A-Trak Explains How Serato Revolutionized the DJ

In a great interview with NPR, A-Trak explains how Serato changed the game:

“Part of what made the switch to digital quicker and easier was I did a couple of big file trades with a couple of DJs. You would meet up with another DJ and you had a hard drive with a certain amount of gigs of mp3, and just swap. Then suddenly you’re like, ‘Whoa, this guy just gave me a folder of like 200 a capellas.’ That’s a great arsenal. And quickly one thing that became very apparent to me was that right as I started doing a couple of these trades that in a matter of moments would quadruple the size of my song library, I also started accumulating music in a lot of different genres. So if I’m doing a trade with a DJ who knows dancehall really well, and [I say], ‘You know what, I don’t have a dancehall collection, can you give me your folder of like the essential songs if you’re going to do a dancehall set?’ And suddenly I had a dancehall set. I had an ’80s set. I had a classic soul set. So quickly it became apparent to me that DJing on Serato would allow DJs to jump between different genres a lot more easily.”

–via NPR

It also took some effort to convince Kanye that Serato was the future:

“I was Kanye [West]’s tour DJ for four years, and the entire music of the show rested on my shoulders. It took a while for me to convince his team to let me use Serato because again, everyone was like, ‘What if the laptop crashes?’ In the earlier days of hip hop, of course, the DJ would play the instrumental track off of vinyl and the rapper would rap on top of it. But sometimes vinyl would skip and it was just kind of part of going to see a rap show. When I was growing up in the ’90s I would go to a rap show and there would be a part where the needle skipped. Part of being a live performing rapper was knowing how to still keep rapping when your DJ’s needle skips. It’s funny when you think about it today. And then at some point in the mid-’90s the first change was DAT machines. A DAT tape deck isn’t that big. So there was a point in the mid-’90s where every rap show had a DAT tape deck playing the instrumentals. But they’re a pain in the ass to use. You have to rewind and fast forward the tape. It was very slow.”

Continues after the jump.

“Here’s the weird part, though. Rap shows started using this machine called the Instant Replay, which isn’t meant to be used for live music performances at all. The Instant Replay was a machine that was made for radio station IDs. It’s a machine that has 50 buttons, and you can record any audio you want and assign it to these various buttons. You hit number twelve and it plays [in radio DJ voice], ‘Hey, you’re listening to KBBL.’

“I think Cypress Hill was the first band to think of this: rappers went to radio stations and were like, ‘What’s this machine you’re using to trigger all your audio?’ And they started using it for live shows. It’s also an extremely rugged machine and it was really loud. Rappers like loud sounds. So for all these reasons combined, for years and year every rapper was using this instant replay machine. This big machine with 50 buttons that could trigger all their instrumental tracks. And when I started working with Kanye, his show was on an instant replay machine.

“I hated that machine. Because as a DJ, it gave me no flexibility at all. You couldn’t even pause on it and you couldn’t start from, you know, the second verse or whatever. All it could do was play something from the beginning, so if we were rehearsing and they’d be like, ‘Let’s start over from the second chorus,’ I’d be like, ‘Stupid machine.’ But it was extremely reliable. So for that reason everybody felt confident about having that as the backbone of the music on the show. So for the first year I was touring with Kanye, my setup was an Instant Replay on the right with all my instrumental tracks, and then I had one or two turntables and a mixer with Serato which I would just use for scratching and little transitions and effects and things that I would do on top. And I had to negotiate for a long time, like: ‘Guys trust me, we can do the whole show on Serato.’

“And eventually, after about a year, we did, and actually it did mess up a few times. But it gave us so much flexibility that everybody was still okay with continuing to use it and as time went along the software itself became more and more reliable and now everybody runs their show off Serato.”