30 Years of the CDJ | The Tech That Revolutionised DJ Culture
They showed me the very first CDJ that they had, and I was like, “Whoa!” Suddenly I stopped using vinyl. I think that was the point where I thought, okay, this is the future. When the first CDJs came out, I was three years old. My first impression was kind of like, “What? Oh, that doesn't sound too cool or whatever.” This is, like, the best way to deejay.
Like, I don't want a laptop. I don't want anything else. I just want to plug my USB in and use these for everything I need. It was the beginning of creating an industry standard.
Felt like such a big jump. The evil sync button. I mean, it's a thing that I really detest. Where can you go?Where? What else do we need? That beautiful black box has evolved into something quite special. Oh.
I like that. I think the first people that I ever heard of having CDJs was some DJs that had a really popular radio show in LA called The Baker Boys. When the CDJ 500 came out, I was just a little know it all working in a record shop. I was three years old. Because I worked in the shop, people would come in and say, “Oh, have you heard? You can mix on CDs now, you know.”
“Nah, get out of it.” There was always going to be a transition with how you're going to be able to take music, how much you could bring on the road now, how much people could play, the accessibility of it. My first impression was kind of like, “What? Oh, that doesn't sound too cool or whatever.”
It was strange. It was different. I'd been really used to playing vinyl. A friend of mine in Tokyo named DJ Takada, right as they started developing their first CDJ, he started working with Pioneer, and then they showed me the very first CDJ that they had, and I was like, “Whoa!” First thing I noticed was it was going to be a lot lighter to carry CD books than carrying my vinyl.
We had a guy that used to come into the record shop called Pompey Si and he came in one day with a CDJ 500, the big chunky one. First machine that I used is like, it had a flip top. It was a very square, boxy device that had a flip top CD load in, so it was more like the traditional CD players.
It had looping function, which wasn't as precise as it is right now, but it would give me the ability to start looping sections of acapella and so on and so forth. You had a time code and stuff, so it was just like, oh, right. Okay. It was very rudimentary compared to what's in play now. The question I had in my mind is how durable is this? Is it going to last, you know, being set up and put back in a case every day and flown and, you know, going on an airplane.
And that's one thing I would say, I've never had a problem with, any pioneer gear, is its durability. There was resistance from a lot of the vinyl community, but like anything it's what you're familiar with. And I think when people get comfortable, change isn't always the easiest thing to come to them. I happen to be somebody that's comfortable being uncomfortable. The more I started thinking about it, and once I finally saw them being used and got my hands on them, I kind of went, “Actually, this is kind of revolutionary.” I knew from the very beginning that was going to be a game changer in how music was going to be played at clubs.
You can literally play demos that you're working on. You don't have to go cut acetate. DJs back then would be burning acetates costing, god knows what. I couldn't afford any of that, so it was a way to have exclusive tracks. I quickly changed my opinion to thinking, “Oh, this is great, it's another new toy for DJs, another way we can express ourselves.” I would say my full transition from vinyl to CD probably happened within the space of six months to a year.
I think at the beginning of it, and definitely before the 1000s came through, people were using both. My love for my vinyl collection and and my Technics, it was everything I knew and I didn't want it to change. And so I was very resistant at first and it was when the CDJ-1000 came out and that you could scratch and stuff. Then, I think that was the point where I thought, “Okay, this is the future.” When pioneer introduced the CDJ-1000, it was the beginning of creating an industry standard. The first time I saw it was the prototype.
And then several months after the prototype, they actually brought me the finished working model and I was blown away by what it could do. It was the 1000s that changed everything. One of my first ever big gigs was at Cream at Nation in Liverpool. In fact, it was my first big gig. I was warming up for Sasha and during the soundcheck, Alan, the manager there, he was like, “Have you seen this? It's a CDJ-1000.” And it was the first time I'd seen one.
First of all, it looked like the Batmobile. Thing that really excited me was when they said, “We are working at emulating the feel of vinyl.” Now. This is the CDJ 1000, so keep in mind this is using only CDs. There's no vinyl involved, no camera tricks, no audio post-production. This is truly the first digital scratching ever recorded.
Don't try this at home. Check it out. Suddenly I stopped using vinyl. For me, it was all about the scratching and like the fact that you could change the brake speed to emulate vinyl. It was mind blowing at the time. The hump that a lot of DJs had to get over that were transitioning from vinyl to CDs was it didn't feel the same.
So there were certain things you really previous to that couldn't do on CDJs, you really couldn't scratch on CDJs. So, the entire hip-hop community was kind of left out of that. The first 1000 felt really true. I remember doing that, and I liken it to the first time that, I used an iPhone, you know, the touch screen on an iPhone and the scratching of a CDJ. It was, the two sort of times where I think these things are magical.
So things like cutting, you can do quite easily on a CDJ, certain other types of scratch moves, I never felt like I could do that well on a CDJ, so I just quickly learned, Okay, here's what I can do and sounds good and sounds pure. And here's the things I just shouldn't try. I also knew they still had a way to go to really get the timings tight, to really get the scratch, so that it actually was very quickly responsive, but at the same time it was leaps and bounds from where they had been before. The clubs started taking their turntables out and putting the CDJs in. It started to be phased in as the standard. You are the premier digital turntablist in the world.
I mean, that's gotta feel pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's like a big honor because, you know, with the technology, everything changed and, you know, it's like this is being on the cutting edge. And, you know, turntablism is like cutting edge anyways. Yeah. So it's cool.
So what do you think the CDJ-1000 is going to do for the industry? Well, there's a lot of companies that try to emulate the turntable, making the CD, you know, scratchable. Has it worked, I mean, are there other companies? No, that's why, you know, things are still, there’s still true vinylists and stuff because nothing can really do, you know like the turntable, until now with this piece, the CD-1000. So big ups to Pioneer for that, hooking it up. Somewhere along the, the eight years between the 1000 and the 2000, Remember speaking to Pioneer as they were saying, “What do you think about putting a USB drive on it?” The shift from CDs is going to happen very, very quickly to USBs, and I think it's absolutely necessary to put it on the CDJ. And when they introduced the 2000, I'm like, “Oh, I like that.” I did not make the full transition over to USB properly until 2012/2013.
I fought it like mad. And then when I did it, it was like, “Oh my God, why haven’t I done this, like, why did it take me so long?” A lot of people were, kind of over burning CDs. Hours to put the music on the CD, and then to make some notes, like every track. I was so over writing a little CD inlay sleeves that I could get into a dark club and then I went, “What? What does this mean? Whose handwriting is this?” It took so much time.
Honestly. The CDJ-2000 sort of solved all of that. I could see properly what I was doing in the dark.
I didn't have to be shuffling about with CDs. So you could just rock up, put your USB key in, and it was stress free. This is like the best way to DJ.
Like, I don't want a laptop, I don't want anything else. I just want to plug my USB in and use these for everything I need. The biggest strides were made, I think funny enough, in the backend with Rekordbox and how Rekordbox really became more than just a play listing interface. All of a sudden it became organized. So how you would have organized your record box, the real record box, suddenly became the Rekordbox.
Rekordbox, this is like one of the coolest things which I have, you know. So you could have comments on your tracks that scrolled along the screen. So there was a lot of similarities at that point from how I used to play with records.
You can organize alphabetically, you can organize by artist, and giving you that metadata. You had your waveforms, the ability to kind of start to mark different sections to drop to, it became far more detailed and far more agile to be able to move around and do different things with the 2000s. It was pretty much a very far leap forward in how to create something that's going to be able to really help me do performances at another level. I remember I got an email from pioneer in May 2009 and they said, we have some CDJs to send you. The CDJ-2000 arrived
and at that point a lot of the features weren't actually working, but all the screen printing and everything on the unit was done so I could see what was coming. The very first thing I noticed was there was more precision on the looping. Now they finally got the quantizing and the gridding right.
You can actually get the loop dead on without stressing too much. Quantization was a major one because up until that point, looping could be very haphazard in a live situation. You know, keeping the stuff in time. It allowed me to really start expanding my sets to like four decks now. If you can loop a great part, mix it over, you can kind of make a mash up. The unique things that can be done with the CDJ, the unique tricks and little moments that you can sprinkle into your set.
When you got to the 2000, then I was able to really expand it and say, “Okay, I'm going to now have a loop here, an acapella here, maybe a piano line here and a groove over here, and really just re kind of remix everything on the spot.” The precision really was what made it that much different than the previous iterations. My heart is still with the 2000-NXS. Once we got to the NXS 2s, that's all I needed. The NXS and the NXS 2s, they refined the tech, and they also made the system even more stable. Really having the NXS as opposed to just the 2000s, because there's so much more that you can do with the cue points.
Hot cue auto load was obviously a great thing. You can load a track and within seconds, jump to the point that you need to. I like that the jog wheel’s a bit heavier. You've got a bit more, balance with that.
You know, some people's approach with cue points in these models of CDJs is, it almost becomes an MPC. If you wanted to, you could finger drum on the CDJ, in the right moment, it's a great performance piece and looks and can sound cool. Look at someone like [DJ] EZ, you know, the way that he mixes is, like, completely unique to him.
He's really made this, like, his own machine and his sound. And I think the possibilities are endless with the CDJs. I'm half in the party and half like, you know, looking into the DJ booth at what’s going on. The evil sync button.
I don't even know where it is. Isn't something that I've ever used. Some people absolutely love the sync button, was like, great. And then other people just despised it. I mean, it's a thing that I really detest.
It says beat sync here, but I don't even really pay attention to it because I've never used it. You could start to use the sync feature, which was prevalent in DJ software, so it had to be added to be competitive. I don't have a problem with anybody that does it, but that's not what I consider necessarily the art form. All of a sudden it did start to do the work for you. The introduction of the sync button, quantizing and all of those features, you know, has made the entry level easier. I have nothing against it.
And I think it's opened the gate for a lot of people that perhaps otherwise wouldn't be able to play sets, especially, producers that aren't DJs. They introduced the sync button, as far as I understood it from them, for people that weren't necessarily going to be deejaying professionally, but wants to try it out and it could be a good introduction to then move them further into the world of deejaying. I never looked at it as a problem, I just looked at it as, well there is another feature. I don't necessarily want to use it, but somebody else might. It never bothered me, it really bothered a lot of people.
Which kind of made me wonder what it was exposing. But, you know, it's called the future. You know, you can't live in the past all your life.
A huge difference for me was 3000. The whole model, you know, we felt like such a big jump. It was just next level. The look of it, the functionality of it, the fact that it was then a big, it was a touch screen. What stands out about the 3000s to me is that they are huge. Nice, bright, huge screen.
It's weird actually, when you use one of those and then you don't realize it, when you go back to using the previous model, the screen feels tiny. And then now that I've gotten used to the screen, sometimes when I come back to the 2000-NXS, I’m like, “Whoa, this feels so small.” Well, one of the things I really like is the ability to jump around within your playlist using the touch screen.
Now I can access things not just quicker, but I can see them in a very different array. So first thing I noticed it was like a lot more responsive. It was bigger.
It was like the waveforms were clearer. The bit processing just sounds way better on the 3000s, it really does. Polyrhythmic looping is quite a lot of fun. It’s a cool way to go from sort of a house record to a drum and bass track. The actual quantizing and lock is so much better, and the fact that on the backend, Rekordbox analyzes all the tracks that you import, then if you need to re-grid, you could do it straight on the CDJ. There's certain things that you can do in real time that before you kind of had to preface, and you had to do a pre prep.
Just the kind of combination between the two has just made it that much more powerful for me to be able to go, okay, I'm going to try this, I'm going to try this on the fly. You know, you'l never want to use another machine. And it's true. It's just a brilliant, brilliant machine. And I will not use anything else.
I can’t imagine how to play with any other CDJs. They have been pivotal in deejaying and moving things forward, but in a way that's logical and, in a way that consumers want. Oh, Pioneer has been instrumental in the evolution of deejaying. Every single club you go to, there's going to be Pioneer CDJs. The CDJ has never left my rig.
That beautiful black box has, evolved into something quite special. As humans, we constantly evolve technology and completely advances at an exponential rate. Like with anything, you know, you you can't stay still.
You have to evolve with the technology, with the industry. Really it's that sort of excitement of getting a new toy. It's found its place, obviously, not only with me and my entire career, but with so many others. Pioneer is the industry standard. Where can you go? Where, what else do we need? As technology keeps moving forward and has different, and different mediums are being introduced, it's important for technology to keep pace and try to anticipate what's coming next.
2024-09-27 10:01
