
When I’m not being a good student, hanging out with friends, or writing articles here, I’m mixing and producing electronica tracks. It’s probably my favorite hobby. For the past couple of months I’ve been mixing straight off my laptop, using applications like Virtual DJ and Deckadance to do the job. It’s a good place to start, but after a while you become limited by what you can do with keyboard shortcuts and mouse control. When you mix on a computer, you get all the knobs and faders and buttons, but on your display. Your only control is the keyboard and mouse. The mouse will twist, slide, and press all those different things on the display, and you can map keyboard shortcuts to different levels for faders and knobs, or simply to buttons, but after a while you feel limited. At that point it’s time to move up and get a controller. So for a cheap $80 I got the Hercules DJ Control MP3 e2 controller.
Read the rest of this entry »