Welcome to my blog – Vinyl Vibes Review. The idea or direction for this site hasn’t fully formed yet, as I’m starting this in the midst of a crazy time in my life with my business and some big changes. I needed something to distract me with but also more importantly to do something completely different than what I would normally do. To the right of my work desk is my vintage DJ and collectible records collection neatly stored away in the IKEA Kallax shelves and I thought – why don’t I write up some reviews on my collection and share.
A bit about me: I’m 40-something, running a small business and raising a family.
I always loved music from as young as I can remember listening to whatever was on TV and the radio and enjoying a wide range of music that was played back then in Australia. Mostly rock, punk, disco and pop.
Over the years I was exposed to artists like Prince (my all time favourite), Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, INXS, which then somehow led to Bobby Brown, Bell Biv DeVoe and a whole list of R&B and New Jack Swing music.
Then my friends down the road showed me some dubbed tapes that they had.
N.W.A & Ice T were on these bootleg tapes. Since a tape was 45 mins each side, these tapes had most of 1 album, and then cuts from other albums to fill up both sides.
I was told to listen to this at low volume so my parents wouldn’t hear (we didn’t have headphones back then). This music shook me to my core about what music could be: angry, brutally honest, confronting and everything in between. My love of hip-hop started and I consumed as much of it as Australia TV & Radio allowed (which was close to nothing), but mostly through sharing music with friends.
Back then I knew mixtapes to be when a song would play and after however many verses and just before the downbeat of the song, the track would switch to another song starting with the downbeat of the new song which had a similar tempo and there would be no breaks in the music for 15-20 mins at a time.
Then I discovered at a local party what DJs could actually do: blend music together to form a continuous stream of music.
Blending two songs on top of each, hearing both but hearing it as one was incredible to me at the time. I was amazed at how all the songs were perfectly in sync as I had no idea you could change the tempo!
Being completely blown away at this, I dedicated myself to this craft and how I can start to do “what that guy did”.
This was before the internet, before the abundance of information out there now, before watching a YouTube video on exactly what you need and the steps to take to be a DJ (I’m not hating, I’m just saying it’s so much more accessible now which is great).
I should point out that at this time, I had already started to acquire records as I preferred vinyl over cassette tapes. Probably because I felt like I got more for my money (really my parents money) as you get the big 12″ cover, you can pick what song to play on a turntable (no need to fast forward or rewind) and if you got lyrics to the songs – easier to read then what they had on cassette tapes.
When my dad invested into a CD player (back then from memory he dropped close to $2,000 on a unit), I slowly started to buy more CDs instead. The logic was sound: better quality, more compact (but not ridiculous like a cassette tape) and you could do crazy things like skip songs, rearrange song play order or shuffle.
The DJ that I saw at that party was also using CDs so I thought: mixing with CDs is the way to go.
CDJ
I had a lot of research to do like: how do you go from one song to the next and….. well actually that was the only question I had. Again I had no idea you could change the tempo of songs and so I thought you just had to know what songs could mix with the next!
After a short while I discovered the mixer, and convinced my dad to buy me one which had 5 channels, a master volume, and a 10 band EQ. Eventually it got called the surfboard mixer because it was about 60cm / 2 feet wide. It did have a crossfader on channels 1 and 2 though which is all I needed.
I then used my Sony Discman as one input and my dads $2,000 CD player as the second.
That first blend – which was definitely offbeat and horrible – was amazing since I was the one doing it.
From there I catalogued my CD collection using a BPM counter on our PC (the internet was just new at the time) and listed them on a printed out spreadsheet so I could blend songs with very similar tempos and practice mixing on beat.
My friend at the time had a love of audio systems and put together a decent speaker setup with his amp and he started to get interested in DJing. Obviously we decided to join forces and we tried our hands at DJing for friends and family parties: me lugging a Discman, a CD player, the surfboard, and he with the amp and speakers and some cheap lights.
Then we hit a school disco which featured a local DJ and he had:
2 turntables and a (skinny) 2 channel mixer.
“Hey bro, what’s that under the record?”
“umm…. a slipmat”
(To my friend “So that’s how you can spin a record backwards and scratch and everything else”)
(“Look, he’s changing the speed of the song with that thing that looks like a volume control or a fader”)
Obviously I couldn’t wait to try my hand at this. We worked out that we could cut one of those thick plastic bags you would get when you buy a record into a makeshift slipmat.
I had a stereo system with 2 tape players and a turntable built into the single unit and I tried to scratch for the very first time and the feeling was incredible!
Since I had 5 inputs on my surfboard, I added a separate belt driven turntable with a dial that could change the tempo just so I could practise blending from a CD, to a record and back again.
This sealed my fate: I needed 2 turntables and a record collection.
2 Turntables and a record collection
From here over the years I eventually got the 2 turntables and a 2 channel mixer and poured all my money into buying records. I realise now that subconsciously I was also buying collectible records and ‘wouldn’t bring these to gigs because it probably didn’t suit the crowd’.
After school and after I got paid from working at McDonalds I would take a trip to Parramatta and drop by Soul Sense, a dedicated music / DJ store. Then onto another train into the city to check out the city branch of Soul Sense, Unsound Records and after a while Anthem Records. Ashwoods, Lawsons, Red Eye Records, Central Station Records were all added to my weekly trips to buy more records so that I could expand my DJ collection (and collectible records), trying to keep up with the latest hits and also trying to make sure I bought and played music that I liked.
Because of this love of music and DJing, my collection continued to grow as I pursued a dream of DJing for a living.
But it wasn’t meant to be. Fast forward many years (and many parties and weddings that I would still DJ for not just the love of DJing, but also for the need of income) my collection continued to grow.
I consider myself semi-retired from DJing. I still mix – no longer at parties but for the love of it. One part I didn’t explore above is when I completely dove into being a scratch DJ after watching a DJ battle / showcase between the Invisibl Skratch Pickle and the X-Men (now known as the X-Ecutioners). Another story for another day perhaps!
Which brings me to this site: Vinyl Vibes Review.
My vintage DJ and collectible records collection was mostly built for DJing, but a good chunk of it (especially in recent years) I’ve added records purely from a collectors point of view. I’m a natural born collector: sneakers, basketball cards, Pop Vinyl, some toys from my youth and other things.
So the main reason why I started this blog is so I can go through my Vintage DJ and collectible record and give reviews.
It will mostly be records that I used when DJing, and there are definitely some in the collection that may be considered collectible. And I will also share records that I’ve gotten as a collector.
I still don’t know the direction this blog will take me (and hopefully it will be more than a handful of posts), but I just needed to start.