As usual, DJ Timofey in Russia is up to some business telling Radio NRJ about his current work and future productions at his label 17:44. Always wrapping things up at the radio station, Timofey busts out one his favorite Dbmlabs shirts, Paired Down Tee. Dbmlabs DJ Clothing out to represent!

Правда О_Dj Timofey from promo-ak on Vimeo.

Timofey had the chance to be in a national radio show in Russia and talked about his DJing and producing work. Props to him for sporting our Headspin shirt while mixing and interviewing with Russian Tv. I don’t what he’s saying but he sure damn looks good! Check out his super popular youtube page where he discusses producing and sampling in Ableton. He’s got 2.2 million views and 5,000 subscribers on his Timofey Youtube Page. He’s also produced several super dope house/electro tracks with his label 17:44 so he’s definitely working his talent.  Not only is he working on his own label, but he’s also supporting our Dbmlabs DJ Clothing label as well!

Our boy from the UK busted out a new single that will knock your socks off.  He samples Stephanie Mills in his new dance track and drops a little rhythmic indulgence to the sample.  I personally love what he did with it, it’s simple, elegant and Mrs. Mills would respect what he did with it. Take a listen below and feel free to download it here or from his website

LISTEN BELOW!

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Download here: Liam Keegan – I’ve Never Felt (Original Mix)

Liam is rocking the decks at Club ?? (not sure where actually!) wearing our Dbmlabs Brand Waves Tee.

A-Trak, well known amongst his peers as a DMC scratch champion, party rocker, Kanye’s DJ, and a gamut of other things, he goes on record with NPR to talk about the new generation of djing and how technology has changed the way DJ’s play. It’s a great listen, especially coming from NPR. It’s fun listening to people ask questions who don’t really know much about the industry and their interest in this new fad that is bringing djing to the mainstream.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/03/04/134259890/dj-a-trak-explains-how-serato-works

For those of you too lazy to click on the link, I’ve blockquoted what he’s said below:

“The record that you put on the turntable has a tone rather than having music. But that tone has a time code that a computer can read. The turntable first sends the tone to the computer. On the computer you choose what song you want to assign to each turntable. On the computer you say, ‘My left turntable’ — which is just a virtual turntable — ‘will be playing this Kanye West record.’ The computer receives the tone from the record, which says, ‘Right now the needle is at 1:32 into the record moving forward.’ So the computer produces that music and sends it back to the mixer and then once it hits the mixer it becomes the same as the traditional setup. It goes back to the signal path where the mixer receives music from the turntables and mixes them a certain way.

“Everything that you do on a record is reflected the same way as if it were a real record. If you increase or decrease the pitch on the turntable, which is what you do when you mix records, that information gets transferred as well. The timecode that gets sent to the computer says, ‘I’m playing at pitch plus two percent.’ And the [computer] gets that information and produces the music accordingly. If you scratch a record, which just means that you’re moving a record back and forth, well, you’re moving the time code back and forth and that time code gets sent to the computer. And the timecode says, ‘On this specific part of the song, the record is going ‘Forward, backwards, forward, backwards.’ And it goes: ‘Chr-prt, chr-prt’ and it sounds like a real scratch.”

How it changed everything:

“The tiniest reflexes that go through your mind when you’re playing a set and thinking of your next songs — these little mini thought process that you’re not even conscious of — are completely different when you’re looking through a list of titles on a computer compared to physically flicking through records with album covers that tell you what the song is before you even have to read the full name. So there was a process of getting used to DJing and also a process of building up a library of music.

“Part of what made the switch to digital quicker and easier was I did a couple of big file trades with a couple of DJs. You would meet up with another DJ and you had a hard drive with a certain amount of gigs of mp3, and just swap. Then suddenly you’re like, ‘Whoa, this guy just gave me a folder of like 200 a capellas.’ That’s a great arsenal. And quickly one thing that became very apparent to me was that right as I started doing a couple of these trades that in a matter of moments would quadruple the size of my song library, I also started accumulating music in a lot of different genres. So if I’m doing a trade with a DJ who knows dancehall really well, and [I say], ‘You know what, I don’t have a dancehall collection, can you give me your folder of like the essential songs if you’re going to do a dancehall set?’ And suddenly I had a dancehall set. I had an ’80s set. I had a classic soul set. So quickly it became apparent to me that DJing on Serato would allow DJs to jump between different genres a lot more easily.”

Still, it took a long time to convince everyone else.

“I was Kanye [West]‘s tour DJ for four years, and the entire music of the show rested on my shoulders. It took a while for me to convince his team to let me use Serato because again, everyone was like, ‘What if the laptop crashes?’ In the earlier days of hip hop, of course, the DJ would play the instrumental track off of vinyl and the rapper would rap on top of it. But sometimes vinyl would skip and it was just kind of part of going to see a rap show. When I was growing up in the ’90s I would go to a rap show and there would be a part where the needle skipped. Part of being a live performing rapper was knowing how to still keep rapping when your DJ’s needle skips. It’s funny when you think about it today. And then at some point in the mid-’90s the first change was DAT machines. A DAT tape deck isn’t that big. So there was a point in the mid-’90s where every rap show had a DAT tape deck playing the instrumentals. But they’re a pain in the ass to use. You have to rewind and fast forward the tape. It was very slow.

“Here’s the weird part, though. Rap shows started using this machine called the Instant Replay, which isn’t meant to be used for live music performances at all. The Instant Replay was a machine that was made for radio station IDs. It’s a machine that has 50 buttons, and you can record any audio you want and assign it to these various buttons. You hit number twelve and it plays [in radio DJ voice], ‘Hey, you’re listening to KBBL.’

“I think Cypress Hill was the first band to think of this: rappers went to radio stations and were like, ‘What’s this machine you’re using to trigger all your audio?’ And they started using it for live shows. It’s also an extremely rugged machine and it was really loud. Rappers like loud sounds. So for all these reasons combined, for years and year every rapper was using this instant replay machine. This big machine with 50 buttons that could trigger all their instrumental tracks. And when I started working with Kanye, his show was on an instant replay machine.

“I hated that machine. Because as a DJ, it gave me no flexibility at all. You couldn’t even pause on it and you couldn’t start from, you know, the second verse or whatever. All it could do was play something from the beginning, so if we were rehearsing and they’d be like, ‘Let’s start over from the second chorus,’ I’d be like, ‘Stupid machine.’ But it was extremely reliable. So for that reason everybody felt confident about having that as the backbone of the music on the show. So for the first year I was touring with Kanye, my setup was an Instant Replay on the right with all my instrumental tracks, and then I had one or two turntables and a mixer with Serato which I would just use for scratching and little transitions and effects and things that I would do on top. And I had to negotiate for a long time, like: ‘Guys trust me, we can do the whole show on Serato.’

“And eventually, after about a year, we did, and actually it did mess up a few times. But it gave us so much flexibility that everybody was still okay with continuing to use it and as time went along the software itself became more and more reliable and now everybody runs their show off Serato.”

DJ Shiftee sent us this film of him performing in the great state of Kentucky wearing our Paired Down Shirt that just recently came on. Oh Oh so comfortable! Ahhhh yea. If you haven’t already, check out his site at www.djshiftee.com where he showcases his travels around the world performing his new sets with his new equipment. You know he’s having a good time when he’s clapping his hands while in the midst of mixing another song..damn boy!

It’s been too long since we released a new shirt so we’ve released our new Paired Down Tee on our site. A shirt that speaks to roots of being a DJ, producer and remixer. Stay cool, stay protected and stay equipped with the Dbmlabs Paired Downtown Shirt! Printed on super soft 100% cotton ringspun tee.