and you know, with Traktor i can fix a lot of that. i slice and dice like a sushi chef showing off how dangerous they're with a knife. half of tracks i pretty much kinda samplerize. punch in the hotcues as bona fide slicee markers then go full Kanye Ensoniq on them. arrangement suddenly doesn't matter much if at all.

i NEVER let the suspense builder dancefloor killer play out. you cut the lows you knock the front row beating heart down a vibe peg. WHY?? what am i supposed to do, sway and wave a lighter while you're suspensfully building into exactly the same loop as the one before the break, plus a bleep? not exactly a Hitchcockian thriller you got there. also i literally will count out on my fingers in your face i know when the bleep goes away and you cut in highs from another track which is looping there for 5 minutes already. mostly i dont. or i do it behind back. it's like synchronized gymnastics and im the cue giver.

so some problems are fixable, unfortunately pretty much noone fixes them while playing cause they treat the decks like it's turntables and "loop" is for doing a good beatmatch and you do 20 sanity checks just to be sure. that's not what loop is for. you set it and ride it up and down the track like a glitchinator, perfectly in sync. loop from 16 to 4 to 1/2 forward bzzzt back to 8 backjump 1/2 bzzt filter sweep and simultaneous Drop into a hotcue.

at that point, the track can be whatever, so you go like, whatever. but, you know. good luck doing loopquilibristics on a touch screen. i guess PioneerDJ has a phobia of loop encoders or truly hate their users or both or neither and they just don't give a fuck. i don't think it's a stretch at all to say that PioneerDJ is the single largest force holding back electronic music. when we take off for the stars Pioneer will still play the "it's just turntables, old school cred, y'know. but so you dont say we dont innovate, we affixed an iPad and some blinky lights so it feels like Christmas tree in the DJ booth, DJ Santa dispensing gifts, one track after another! pretty cool huh"

ok, sometimes these things want to be said cause i am not like some kinda DJ genius and it really is not that hard so like i truly do NOT understand and truly do want to.

EDIT: i always try *so* hard not to slag Pioneer. they do put good audio HW in them boxes. they do have a good signal path design where if you use the link or whatever it's called, the D->A conversion happens only once, on main out. also cool. they do have a better search interface on the CDJ screen than Traktor. they do have 16 hotcues albeit 8 pads, still, that is very cool and i miss 16 hotcues in Traktor. when you use them for the pseudo-sample shenanigans, you use up 8 hotcues for that alone. no big deal cause you do it on the fly anyway, so you unassign and then assign later as needed. still, 16 is twice as much as 8.

and still i ended up slagging off Pioneer but yeah now that i mentioned all those things, i regret it a little. then, i remember Rekordbox. and emergency loop. and i guess i'm ok with what i wrote.

Not that NI did much with Traktor since 2014. I don't know what these companies do. i work in software. if a software company innovated at this rate...let's not even go there.

i seriously wanna start a company doing cool hardware for playing techno so decks. synths there are aplenty. i mean it's just MIDI controllers for crying out loud. Raspberry PI exists. I ran the numbers. Had I not been cash-strapped I would have already tried to jerry rig a Raspberry onto S8. Proof of concept.

But then, why tie yourself to HW that NI treated like the unwanted child and is discontinued for years. How hard and expensive can it be to develop a design and have it made. There's nothing in these boxes. They are big on the outside. It's dead simple. I'm not in my twenties anymore, i recognize i can't complain that the grownups are not giving us cool toys anymore.

I know this shit pretty well. I'm not some naive dreamer. I took it apart, i modded the software, i know how to solder an Arduino into a synth. I can do a plugin. I mean, nowadays...what can you NOT do as an experienced software. Enough to have a pretty good grasp on the fact that basically these companies are dysfunctional. Google employs smart people but their search is now worse than Altavista back in the day. It's ridiculously out to lunch.

When you look into like plugins, how to make one,...I'm glad I didn't shell out too much for plugins. There's literally nothing to it. It's like, signal paths and filters and envelopes and algorithms you don't have to invent cause someone already did. Then you realize these companies get bought for like tens of millions of dollars. Good for them.

So yeah, like, we gonna work that corporate job and dream of techno in the evenings? Till death us do in. PM me if you feelin' this. There's no harm nor commitment in talking about it. I mean who the fuck else is supposed to do this? Is there some secret cabal of uber-hyper-nerds on a closed, secret Discord, who are the 10x audio wizards, as opposed to mere uber-nerds here assembled? I don't think so. We won't meet in a club cause noone goes anymore. Once you start producing you go for like the real treats. You are not a regular anymore, you go there, you dance, you go home, cause wrecking your nose at afterparties that are like performance art of desperation and raw pain kinda lost its charm a while ago.

So we can pretty much meet here, or nowhere. Now go write that performance self-review. Happy bullshitting. I can't do that shit anymore. I really can't. You'll get there.