Controlled External Sources

Things have begun to shift back to the middle

I’ve been having some serious trouble with my midi control surfaces in Traktor DJ Studio 3. For about a year now I’ve been packing up one little bag with my laptop, the m-audio Conectiv interface, an X-Session Pro DJ style control surface, a Mic, and a Boss DD-20 foot pedal delay unit and having a blast mixing digitally in some of the finest clubs in the world.

M-audio are not known for their quality products, and I knew that going into this. I bought devices which did not need drivers, and could easily and quickly be replaced. It was, this digital DJ thing, simply an experiment and nothing more. I fully expected to hate it, and return to vinyl and occasionally CD’s immediately. Much to my surprise I have had more fun mixing music, relooping, dubbing on the fly, re editing in the mix, and going pretty well insane with all that can be done to a 320kbps mp3 file in front of beautiful dancing people.

I noticed the faders begin to go on the X-Session Pro. The pitch slider began to become a little shakey, and the cross fader crapped out entirely, but I went with it. I accepted that this under $100 USD piece of plastic wasn’t meant to last, and I was having fun, so it was ok. Until last sunday night.

I was mixing my weekly radio show, Sunday Soul, and it was going nicely. Suddenly I lost control of Traktor. The pitch slider seemed to awaken and I was no longer able to control it. I bungled a couple of mixes, tried to stay with it, but eventualy pulled the USB cable out of my laptop and tried to complete the broadcast using the trackpad only. This was unacceptable mainly because with a control surface the DJ can touch many things at once and really mix, but with the trackpad, and pointer we are limited to one operation at a time.

I reset the device, restarted the computer, and managed to mix fairly painlessly for my Pacific broadcast of the show. I like a little difficulty to keep me on my toes, and this one had me reaching for the ceiling like Emma Livry on opening night.

The next afternoon I called m-audio and sat on hold with them for hours hoping to find out that there was something I could do to repair the device. After three or four two hour + waits, I still hadn’t spoken to anyone. Again, I knew I was in for the shaft when I went with M-audio in the first place, so it was no big deal. I searched google and came up with how to reset your X-Session Pro to factory default settings. Splendid. Well, sort of.

Resetting the until seemed to introduce a host of new problems:

1. The faulty faders were still faulty.

Even if you can reset your device, a funky fader is still funky. So no crossfader, and the pitch slider is still janky, and the volume slider for channel B wouldn’t reach 0.. it was awake and hovering around 10.

2. The buttons are no longer immediate.

After the restoration, buttons which demand crucial timing like “start” and “loop,” required double clicking to make them work. This was entirely unacceptable.

To try to fix this, I went into Traktor’s midi control settings and wiped them out. I began again. I re wrote the entire settings file for every control on the X-Session Pro and the results were exactly the same.

I trashed the midi settings for Traktor and re wrote the settings file again. Same result.

Finally I tried to use a completely different controller. I connected my Novtion ReMote SL (which I don’t like very much either actually) and began some simple testing. At first it worked quickly, and without issue. But soon, as I added more and more controllers to the midi setup file within Traktor we were back to double clicking, and sluggish response. I’ve been looking with lust at the Vestax VCM-100 and VCI-100 interfaces for Traktor and I may still go this way eventually, but after a couple of days of trying to simply exact basic operations from a control surface with Traktor (and I am a little obsessive, so you know they were 18 hour days) I was fed up.

Finally I had to do something. I am working on several mixes right now and needed the process I have chosen to DJ with…

So I simply set the audio setup to External Mixer, connected the two pair of RCA outs from the Conectiv into my Allen + Heath XONE:92, connected up all my other items (delay unit, headphones, mic, etc.) and returned to my beloved DJ console.

What I found was that this beautiful, elegant DJ mixer is once again the love of my life. I can’t believe I actually forgot how amazing it is to use, how beautifully it sounds, and how much fun the filters can be, and the ability to effect each channel as well as my vocals, all from the center of my DJ booth is simply amazing.

I am again, inspired, and delighted with the results of completely abandoning the use of a control surface.

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