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I finally got around to upgrading my DJ set-up from a very tired cheap & nasty Behringer Mixer & Technics 1210′s to something a little more cutting edge.

I’ve been a longtime user of Final Scratch and really like the combination of digital DJ’ing but the tactile elements of vinyl so I decided to keep the technics 1210′s but went for a software upgrade. The mixer I bought has a built in ‘scratchamp’ equivalent which hooks up to Traktor Scratch Pro – the software is pretty much the same but the timecoded vinyl system has been much improved and crashes a lot less.

The mixer itself is a Korg Zero4 which has firewire interface, midi controller and 4 channels. It does a good job of replacing my mixer and scratch amp whilst also offering a whole bunch of features like effects on a per channel basis which can then be sent through to the master and another layer of FX applied there if you want. Initial feedback is that its a pretty solid mixer and the illumination also looks pretty cool.

If I ever get around to playing out then CDJ’s seem to be the industry standard at the moment so I invested in a couple of CDJ-1000′s and stands so that I can get the whole rig into a fairly compact space. The final aspect was to upgrade the speakers to active-powered Behringer Truths which are pretty punchy for the price. Quality isn’t the best but I’m not the most demanding audiophile….yet

Also added a lap-top stand to make it much easier to intergrate Traktor into my line of sight. Its actually a pretty versatile set-up now, I can either do full digital DJ’ing using the mixer as a MIDI controller only or can go completely old school and move back to Vinyl or can use CDJ/Vinyl as timecodes to manipulate tracks in Traktor Scratch Pro.

I still have the old scratch amp which makes a pretty decent external soundcard and is the only thing I need to hook-up to the mixer so I can record sets which will hopefully be pretty soon!

Pics below:

My completed Set-up!

Korg Zero 4

Dj Set-UP