DJ Decks

This one isn't dead.

Let's make that very clear.

It's just been placed into extremely long-term storage while the economy sorts itself out.

For a while, DJing was a major obsession.

I bought a Numark Mixstream Pro, learned what all the buttons did, acquired an increasingly ridiculous amount of music and spent many happy hours pretending my living room was considerably more exciting than it actually was.

And I got reasonably good at it.

The problem was that eventually I started bumping into the limits of the setup.

The Mixstream Pro is a perfectly capable standalone controller, but there's only so far you can go before you start looking enviously at better equipment. And my laptop, meanwhile, was less a piece of high-performance music technology and more an elderly administrative assistant who became visibly distressed if asked to do two things at once.

So Roi and I started investigating upgrades.

Naturally, we went around the houses.

Better decks.

Better laptop.

Different software.

What would actually constitute a meaningful upgrade rather than spending a lot of money to achieve essentially the same thing with shinier buttons?

Eventually we established that yes, I could absolutely take this further.

There was just one minor problem.

Money.

No matter. I had a plan.

"I'll start saving now then," I said confidently.

Reader, I did not.

Or rather, I probably did briefly, before life noticed there was money sitting around without an assigned emergency and dealt with it.

Fast-forward an indeterminate number of months — possibly years — and the DJ Equipment Upgrade Fund remains impressively theoretical.

There have been car repairs.

Fuel prices.

Electricity bills.

And apparently we now live in an age where buying a loaf of bread requires preliminary financial planning.

So the Mixstream Pro remains.

The inadequate laptop remains.

The hypothetical magnificent future DJ setup remains magnificently hypothetical.

But unlike most things around here, this project hasn't earned itself a plot in the Graveyard.

I still love music. I still love mixing it. And if someone unexpectedly deposits a few thousand pounds into my bank account with strict instructions that it may only be spent on completely unnecessary audio equipment, I know exactly what I'm doing with it.

Until then:

Status: Covered in Cobwebs.

Not abandoned.

Just economically suppressed.