Parts & Functions of a Turntable

Video Transcript

"What's up everyone I'm DJ PieceMeal and your watching Expert Village. So now let's talk about the elements of the turntable. First let's start very basic. So let's start with the first thing that catches your eye. That would be the platter. Basically, as you can probably guess, platter is what holds the record. Most turntables if your going to be look for a platter you want to look for something that's fairly heavy in metal anything plastic your not going to be able to get a good grip on. The thing on top of the platter, this is the slip mat. I prefer to use the butter rugs it's, I've had these probably for about three or four years it's in pretty good shape. What the slip mat allows you to do is have the records sit on the platter and glide easily without recking your record or the platter. Next, we'll move on to the tone arm. There's basically two types of tone arms: there's the straight tone arm and the S-tone arm. What I like about the S-tone arm is it stays on record and it doesn't skip when your playing it. Usually when you have a straight tone arm and your adjusting the record a lot of times the tendency of the needle is to slip off and you'll lose your track. So that's why I like the S-tone arm. Next important thing on the turn table is the cartridge. There are many different types of cartridges out there and needles. Usually you can just take them off and carry them with you that way you don't reck them. I use the Scherz for needles. Most scratch DJ's do and the stylist if you can see that. This is the actual needle that goes on the record. Again different DJ's use different needles. I use the N 4,4 by Scherz they seem to work well with me and scratching and now we're gonna move on here to the pitch control. That's this right here. Essentially what this does is it allows you to speed up or slow down your record and this we'll talk a little bit more about when we're matching beats but essentially most turntables will have a button that you can push. Mine is right here to put it to zero and that means that the beat on the record is gonna stay exactly how the producers on the record want it to be. If your mixing and you need to do any adjustments you can go all the way to plus 8 and that will speed the record up or you can slow it down and go to negative 8."