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STANTON: FINAL SCRATCH
I had a fantastic idea one lunchtime back when I was at school. I dreamt of a device - the most advanced piece of DJ technology known to man: the everlasting dubplate, erasable and recordable for all time. It would utilise a high tech arrangement of miniature magnets, and a special attachment for the tone arm of your trusty SL1200s to read out the tune from this whole arrangement. When you had finished playing your tune, you could wipe it off, like some kind of magic musical black board, and chalk up a new tune ready for the next session. Expensive, I thought; difficult to engineer. But plausible. It could definitely be done.
A while later, I was introduced to finalscratch.com, and the truth was much much simpler, and far more incredible to behold.
Way Back When
At the time, many people who saw the web site considered it to be a joke. "It's impossible," they cried, because they could not figure out how it could be possible. Richie Hawtin was the only touring DJ with the system, and slowly its reputation began to take a hold - even though on occasion he was accused of faking it, just playing a CD, because it looked like he was never changing the records! The reality of Final Scratch is, of course, that you can control any tune that you have on your laptop using real slates of vinyl, and real turntables.
Who, You Say?
The Final Scratch is aimed squarely at a very specific cross-section of the DJ market: those DJs who want to retain all the hard practiced, hard proven skills on the traditional one's and two's that they have spent so many years gaining and retaining; but who don't want, or can't afford, to miss out on the digital revolution.
Of course, the main advantage of being a digital DJ is obvious - "digital DJ" is synonymous with cutting edge, and just BEING one will get you on the list of the world's top one hundred cool people. The practical advantages are less obvious but considerably more tangible, and basically boil down to being able to carry your entire record collection with you at all times. The possibilities afforded by having your entire shelf on tap are immense, particularly if you have good taste. And, it's certain to save you from years of disfiguring back pain in the years ahead.
Another possibility, one that's rarely seen outside of the elite international producer/DJ touring world, is that of producing a tune on your laptop whilst on the long-haul to a gig in LA, and then dropping it straight into your set when you get there, á la Photek. There are also tremendous possibilities for live action and improvised sets, particularly if you are performing with several laptops and a friend or two. An amusing anecdote comes from Exile, who routinely hands the microphone to members of the crowd and samples them, weaving the ensuing exclamations into his improvised tune. There are also entertaining possibilities when it comes to scratching, such as making scratch records from your own voice, or jingle-discs full of funny samples.
Inside The Box
I have to say, I was extremely excited when this piece of childhood dream landed on my doorstep, and set about tearing open the packaging with some glee. Included in the standard kit are the following items:
- 1 Scratch Amp and it's power supply
- 4 stereo phono leads, and 1 USB lead
- 1 installation CD for your laptop
- 3 Final Scratch vinyl.
Everything is of a nice build quality. The cables in the box are of a good length, around 2 meters or so. The scratch amp, although lightweight and plastic, is well designed. The fact that the phono sockets on the top are sunken into the case of the device means that you won’t leave 12 small round impressions on your records when you jam in your bag. The silvered exterior is emblazoned with the dandy red Final Scratch 'F' and Stanton's trademark 'S'. Definitely one to hold up and show the crowd, although perhaps not until the lights are on at the end. And perhaps only if you're at a trade show surrounded by people with an electrical cable fetish. Moving swiftly on...
Setting up the Final Scratch is not particularly challenging, although doing it at high speed is something of a challenge. First you have to unplug your turntables from the back of the mixer, and then plug them into the scratch amp. Then you have to plug the scratch amp into both the phono-sockets on the mixer (where you just unplugged the tables from) and then additionally you must plug another pair of leads in to the line-in's. You also have to plug the Scratch Amp in to your laptop with the USB lead. In essence, that's all you need to do.
Of course, before you can actually DO anything with the kit, you will have to install the Traktor FS software on to your laptop, and amass a collection of tunes to play. The former is easier - chuck the CD in and follow the instructions. The latter is left as an exercise for the reader; the Traktor system doesn't come with any software for importing tunes from CD or Vinyl, although a copy of iTunes will get you a long way.
The software is fairly intuitive.
At the top you have your left and right turntables. These scroll past as you play the FS vinyl, and move back and forth - as you'd expect - when you scratch. Underneath, a selection of "cases" where you can organize your tunes for quick access - by style, or tempo, or artist, or anything you like. You can also browse your hard disk directly. Organizing tunes is done by dragging and dropping them around. There is also a handy search box which will instantly bring up a list of tunes that match the word you type. In essence - it's designed well, with no frills, and can be picked up pretty much without reading a single line of instructions.
Before you can really make the most of tunes you need to "analyze" them - this process builds up a wave form so that you can see exactly what the tune looks like from start to finish. It's definitely worth spending a few hours organizing all your tunes, running them through the system, and getting it set up exactly the way you like it, before going on the road.
Of course, waxing lyrical about how great the system LOOKS is all well and good - we're trying to win a fashion show here, after all, aren't we folks? But the most potent question of all is "how much does it FEEL like real vinyl when you are mixing and scratching?"
Showdown
It occurred to me that there are two distinct ways of looking at the Final Scratch. Its essence is to be a cross over product between the analogue realm of vinyl, and digital realm of the CD or the MP3. This provides us with two points of view: Final Scratch as system which allows you to virtualise your vinyl and expand your record box, or Final Scratch as a novel, versatile control mechanism for your digital setup. Let’s examine these in turn, by comparing the system with the two most common set ups today: a pure analogue setup, the original vinyl selector; or a purely digital setup, the realm of the CDJ.
On The Ones: Technics 1210s
So how DOES the Final Scratch feel compared to vinyl? Actually, it's pretty damn near to perfect. You plonk your stylus into a groove, and a fraction of a second later the tune is playing exactly where you expect. Picking up the needle and dropping it elsewhere is pleasant and effective. Once you have your hands on deck, pushing, tugging or nudging the vinyl feels just as it would feel with an ordinary record. There is no noticeable delay between what you do and what you hear happening. Transferring your mixing skills from vinyl to Final requires no effort at all - a very big plus point for this product! Mixing real vinyl into a set is easy - take the FS record off, put a real record on, switch the switch on your mixer from Line back to Phono, and hey presto: it's as if you'd never bothered plugging the Scratch Amp in.
An FS vinyl comes with a 45rpm groove on one side, and a 33rpm groove on the other. It's definitely a pleasure to be able to take some classic hardcore and throw it on at 33rpm but switch the platter up to 45 for mixing into your d&b. Alternatively, you can take some of your 33rpm Dom & Roland vinyl, play them on the 45 side of the FS record, but stick the platter down to 33rpm, and mix his masterpieces into your latest banging Nu Skool Breaks mix. Versatile to a touch.
Of course there are some important caveats as well. The FS record does not have the same visual cues as all your old records - naturally, this would be impossible, as those dark and light patches are caused by changes in the sound on the vinyl. Instead you need to keep a sly eye on the computer screen - or, alternatively, know your MP3s inside out. This is only a minor flaw; there is no real substitute for knowing your tunes.
There are other issues that need to be borne in mind as well. The vinyl are nice and thick - hard wearing, and I would imagine, difficult to break, even if you threw them quite hard. But they are still vinyl, and they still suffer from the problems of traditional records that every DJ is familiar with; surface noise, dodgy needles, skips, scratches and finger marks. The Final Scratch copes as well as it can - but that's not always good enough, especially as if you are playing a full 2 hour set in a club with the same pair of records, they will suffer 30 or 40 times the damage that an individual record usually would. The records track the forward and backward motion of the tune using a phase difference in the stereo channels of the record (I verified this by swapping the leads whilst it was playing; it started to play backwards). This means that your needles need to be picking up stereo accurately or you will get glitchy stoppy-starty sound playing back from your laptop. Dust, dirt and beer do nothing at all to help this, and it will sound pretty bad. Greasy finger marks can also hinder the ability of the device to keep track of whereabouts on the record it is. Scratches are less of a problem but can lengthen the amount of time that it takes for the system to work out where it is supposed to be playing from when you first drop the needle onto the record. Also beware of loose cables; if one of the stereo leads comes out, your playback will stop and wont start again until you figure out what happened!
Ironically, I also had a problem getting the device to work correctly with Stanton 500s - you need good needles to get this product to work. The 500s would correctly determine if the record was playing forward or backward, but could not work out when I had picked up the needle and moved it. The position on the record is encoded with an AM timecode - so you need needles with good pick-up, and of course that's the first reason people ditch their 500s anyway. I had no problems with more expensive Stanton carts, or my Ortofon Concords.
On The Twos: Pioneer CDJs
Let's take it from the other angle - Final Scratch versus the trusty CDJ, the new mainstay of the club environment. With the advent of the Pioneer CDJ 1000 - arguably the standard in CD mixing now - there's a lot less to recommend Final Scratch from an idealistic point of view than there once was. Many of the selling points of the Final Scratch have already been selling points of the CDJ for some time. CDs already had the advantage that you can fit 100 tunes in your jacket pocket, and they also already had the advantage that the sound quality doesn’t suffer from environmental factors like dust. CDJs are easier to set up than turntables: plug them in, turn them on, play away, play away, and play away! Perhaps crucially, CDJs are finely tuned, expensive, standardized pieces of hardware; everyone's laptop is different.
One thing that many CDJs have that is missing from the Traktor FS software is the ability to set up loops, and store cue points. This is not something you can do with traditional vinyl - but it's certainly something theoretically possible with the cross breed system that is the FS. The full version of Traktor DJ has many features above and beyond what’s possible with the Final Scratch version, and some of these features would be very pleasant to have indeed, such as filtering and looping. Of course if you have a nice mixer you don’t need the filtering; and if you have time to spare ante-performance, you can cut up your loops and save them on to your laptop in the first place. I even saw a nice page on how to make your own “Q-Bert” style Y-record in MP3 form.
But even with a CDJ, your tunes are not truly in the digital domain. Only on the most expensive Denon CDJ can you get close to the advantages of having purely digital tunes that are not tied to the medium that you play them from. One of the biggest disadvantages of a CDJ is that you can't mix together two tunes that are on the same CD - without burning two copies of the CD, of course. Also, whilst 100 tunes (10 CDs) may just fit in your pocket, 1,000 tunes will not. And 10,000 are right out of the question. But with laptop hard disks reaching beyond 80Gbs these days - or hey, why not buy an external 250Gb firewire drive? - It’s not just feasible to carry around this much music, but it's actually easy.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the CDJ approach is one that's simple to solve in theory, but impossible to solve in practice: many clubs still don't have them. And whilst the clubs may be catching up fast, there are other environments that almost certainly won't, such as free parties, festivals, your university mates' messy suburban squat, and just about every bar that never sees the front let alone the back of a Real, Mixing DJ. Even if you only ever hit the finest venues through the VIP entrance, you'll still be caught short eventually. You simply can't rely on people having anything more than two 1210s and a mixer - even monitor speakers are still far from guaranteed in a dance-floor environment, and we really are talking basics here aren't we? The obvious work around is to bring our own - but CDJ1000s are bulky, not to mention expensive. A laptop and Final Scratch will fit in your bag alongside your records. Clearly that's one up for the Final Scratch.
Bugs In The System
But, of all the issues covered so far, there’s one that’s at the back of everyone’s mind that I haven’t yet touched upon… computers crash, I hear them cry; and Technics don’t. What if it crashes mid set? Well, it’s certainly true that they do, up to a point. Computers shouldn’t crash, although it’s certainly inevitable on some level. The Final Scratch has a bad reputation from its earliest days, and the earliest incarnation of its software, for being a bit fickle when it comes to deciding whether or not to work properly. Fortunately those times are long forgotten. I have not had the software bomb out on me once - I did once manage to get the Scratch Amp drivers to blue screen my laptop, but I did have to pull the USB cable out whilst in the middle of messing with the software for that to happen (and I couldn’t replicate the fault afterwards). Likewise, I’ve had Windows XP go all weird on me and mess up the sound – but that’s really my fault for opening and closing lots of strange applications on my laptop and not giving it a reboot before walking in to the club. My advice for getting a seamless setup is fairly simple: before you go out to perform, reboot your laptop, open up Traktor FS and nothing else, and then hibernate your laptop so that it’s ready to spring in to action when you get to your destination. If you follow that advice, and keep your laptop free from hijacking software and silly frilly start-up jobs, then you’ll have very few problems indeed.
The unit does have its bugs. One of the ones I encountered was an issue where the sound would come out all choppy and grainy the first time you played a tune – I found that you could fix this by going into the options, and switching the latency from Low to Medium; you could then return to the option and switch it back to Low, and everything would be dandy. Another limitation of the scratch amp is that when it’s not powered, it won’t pass sound through from the decks to the mixer. This means that if your laptop accidentally runs out of batteries mid way through a set, everything will cut out unless you bothered to plug the Scratch Amp into the mains separately. The temptation is not to do this; it’s yet another thing to remember to pack away afterwards.
The system also does not cope as well as I would like with fast motion of the vinyl. Scratch movements are fine, but rewinds just don’t hold on. The system cannot track where on the vinyl the needle is when the vinyl is moving backwards – it relies on sensing the speed only, and most of the time, e.g. when cueing up or scratching, this is very accurate. But a fast rewind will throw the measurement off, and you will get a glitching sound. Once the vinyl is spinning forward again, you will find that it’s actually further back in the tune than you expected, as the screen suddenly jumps back a spot. Fast, accurate rewinding is therefore definitely off the menu – I suspect that this is a problem with the way that the tracking tone is picked up by the needle at such high speeds, although who knows.
Another quite distressing problem – not one that’s unique to Final Scratch, but one that any laptop DJ will tell you is quite harrowing – how to get rid of ground hum. Most laptop’s power supplies are not grounded, and neither is the Scratch Amp’s. This can cause a low pitched DC hum when the laptop’s connected to the mains. Of course a good laptop will have batteries that last for 2 or 3 hours, more than enough for a good set, but it’s a tricky problem to combat successfully. Worse still are laptops which are grounded through the mains, but have a dirty powersupply. I’ve not yet managed to get rid of the horrendous digital noise that my laptop emits whilst plugged in to the mains – I’ve been playing all my sets on batteries only. Your mileage may vary, and it’s probably wise to see if you can try out your laptop in the shop before you buy, or look for anecdotal evidence on Google, before parting with your cash – that is if you’re buying a laptop with DJing in mind. I haven’t yet tried isolating the system from the ground; it’s probably not wise.
What Else Is There?
Final Scratch is not the only digital-vinyl product out there. I’ve come across a few; DJ Decks from www.djdecks.be and Ms Pinky, from www.mspinky.com, are the main two competitors. Neither are hardware solutions; both require an expensive soundcard, but that is essentially what the Scratch Amp is anyway. They also both have higher system requirements. The DJ Decks software is certainly not as slick as Traktor FS; but it IS considerably cheaper. The Ms Pinky software is, again, somewhat novel, but as standard it includes a video-scratch module, and it comes with an SDK which means that, if you’re a software developer, you can do pretty much anything you like with the system, unlike FS which is a closed system. There are already fruits to this; there is a Cubase VSTi plug-in for MsPinky that allows you to scratch filters and effects and basically whatever you like directly inside your favourite audio application. The possibilities are definitely here to be realised, but it doesn’t look – yet – like Final Scratch is ready to take advantage. That said, there’s no reason that this situation shouldn’t change.
At The End Of The Day
Final Scratch is much more than an expensive novelty toy, although the novelty value is certainly still there. It does exactly what it says on the tin, and it does it well, although it can sometimes feel quite fragile. With proper care and a good knowledge of your kit, this is a very useful tool and opens up a wide range of possibilities for the pro DJ, even if you just use it to offset your dubplate cutting bill. I definitely look forward to the continued use of mine.
Suggested Retail Price: £449 incl. VAT
More Info:
www.lambaplc.com
-- Ben XO
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Dogs On Acid > Comments > STANTON: FINAL SCRATCH
08-25-2004 07:18 PM
