How to Choose a Scratch Record: Hip Hop DJ

Video Transcript

"What's up everyone, I'm DJ PieceMeal and your watching Expert Village. So, the first thing we're going to talk about is what to look for in a scratch record. Basically, there are three types of records that you can buy. There's the full length album which will be like if you go to the store and buy a CD, that's what your going to get on the album. If you want to save some money, and you want to get the songs that you really want to hear, there's singles. Basically, a single record will consist of the main version of the song, a radio edit, it will have an instrumental; which will obviously just be the beats that you hear on the record, at times it will have the a cappella. But what where going to look at since this topic is about scratching is a scratch record. This is the very first scratch record I ever picked up, it's the very best of DJ Rectangle, and what it has is it will some tracks with some beats and then it will have a breakdown of just scratch samples, so let's take a look at what a scratch sample is. So, when looking for scratch samples, essentially you want to think of a scratch sample as just a chuck or a single phrase that you can use to throw in on an instrumental. So, when where looking at DJ Rectangle here, let's just cycle through about four, maybe five different scratch samples. There's one, there's two, that's three, and four is right here. So, basically these are all the tools that you are going to use to create just infinite amount of different sounds. So, something you really want to focus on is marking your records. A big thing about turntablism is hand eye coordination or knowing where to bring the record back at all times. So, a lot of DJs will cheat and actually have some visual cues set up for them. As you can tell, my visual cue that I put is this line right here, I just took a marker, careful not to put it on any of the tracks, which I didn't do. That way I know when I'm looking at a specific scratch sample, this one, I'm looking always to bring it back to the very beginning, which is right there. Usually I'm going to know this line right here needs to be pointed right there, or I look at other cues too like pictures on the record. So, if you can see right here there's a little record, that matches up perfectly with my needle so that's where I know to go at all times. I can let it go for a while and I always know to come back to that point. So, a good thing to do is mark your scratch record or any record that you have when you want to remember a specific spot in that record. Sit at home and just practice this, bringing it back."