Session Transcript:
Kabuki
Red Bull Music Academy, London 2002

The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.

In a parallel universe somewhere, Frankfurt's Kabuki is a classical musician. Because until he discovered the power of the breakbeat - which inspired him to set up Precision Records in 1992 - he was studying guitar at the Frankfurt Conservatory and jazz in Vienna. Thankfully, the grooves got him, and he's been waving a flag for drum 'n' bass - as well as releasing records on Reinforced, Sonar Kollektiv and Spectrum Works - ever since. And his moniker? It's a traditional form of Japanese theatre, of course.

Kabuki: »There are a couple of systems, which claim they're trying to drive vinyl out of clubs and give different angles on how to do mixing. There is obviously Final Scratch, which has the big benefit of an interface as everybody is used to having the record player and the vinyl. But there are also some downsides because you always have to carry the interface, the synchronisation box and the computer around with you. All these things are pretty good, but there are some improvements you could have, which would give you the chance to do things that you can't do with vinyl, which is the whole deal after all.

There are only two reasons why you don't want to use vinyl -it's heavy, especially if you travel around with 200 records or something, and having access to all those tracks you want to play without having to flick through them all. I would like to be able to just download tracks from the Internet or just have a MP3 of a track I produced. I'd keep it on a little hard drive, go to the club, hook it up to the computer and just do my set.

Final Scratch lets you use it just like you're used to DJing with records. With Traktor, you have more opportunities to be musical with the mix. Its one thing to do it with two turntables, but you could come more from traditional techno DJing. You may want to make a 8 hour set sound like one track. Use different kinds of moods to take people on a trip from A to B. It's a different approach where you might want to think about how the arrangement of the song works, and how you might combine these tracks into one so that it's more or less seamless. Traktor contains a lot of tools which you can use to make this happen smoothly.

So for the set-up you have some quite different panels. You can record your mixes internally. There are different categories of users that Native Instruments made this thing for. They have like a full line of software synthesisers, plug-in's and effect machines. They always make very innovative products. Some companies try to make just retro fitting, taking the [Yamaha] DX7 and making a copy of it. But Native Instruments always try to include added content. So you could use it live in a club or whatever setting and it works. You could use it for auto mix, which means that you just load up all your tracks and will play a continuous mix. It works, strangely enough. It's a very basic mathematical concept how you can do beat detection - it's just counting the zeros.

That's the basic concept of beat-matching, the zero crossings of the sound. You have the different elements with the beat, the kick and the snare, and little fills in between so you've got the matrix where it snaps to. That's a zero crossing. Obviously it sounds total crap if you have one track at 175 bpm and another at 65. You could also just load your tracks in there and it mixes it for you. It doesn't sound as good as if it's mixed by a human because you obviously make different decisions than a computer.

On Traktor's top menu bar you've got different modules. You can switch them off to get it to the very basic kind of play, where you can see which tracks are playing. This is a digital tape deck. You can just record whatever mix you are doing into this and it records it as a WAV file or you can convert it into MP3. You can make your own mix tapes with this.

This is the player itself. You can see the waveform of a track. It gives you a pretty good idea what's happening, if you can read the waves, you see all the different peaks. So its a pretty good visual help for that. With this you can do the scrubbing and you can do the manual.«

RBMA: »Are there different things to look out for when reading these waves?«

Kabuki: »On the basic level it really helps to understand where everything is. You can see that this is a snare and this is a kick. If you do some production work as well you tend to get very visual, which is a let down because you should trust your ear.

Here you can adjust the pitch. It's at 231 bpm if anybody wants to see how it sounds. You have much wider range than with regular decks, which isn't really necessary because you don't want to play a techno tune at 300 unless you have very special purposes. This is the thing that we were talking about. It's pretty much set up like a regular record player. You can press play and you can even play it backwards for some reason. You've got a crossfader to switch between the two decks.

One of the things built into Traktor is a sync. We were talking about the zero crossing analysis, this thing here is continuously counting the number of beats. It shows the play list, which is like a record box where you can load in all your tracks. It doesn't matter what format - mp3, WAV, whatever. It shows you with a percentage what the tempo of the track is. OK, so this is the one running right here. It's 7 minutes 52 and it says there's a 68% probability that it's running at 171.4 bpm. The longer the track is running, the more certain it gets about what the tempo is. Depending on the beat structure, this track shouldn't go any higher so it just stays with the 68%. Obviously if you are human and you can hear, you are able to hear if it's slower or faster, whereas Traktor just relies on mathematics for that.

So you've got this track running right here, which is 171.4 beats at the moment, and you've got this other track running on the left deck, which is at 107. You could cue the record and if you start it now, if you press this button, it just aligns the speed. So you have the chance to synchronize these two decks just by one button that will switch the speed either to the left or to the right deck, depending on which one you choose.

The benefit is that you can define where it should start. You can either press start and it just plays the file as it is, or you can set cue points, which is a big benefit compared to the vinyl. So you could say this is the part where I want to start the track from. You just press set. So that's your start reference.«

RBMA: »Are there any interfaces for this and what would they look like?«

Kabuki: »Final Scratch gives you the option to actually use a deck, which is a very good reference point. Native Instruments has developed this algorithm and the whole software. Now they are working with partners to do interfaces. I think the guys from Final Scratch and Traktor should get together because this has got the features and Final Scratch has got the hardware. If they joined up that would be a very nice combination.* At the moment it's a bit dodgy just with the mouse and it's not the real thing, you want to really touch something.«

RBMA: »What happens if it crashes?«

Kabuki: »There are only so many things that can happen if you DJ in a club with two decks and a mixer, it's very obvious what's gone wrong. I did a presentation and everything was working, then all of a sudden the track was running at 60 bpm. I was like: "What's going on?" You can't really figure it out because there are so many things to look at. When I play it's dark, hot and humid. Sweat is dripping from the ceiling, I don't really feel like being in a situation where it's crashed and I need to reboot or something. It just doesn't work.«

RBMA: »What about the visual aspect. Would people be disappointed if they looked at the DJ and saw a computer?«

Kabuki: »It's not very sensual if you stand there with a computer, it looks quite geeky I guess. I've been DJing now for six years and I'm really used to vinyl, it's just very natural.«

RBMA: »Right now for what purpose do you actually use this?

Kabuki: »The good thing about this is there's loads of things you can do which you can't do with decks. For the February/March issue of The Knowledge magazine, I did the mix CD. It was just two days before I left for a job I had to do in Japan for Playstation. I couldn't really do the mix because I still had to cut the dub plates for all the tracks. It just didn't work out time-wise. So I just copied all the tracks I had as mp3 onto a CD and took it with me. While I was in Japan I was recording the mix. One of the beneficial features of Traktor is that it records all of your fader movements. Say you load in one track and you press play and you change the pitch, it makes a note of that onto a very small mix file. That file displays all your fader movements. My partner in Germany had the same tracks on his computer, he just loaded the mix file, played it back and it was my mix. I just had a 56K cable modem. I would have never been able to send back a 60 minute mix, which would be around 60 megabytes or something like that. So it's a very strange story but it made sense to me.«

RBMA: »Could you possibly use it like a third deck?«

Kabuki: »Definitely. I think it's how many people use Final Scratch at the moment. They still play records but if they have some tracks they want to play as MP3, they just put on the computer code record.

I've grown up DJing with two decks, so when Native Instruments approached me, I just didn't think it would make any sense. It actually does work and there are some situations where it's very handy, like when you really want to listen to what you've done, or if you want to use stuff which is not really around. There are some features which you can use more to arrange songs. You have some additional features here, which you don't have on your regular deck. You have a three-band EQ, which is obviously regular, but you also have a dynamic filter. You can use these on the band pass or nudge it for resonance. You can create some pretty interesting effects and loop different elements of a song, which is also totally impossible with vinyl.«

*Since this feature was published online, Native Instruments and Stanton have indeed teamed up to bring you Traktor FS - just like Kabuki said!