Pioneer CDJ Guidebook: A Comparison and History of CDJs and XDJs
passionatedj.comGetting into djing was incredible. We had a friend working in a local music shop, they had gigantic rooms filled with guitars and pianos, but once djing became a thing they started dedicated a little angle to pioneer and Cdjs.
They let us playing on 2 cdjs 1000, with an Allen Heat mixer. Deadmau5 was the most played there, 2010 was an amazing year for electronic music. People kept increasing, things started breaking and we had to find something else. I've worked an entire summer 10 hours per day to afford two CDJ 900, then I bought a Reloop DJM and started organizing parties.
Those years will always remain in my heart. The energy, the people, I just think that some experiences will stay within your soul for the rest of your life. But if there's something I'll never understand is why the business world behind music and entertainment in general is so rot and broken. Maybe drugs, maybe the desire to get easy money, most of the people involved in parties just want to squeeze people for money, from location owners to PRs. If you don't have the guts to enter this "Mors tua Vita mea" cycle you're getting ripped off and left behind.
Your only hope was finding those two or three trusted friends and fight together against the rest of the world, until the last breath.
God, I miss those times.
I can explain why the business behind music in particular is troublesome, but first let me just complain about the combination of "Pioneer" and "once DJing became a thing." DJing was a thing before Pioneer ever got involved. Technics turntables outsold guitars in the US at least once in the late 1990s.
With that out of the way, what are you selling, in music? You can sell recordings, but Spotify has made that pretty difficult, and even without Spotify, the margins are surprisingly bad because of all the middlemen. So mostly you're selling live performances, i.e., parties.
Some people go to the party for the music, some people go there to dance, and many people go to get high and/or get laid. The people who love music and the people who love dancing will come back often, and that's not a problem. But the people who show up to get high either don't do it very often, or they're a problem. The people who show up to meet somebody either then date that person for a while or are sex addicts. So again, they either don't do it very often, or they do, and that's a problem.
So there's the demand side of the equation. There's a small number of customers you can build an ongoing relationship with, and a larger number with whom you can't. Let's look at supply. Here it's the same story as it is with movies or TV: there are tons and tons of people who want to do it and are willing to take a financial loss in order to do so. So until you get to a level where you can charge a lot of money, you're stuck at a level where you can hardly charge at all. That phase can last for years, even decades.
If you want to instead consider promoters and event organizers the supply side, everything I said about the customers applies to them as well.
So there you have it. It's a brutally tough business for most people and a cakewalk for a lucky few.
Drugs have always been a part of the music scene. I guarantee its corporatization and the focus on profits. Greed ruins nearly everything.
I still have a collection of older CDJs. A lot of my friends bought into the CDJ100s, but I abhorred those decks. Coming from vinyl, they just did not have a feel that felt good at all. Once the CDJ1000s came out, I finally felt that the decks had a feel that didn't feel gross. If you've never been a vinyl DJ, it's really hard to describe what it was that just wasn't right. The CDJs just felt light, cheap, plasticy, etc. Everyone felt this way, and that's why they kept changing until they got closest with the CDJ1000 and later.
To this day, I still prefer to play vinyl. There's just something about putting your hands directly on the medium. Yes, needles, scratches, pops, dust, all degrade the sound blah blah, but I still love it regardless.
Fun fact: the XDJ-XZ hybrid console/controller appears to run a BSD of some kind. I wonder if the other products do too?
This is great and very thorough! But it's nearly 4 years old, should have a (2018) appended to the title please.
I've got 4x XDJ, 2x turntables and a mixer setup in the front room of the house :-). DJing is my creative outlet, a way for me to escape reality for a fee hours at a time.
I can either use DVS to "simulate" vinyl (laptop required), use actual vinyl or plug in several USBs.
I had thought serato paired with vinyl control records on traditional Technics MK2s was the sort-of stack of choice.
Are people using CDs and these devices commonly today?
Most people getting into DJing now are either using Pioneer DDJ[1] which is a controller you plug into a computer, or the all-in-one system like XDJ-RX2[2]. Serato/Traktor Scratch DVS setups are usually favoured by people who like records but want to play digital too.
1210s (older MK2/3/5 or the newer MK7) are very expensive so its a huge call for someone to start with a pair of these (plus the additional expense of a mixer, needles and records).
[1] https://www.pioneerdj.com/en-au/product/all-in-one-system/xd...
[2] https://www.pioneerdj.com/en-au/product/controller/ddj-400/b...
Thanks for this and the sibling replies.
I’ve been out of the game a long time. I have a pair of SL 1200 MK2s in the original boxes (boxes beat to hell, they were my only cases) in my moms attic.
They were expensive new, I picked up a djm-500 at the same time. Looking at eBay, they don’t seem to have appreciated much in value, if anything gone down given inflation.
It was all thanks to a summer job at Intel between my first and second years at college. Blew a ton on this setup!
Just had a look on ebay and I'm surprised at how much used SL1210 mk2s still go for.
I'm surprised, but not that surprised.
I still have my pair of 1210s I bought in 1996 I think. I dragged those to regular small bar gigs 2 or 3 nights a week for about 4 years when I first left uni.
They're still rock solid and work just like new. Whenever I think of good design the Technics SL1200 comes to mind.
The flight cases, however, are up in the loft and stink of cigarette smoke. Seems now crazy to think people used to smoke in pubs.
This sounds like good living. I’d take mine to house parties in college, mostly. Spinning house music. Stuff like Subliminal Records, whatever DJ Dan was into.
> Seems now crazy to think people used to smoke in pubs.
It was crazy and reckless but also interesting to have experienced if only for a relatively short period of time. (presuming no obvious personal long term impacts)
I presume we’ll feel the same about alcohol in a few decades. It’s a rather blunt instrument with which to alter consciousness. And it has a lot of unfortunate outcomes.
It was for a time, and then the ability to plug a USB drive into one CDJ and use it across multiple CDJs came into play. Suddenly, instead of bringing a laptop to a club that you have to fumble around with (no more unplugging and rewiring decks in the middle of someone's set), all you needed to do was bring a thumb drive.
Nowadays you still see folk using Serato/Traitor for sure, but - at least within the dance music community - regular vinyl or USB/CDJ (or often a combo of both) are the most common formats you'll see.
It makes sense that you’d wanna eliminate the entire laptop stack and everything they can go wrong there.
I suspect it varies a lot by genre and possibly also geographic location?
For house, techno, drum and bass, etc I typically see a lot of Pioneer gear, used with digital storage, not CDs. I still see Technics turntables too, but with real vinyl, depending on the DJ. The vast majority of the stuff I listen to doesn't involve scratching / DMC-style turntablism though.
Yeah, it's way easier to set up, transport, and transitions between DJs when all you need is a USB (plus a backup or two) and your headphones
I’ve just recently got back into it again with a small controller after having a break for a decade, and am having a great time, I started with vinyl then CDJs.
I’m using Beatport Link for my music which is incredible, but it doesn’t match vinyl shopping and really getting to know your tracks, as I already have 200 songs in various playlists and barely know the names of any of them.
Good stuff, though it's missing the newest model, the CDJ-3000.
Which, as a sign of the times, doesn't play CDs.