Sync is not mixing, but is automated beatmatching.They don’t care if you use sync – they just want to dance. Once people can rationalise automated beatmatching from skilled mixing in their minds, then perhaps we can all get on with what we’re supposed to be doing – mixing great music for our audience. I hope that with Pioneer manning up and finally making sync happen, that we’ll see much less pointless resistance to it. So an anti-sync stance if you use everything else in the digital arsenal is quite illogical. And while you’re getting hot under the collar, remember that loops and hots cues can’t be done on a turntable either. Just to repeat this one last time – sync is not mixing. You still need to know the basics, but they just speed stuff up. Sync is nothing more than speed dial, satnav or a pocket calculator. None of this is the end of days, but is the dawn of new ones. See the section on the real DJ skills for evidence. DJing is more than a sync button.Īnd here’s the thing – nobody is forcing you to use it, nor does its use make anyone better than another DJ. And when Serato finally add it to Scratch Live, that won’t be the end of DJing either, nor will people put down their headphones in protest. Funnily enough, DJing is still here and more popular than ever. There have been many landmark moments that have allegedly meant the death of DJing – CDJs, DVS, controllers, iPads, the end of Technics and now sync on CDJs. The level of feeling on this subject is understandable, but I feel it’s misplaced.

Any 2 tracks in the world can be beatmatched, but mixing them successfully is an entirely different matter. Sync will not fill a dancefloor – that takes and always will take a skilled DJ, regardless of if they use sync or not. You still need hard earned human skills to mix successfully. It’s about knowing and reading the crowd, understanding moods and feelings and knowing which track to play next, when to mix it in, for how long and how exactly to achieve the perfect mix with faders, EQs, effects and filters. This involves listening to thousands of tracks over many years, knowing that music inside out, understanding song structure and BPM. Mixing is the all encompassing true DJ craft, and goes way beyond the chore of locking 2 beats together. And in the digital age of quantised music, beatmatching is even less of a skill than it ever was.īut let me state this plain and clear – sync is not mixing. It is a task – a process that has to be done. Nobody has an issue with that, and that’s all that sync is – a simple button-push to change pitch to keep things in time and nothing more.īeatmatching is an easily learnable process, and indeed easily automated, and as such cannot be classed as a craft as it requires no human element. Think of it as MIDI clock – a pulse sent out to connects keyboards, drum machines and sequencers to keep them all in time. Music has a BPM, and sync’s job is in its rawest form to match BPMs across 2 tracks. It’s important to realise what sync actually is and does. I’m exactly the kind of DJ that you might expect to take a particular anti-sync stance. Indeed, my career has seen me in roles based around automating mindless tasks, so that people can do their job more effectively.

I started on pause button tapes, migrated to belt drives and a mixer without a crossfader, and honed my craft using gear that would be classed as prehistoric by today’s standards. I’m a time-served vinyl DJ of some 3 decades. Yep – I’m pressing that big red button one more time.

So for those who have zero interest in CDJs, or simply cannot be arsed to wade through a whole story, please allow me to state my own opinion on the subject in isolation. It also seems that the way I put across my point about the issue seems to have made a lot of sense to a lot of people. And yesterday’s CDJ-2000nexus post seemed to hit the right note with people regarding Pioneer’s somewhat controversial addition of syncing. It’s easy for me to gauge public opinion by the comments and retweets that my own published opinion gets.

Course of naturewall of shame bpm