Mixing with Records
Authors: Chapman Owen 
Published: October 2020

Introduction
"Doesn't that wreck your records?"
This is one of the first things I generally get asked when someone
watches me at work in my home or while spinning at a party. It
reminds me of a different but related question I once asked someone
who worked at Rotate This!, a particularly popular Toronto DJ refuge,
a few days after I had bought my first turntable:
DJO: "How do you stop that popping and crackling sound your record
gets when you scratch back and forth on the same spot for a while?"
CLERK: "You buy two copies of everything, one you keep at home all
wrapped-up nice and never use, and the other you mess with."
My last $150 had just managed to pay for an old Dual direct drive
record player. The precious few recently-released records I had were
gifts. I nodded my head and made my way over to the rows of disks
which I flipped through to make it look like I was maybe going to buy
something. Lp cover after lp cover stared back at me all with names I
had absolutely never heard of before, organised according to a hyper-
hybridised classification scheme that completely escaped my
dictionary-honed alphabetic expectations. Worst of all, there seemed
to be only single copies of everything left! A sort of outsider's
vertigo washed over me, and 3 minutes after walking into unfamiliar
territory, I zipped back out onto the street. Thus was to begin my
love/hate relationship with the source of all DJ sounds, surliness
and misinformation--the independent record shop. My query had
(without my planning) boldly pronounced my neophyte status. The
response it solicited challenged my seriousness. How much was I
willing to invest in order to ride "the wheels of steel"?
Sequence 1
Will Straw describes the meteoric rise to prominence of the CD format,

If the compact disk has emerged as one of the most dazzlingly
effective of commodity forms, this has little to do with its
technical superiority to the vinyl record (which we no longer
remember to notice). Rather, the effectiveness has to do with its
status as the perfect crossover consumer object. As a cutting-edge
audiophile invention, it seduced the technophilic, connoisseurist
males who typically buy new sound equipment and quickly build
collections of recordings. At the same time, its visual refinement
and high price rapidly rendered it legitimate as a gift. In this,
the CD has found a wide audience among the population of casual
record buyers.(61)
Straw's point has to do with the fate of musical recordings within
contemporary commodity culture. In the wake of a late 70's record
industry slump, music labels turned their attention toward the
recapturing of casual record sales (read: aging baby boomers). The
general
shape of this attempt revolved around a re-configuring of the record-
shopping experience dedicated towards reducing "the intimidation seen
as endemic to the environment of the record store."(59) The CD
format, along with the development of super-sized, general interest
(all-genre) record outlets has worked (according to Straw) to
streamline record sales towards more-predictable patterns, all the
while causing less "selection stress."(59) Re-issues and
compilations, special-series trademarks, push-button listening
stations, and maze-like display layouts, combined with department
store-style service ("Can I help you find anything?") all work
towards eliminating the need for familiarity with particular music
"scenes" in order to make personally gratifying (and profit
engendering) musical choices. Straw's analysis is exemplary in its
dissatisfaction with treating the arena of personal musical choice as
unaffected by any constraints apart from subjective matters of taste.
Straw's evaluation also isolates the vinyl record as an object
eminently ready (post-digital revolution) for subcultural
appropriation. Its displacement by the CD as the dominant medium for
collecting recorded music involved the recasting of the turntable as
outdated and inferior, thereby relegating it to the dusty attic,
basement or pawn shop (along with crates upon crates upon crates of
records). These events set the stage for vinyl's spectacular rise
from the ashes. The most prominent feature of this re-emergence has
to do not simply with possession of the right kind of stuff (the
cachet of having a music collection difficult for others to borrow
aside), but with what vinyl and turntable technology can do.
Bridge
In Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige claims that
subcultures are,

cultures of conspicuous consumption...and it is through the
distinctive rituals of consumption, through style, that the
subculture at once reveals its "secret identity" and communicates
its forbidden meanings. It is basically the way in which commodities
are used in subculture which mark the subculture off from more
orthodox cultural formations.(103

Hebdige borrows the notion of bricolage from Levi Strauss in order
to describe the particular kind of use subcultures make of the
commodities they appropriate. Relationships of identity, difference
and order are developed from out of the minds of those who make use
of the objects in question and are not necessarily determined by
particular qualities inherent to the objects themselves. Henceforth a
safety pin more often used for purposes like replacing missing
buttons or temporarily joining pieces of fabric can become a punk
fashion statement once placed through the nose, ear or torn Sex
Pistols tee-shirt. In the case of DJ culture, it is the practice of
mixing which most obviously presents itself as definitive of
subcultural participation. The objects of conspicuous consumption in
this case--record tracks.
If mixing can be understood as bricolage, then attempts "to discern
the hidden messages inscribed in code"(18) by such a practice are not
in vain. Granting mixing the power of meaning sets a formidable
(semiotic) framework in place for investigating the practice's
outwardly visible (spectacular) form and structure. Hebdige's
description of bricolage as a particularly conspicuous and codified
type of using, however, runs the risk of privileging an account of
record collecting and mixing which interprets it entirely on the
model of subjective expression.(1.) What is necessary is a means of
access to the dialogue which takes place between a DJ and her records
as such. The contents of a DJ's record bag (like Straw's CD shopping
bag) are influenced by more that just her imagination, pocket book
and exposure to different kinds of music. They are also determined in
an important way by each other. Audio mixing is not one practice, it
is many, and the choice to develop or use one sort of skill over
another is intimately tied up with the type and nature of track one
is working with.
Sequence 2
The raw practice of DJing relies heavily on a slider integral to DJ
mixers known as the _cross-fader_(ital). With the standard DJ set up,
when the cross-fader is all the way to the left, the left turntable
track plays through the system; vice versa when the fader is all the
way to the right. In between is the "open" position which allows both
inputs to be heard simultaneously. The most straightforward mixing
technique, "cutting," involves using this toggle to quickly switch
from one source to another--resulting in the abrupt end of one sound-
flow followed by its instantaneous replacement. This technique can be
used to achieve a variety of different effects--from the rather
straightforward stringing together of the final beat of a four bar
sequence from one track with a strong downbeat from something new in
order to provide continuous, but sequential musical output, to the
thoroughly difficult practice of "beat juggling," where short
excerpts of otherwise self-contained tracks ("breaks") are isolated
and then extended indefinitely through the use of two copies of the
same record (while one record plays, the DJ spins the other back to
the downbeat of the break in question, which is then released in
rhythm). In both cases timing and rhythm are key. These features of
the practice help to explain DJ predilections for tracks which make
heavy, predictable use of their rhythm sections.
"Blending" is a second technique which uses the open position on the
cross-fader to mix two inputs into a live sonic collage. Tempo,
rhythm and "density" of source material have an enormous impact on
the end result. While any two tracks can be layered in this way,
beats that are not synchronized are quick to create cacophony, and
vocals also tend to clash dramatically. Melodic lines in general pose
certain challenges here since these are in particular keys and have
obvious starts and finishes. This is one reason why tracks produced
specifically for DJing often have such long, minimal intros and
exits. This makes it much easier to create "natural" sounding blends.
Atmospheric sounds, low-frequency hums, speech samples and repetitive
loops with indeterminate rhythm structures are often used for these
segments in order to allow drawn-out, subtle transitions when moving
between tracks. If an intro contains a fixed beat (as is the case
often with genres constructed specifically for non-stop dancing like
house, techno and to some extent drum and bass), then those who want
seamless blends need to "beat match" if they want to maintain a
dancer's groove. The roots of this technique go back to disco and
demand fairly strict genre loyalty in order to insure that a set's
worth of tracks all hover around the same tempo, defined in beats-per-
minute, or BPMs. The basic procedure involves finding the downbeat of
the track one wishes to mix through a set of headphones, releasing
that beat in time with the other record while making fine tempo-
adjustments via the turntable's pitch control to the point where the
track coming through the earphones and the track being played over
the system are in synch. The next step is "back-spinning" or "needle
dropping" to the start of the track to be mixed, then releasing it
again, this time with the cross-fader open. Volume levels can then be
adjusted in order to allow the new track to slowly take prominence
(the initial track being close to its end at this point) before the
cross-fader is closed into the new position and the entire procedure
is repeated.
Scratching is perhaps the most notorious mixing technique and
involves the most different types of manipulations. The practice is
most highly developed in hip hop (and related genres like drum and
bass) and is used both as an advanced cutting technique for moving
between tracks as well as a sonic end-in-itself. It's genesis is
attributed to a South Bronx DJ known as Grand Wizard Theodore who was
the first (1977) to try to make creative use of the sound associated
with moving a record needle back and forth over the same drumbeat, a
phenomena familiar to DJs used to cueing-up downbeats through
headphones. This trick is now referred to as the "baby scratch," and
it along with an ever-increasing host of mutations and hybrids make-
up the skills that pay the bills for hip hop DJs. In the case of many
of these techniques, the cross-fader is once again used heavily in
order to remove unwanted elements of particular scratches from the
mix, as well as adding certain staccato and volume-fading effects.
Isolated, "pure" sounds are easiest to scratch with and are therefore
highly sought after by this sort of DJ--a pastime affectionately
referred to as "digging in the crates." Sources of such sounds are
extremely diverse, but inevitably revolve around genre's which use
minimal orchestration (like movie-soundtracks), accentuated rhythms
with frequent breakdowns (like funk or jazz), or which eschew musical
form all together (like sound-effects, comedy and children's records).
Exit
To answer the question which started this investigation, in the end,
how wrecked my records get depends a lot on what I'm using them for.
To be sure, super-fast scratching patterns and tricks that use lots
of back-spinning like beat-juggling will eventually "burn" static
into spots on one's records. But with used records costing as little
as $1 for three, and battle records (2.) widely available, the effect
of this feature of the technology on the actual pursuit of the
practice is negligible. And most techniques don't noticeably burn
records at all, especially if a DJ's touch is light enough to allow
for minimal tone-arm weight (a parameter which controls a turntable's
groove-tracking ability). This is the kind of knowledge which comes
from interaction with objects. It is also the source of a great part
of the subcultural bricoleur's stylistic savvy. Herein lies the
essence of the intimidating power of the indie record shop--its
display of intimate, physical familiarity with the hidden
particularities of the new vinyl experience. Investigators confronted
with such familiarity need to find ways to go beyond analyses which
stop at the level of acknowledgment of the visible logic displayed by
spectacular subcultural practices if they wish to develop nuanced
accounts of subcultural life. Such plumbing of the depths often
requires listening in the place of observing--whether to first-hand
accounts collected through ethnography or to the subtle voice of the
objects themselves.
(1.) An example of such an account: "DJ-ing is evangelism; a desire
to share songs. A key skill is obviously not just to drop the
popular, well-known songs at the right part of the night, but to pick
the right new releases, track down the obscurer tunes and newest
imports, get hold of next month's big tune this month; you gather
this pile, this tinder, together, then you work the records, mix
them, drop them, cut them, scratch them, melt them, beat them all
together until they unite. Voilà; disco inferno."
Dave Haslam, "DJ Culture," p. 169.
(2.) Records specifically designed by and for scratch DJs and which
consist of long strings of scratchable sounds.

References

Haslam, David. "DJ Culture." The Clubcultures Reader. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers. 1997
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Melvin and
Co. Ltd.. 1979
Straw, Will. "Organized Disorder: The Changing Space of the Record
Shop." The Clubcultures Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 1997