Other DJs

If you’re playing with other DJs find out whether any of them use Scratch LIVE, maybe you can share an SL 1 and save some setup time.

Find out who is before you, if you need it, request they play a longer track to finish up so you can swap in your gear.

Show them Scratch LIVE, tell them how great it is, and where you bought it from.

Promoter/Owner

He’s the guy you will be talking to about getting paid at the end of the night. Make sure he’s around to see how good you are.

Sound Tech

There shouldn’t be any difference sound wise, but if the venue has a sound tech, let him know what you’re using as a courtesy.

Find out if there is any spare equipment (turntables, mixers, headshells etc) and where it’s kept. If some of the club’s gear fails you’ll know what to ask for.

Facilities

Find out where you can keep your gear before and after the show, where the closest bathrooms are and how hard it is to get to them with a crowd.

Parking, if any, and where is safe to park is also good to know.

The Gig

Put in your headshells, and go through the calibration sequence again. Check your levels and make the crowd go wild etc.

Clean your needles and control vinyl during the course of the night.

Keep an eye on the tracking indicator.

Make sure everyone who’s interested knows where they can buy Scratch LIVE

It’s a good idea if you can, to record your set and listen back afterwards to see what went right, wrong, and how it all sounded. With an extra soundcard, this can be achieved with the same computer that you play from. Check out the forum for ideas about this and whether your system is capable.

Potential Problems

It’s unlikely that you will run into problems, but if something strange happens, you should know a few basics to figure out what’s wrong.

First things to check are:

- The tracking indicator
- Dust on the needles
- Temperature
- The scopes in the setup screen
- Is your control vinyl clean
- Other applications, tasks

If you see the USB light coming on and sound glitches, the first thing to try is to switch to the setup screen and raise the USB buffer. If it’s maxed out and you still get dropouts, make sure your cooling is working, your other programs aren’t running and the tracks you’re playing aren’t corrupt somehow.

It might be a good idea to throw on some backup audio and restart your computer.

Quickly play backup audio and restart your computer. Make sure you don’t play that file again until you’ve verified what the problem is.

If your computer crashes that iPod might come in real handy. Don’t be scared, almost all of our users have never had a crash in a live situation, but try and remember the track you were playing, and come onto ScratchLIVE.net and tell us about it, so we can make sure it never happens again.

If it turns out your problem was caused by a particular file, we need to know about it, so please retain the bad file and send it to us at some point (make a topic on the forum and we’ll let you know how).


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