Hello! I hope you’re all doing well! As a practicing DJ based in the USA, there are more than a couple of upcoming (or “forthcoming” as some music bloggers used to say/write) albums and music releases that I’m looking forward to.
One is Strange Days by drum & bass duo, Paul T and Edward Oberon. I really want to order the vinyl! Looking at the multi-colored album artwork for that album online brought me to a memory of a drawing I made and posted on djforums.com around 2005. I was in my very early 20s then, had just been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and had just bought turntables, a mixer, amp, speakers and grew a vinyl record collection in my parents’ basement. I was also writing and drawing quite a bit.
Around that time, I made a drawing to illustrate my old understanding of beatmatching (a term for utilizing turntables and a mixer for aligning the drum beats of 2 different songs in auditory form). This was before visual representations for songs and “waveforms” on a laptop screen became a trend in DJ culture. DJs are relying on their eyes to mix waveforms they see on a laptop screen more now, as opposed to when DJs were using their ears to mix with vinyl.
Serato and other companies created software to enable waveforms for DJing with nearly any piece of recorded sound in a digital format. Around 2007, the phenomena gained popularity with DJs who then decided to buy laptops and sell their vinyl record collections.
I do not have the original drawing still, and unfortunately for this blog entry. But I decided to recreate it today from the best of my memory. Here’s the recent mock I drew based on my memory of the old drawing:
It was basically giving an image to 2 different beats, each with 2 quarter notes, which are not aligned in an attempt to beatmatch. I was likely not having much success with DJing at that time, and wanted to put the old drawing on djforums.com to show more experienced DJs what I was doing.
If I made that drawing around 2005, and waveform software didn’t arrive to the mainstream until 2007, then there’s a huge possibility that I clearly invented Serato and pioneered a grand revolution in music performance, right?
Wrong. I admire Serato’s products quite a lot, and used Serato software for about 10 years, but I’ve never worked for them, and I don’t know what they were thinking when they created their groundbreaking software.
Regardless, these are the kinds of granidose delusions that I, and a lot of people with my condition, endure.
Thank you for reading, and I hope that others with mental health difficulties do not get too superstitious with today’s football and soccer games. Please take care as the weather is changing around the Earth.-Chris Milbourn