at a festival called Entheos which was located 2 hours north of Vancouver, Canada.  The uptempo music stage was inside of this dome (above).  My friend had his soundsystem inside here which means 10,000 watts of rich RCF power.  6,000 of these watts are from his six subwoofers, and for this event they were situated directly underneath the wood DJ gear surface (which doubled as a riser).

The bass from the subs was HUGE and as soon as I set my VCI 300, Macbook Pro and Newer Technologies hard drive down next to the CDJs I could feel ridiculous amounts of vibration going through all three of them.  I had never taken this gear configuration into a DJ booth with this much vibration running through it and I was indeed very afraid that something wouldn’t be able to handle it.  When I was setting my gear up, my hard drive walked itself off of the table twice!  Kudos to Newer Technologies for making an enclosure that can hit the dirt from 5 or 6 feet above and keep working perfectly.

It wasn’t until about half way through my two hour set that I realized everything was holding up fine.  All of these vibrations did not affect the VCI 300 performance one bit.  Nor was my laptop or hard drive affected (save for the hard drive taking two dives).  After this extreme experience, I now have the utmost confidence that my VCI 300 setup is going to perform without a glitch in any situation.

Further :::

I have been using the VCI 300 + Serato Itch combo since the beginning of this year and my overall opinion is that it’s solid.  Cuing and nudging with the platters is as good as on a Pioneer CDJ 1000 and searching for tracks using the circular buttons in the center is super fast and easy.  I love being able to mirror my iTunes organization in Itch!

There are three things that I can think of that can use improvement ::

1)  Pitch slider resolution isn’t as high as on the VCI 300 as it is on, for example, the Pioneer CDJ 1000 or a Technics 1200 turntable.  What this means is that you have to have a steadier hand when making very fine pitch adjustments on the VCI 300.  I have gotten used to this and oddly enough actually enjoy the slightly higher level of concentration it requires.  I like developing greater power of concentration, but I suppose some people don’t and hence the inferior VCI 300 resolution would be a bigger drawback for some than it is for me.

2)  Master output is quiet as compared to other sound interfaces.  I have listened closely and haven’t detected any difference in audio quality, however.

3)  All of my music is on an external hard drive.  If I forget to turn on said hard drive before launching Itch, all of the column customization (showing BPM, key, etc) of the Itch music browser I have done gets lost.  This happens more often than I’d like to admit and it takes me 10 minutes every time I forget to turn on the hard drive first to set the browser up again exactly the way I like it.

Conclusion ::

The Vestax VCI 300 + Serato Itch combo is a great value for the money.  The VCI 300 MKII has been recently released and they might have fixed some of these drawbacks above.  If you already are or are going to be doing traditional-style DJing, I would recommend this system wholeheartedly.  One of the best advantages over CDJs is that you don’t have to burn CDs and you can re-arrange your music however you like at anytime!  Burning CDs can take extraordinary amounts of time if you are getting lots of new music on a regular basis as a DJ often does.  And not being able to re-arrange your music when you have a much better idea of how to do it is supremely frustrating.

My first hardware review is going to be a big thumbs down for the Novation Remote 37 SL & the Automap softare.  I have had so many issues with this keyboard that it now lives in its box under my bed.

Below is a recent email that I wrote to Novation.  Unfortunately (and irresponsibly I think) my request to get my money back was turned down.

“I have had so many problems with my Remote SL ever the last year and a half of ownership that I have now had to get another keyboard.  I am a professional music producer and have a number of projects that need to be done and I can’t be spending hours trying to troubleshoot this controller.  I have already spend many hours with these four issues and a host of other issues that I’ve had in the past.

I ask that you please give me my money back for my Remote 37SL.  It cost me $660 Canadian dollars including tax in the summer of 2008.

FYI the issues that I have had don’t stem from the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing.  I understand the MIDI language and MIDI controller programming.  The problem I am convinced is that there are too many bugs located in the Automap software or the Remote SL firmware.  Or both.  I have had no problems with any of my other MIDI controllers.  Pretty much every problem that I have had with my software/workflow over the past year and a half has been solved by taking Automap or the Remote SL offline.  I do not exaggerate here.  No joke.”

-Oliver Giving