Transcript
TECHFILES
with...
SLYNK
NOVATION DICEZ As DVSs (Digital Vinyl Systems) like Serato and Traktor Scratch become more popular we’re seeing more and more MIDI-based products come out, which help you look less like your checking your email and more like your rocking a show. ovation claims the Dicer is a “game changing” piece of kit. Are they just being vain? Store DJ with the hookups this week. First impressions of the Dicer are pretty good. Although they look kind of cheap with their plastic housing, the buttons feel pretty good, they light up different colours and the whole idea is great. These stylish Serato MIDI controllers come in pairs, one for each deck, along with one USB cable and a dicer-to-dicer communication mini-jack cable. This allows you to power and run both dicers off the one USB cable. It also comes with a mysterious black coloured sticky substance they call “DJ Putty”. It’s almost like blue tack but it possesses magical reusable sticking powers without leaving residue. This is used to stick your dicer firmly to your CDJ or anywhere really. The coolest thing about these things is that they come with a removable attachment that fits snugly into the 45-adapter space on the Technics 1200s. You’d think bashing the buttons on the Dicer while its sitting on top of
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your turntable is going to cause needle jumps all over the place, but the Dicers are fitted with padded feet and the buttons are really sensitive so you quickly get used to pressing them softly. You’ll have no problem if you are using relative mode on Serato. Using the Dicers is so easy. You don’t need to install any drivers or software. You just plug them in, load up Serato (not necessarily in that order) and go for it. Novation has made a template for Traktor users so that they can quickly get in on the action too, and of course with some simple MIDI learning, you could have these guys triggering clips and effects in Ableton or any other program that accepts MIDI information. Testing shows little to no latency. Nice. So what can you do with these things? They have three modes each colour coded with the default mode landing on “Hot Cue” which is coloured red. Oh I see what you did there Novation. In this mode the five dice buttons correspond to the five hot cues in Serato. The Dicer buttons only glow red if you have a hot cue set for that number. Otherwise pressing that button will set you a hot cue point. You can delete any of the hot cues live by holding the mode button and pressing the hot cue you want to remove. Next up is ‘Loop Roll Mode’, which glows green. This is really fun and it’s easy to get carried away with. It loops tiny sections of your song (either 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 of a beat) to give a sweet stutter effect to glitch up your song or make a big build up. Holding down any of the five Dicer buttons will start the loop rolling. Upon exiting the loop, the song continues to
play from where you would be if you hadn’t pressed the loop. This keeps the flow of the song together. The third mode is the ‘Auto Loop Mode’, which glows orange. Each Dicer button will automatically apply a different sized loop (1, 2, 4, 8, 16 beats) assuming that the BPM information in the MP3 tag is accurate. Serato will automatically find the BPM of your songs but if it is a funk or rock track, chances are the song has a lot of human error in the timing and will not keep exact time, rendering your auto loops useless. But for most electronic music, you’ll be fine. There is also a user-defined mode that you can setup to trigger anything you want in Serato. There are so many possibilities with these little units but some of you may be asking, “there are shortcuts on my laptop keyboard for all of this junk, what do I need these for?” Well you’ll find using them to be quicker since they are right on your decks but will also make it loop less like you’re checking your email while you DJ, and
stage presence is essential to rock a crowd. Overall I was pretty impressed. The price is decent, and what you get is quality. The fact that they light up will make it so easy to hit those cue points accurately in a dark club. I want to see a wireless rechargeable Dicers V2. How sweet would that be!
TECHFILES LED SPECIAL Whether you’re wanting to light up your next house party, looking after the lighting at the local theatre club’s amateur production or a LED professional, Lightsounds has you covered when it comes to the range of LED lighting products at your next event.
activated programs via master/ slave, as well as a hypnotic variable speed-pulse effect. Rich red, green and blue colour washes can be achieved (plus static colours), without the need for a DMX controller. Lux is set at a powerful 1,360 at 1m, and weighing in at a modest 3.2 kgs you won’t be breaking your back handling them. The Ledbar is just over one metre in length, with power auto switching built in, and a piggy-back plug.
THE LEDBAR
THE XLED 590
The Ledbar has become renowned as a supremely versatile fixture that is as equally at home in a 5-star hotel as a nightclub. Its flexibility of use and application is of appeal to production companies and installers alike. It has multiple hanging brackets for stage floor, truss or lighting stands, and is housed in a compact and lightweight chassis. Beam angle is set at 42 degrees while the 3x12 Watt Tri Colour LEDs actually reduce shadow, providing smoother colour mixing. Plenty of control options can be accessed with multiple DMX control options - up to 36 channels. Additional features include built-in automated and sound-
The XLED 590 wash moving head is fast coming the ‘go to’ fixture for powerful and dynamic RGB wash lighting. The fixtures create enormous punch thanks to the use of 90 Osram Diamond Dragon 5W RGB LEDs in each head. One of the world's brightest single-chip SMT
LEDs (offering up to 250 lumens), each head contains 90 high power 5W LEDs, 30 each of red, green and blue. The light output closely resembles that of a conventional wash light, containing a 1200W discharge lamp, with the advantage of excellent colour mixing and high uniformity of the white beam. These compact fixtures are lightweight, convenient to use, easy to install with quiet running, and offer an impressive array of settings. At the same time they offer an enormous output making them easily adaptable to a variety of uses. Recent applications have included fashion shows, theatre productions and live music video production. The XLED 590 comes with ten preset fixed colours with linearly adjustable colour temperature (3200°K-10000°K), with four preset fixed colour temperatures (3200K, 5600K, 7200K and 10000K), smooth dimming, strobe from 1-25 fps, 540° pan, 270° tilt (8-bit or 16-bit), programmable by user from the LCD control panel, three optional DMX control modes, RDM (Remote Device Management) ready, automatic power turn off when the LED temperature is too high, and lens protection design with compact modular design. With a chassis constructed in composite plastic and aluminium (IP20), the head weighs just 11kg and measures 350mm x 252mm x 353mm.
THE OPTITRILED The Optitriled is fast becoming an integral wash lighting fixture for production and stage applications. This high-powered LED par projector makes use of the latest in LED technology with three Watt tri-colour LEDs.
These tri LEDs incorporate three colours in each LED providing smoother colour mixing and removing much of the multi-shadow normally associated with standard LED wash lights. The Light Emotion development team have done their research with regard to on-thejob practicalities, so there are several userfriendly features included. Strong double yoke with easy access tri-wheel tighteners, and piggy-back plug sockets, essential in saving time from having to run extension leads and power boards. There is also an electronic LCD display with one touch DMX programming. Weighing in at a modest 6.7kgs you won’t be breaking your back when rigging or installing them. Adjustable strobing and smooth master dimming are also available with beam angle of 40 degrees. This unit is also fully operational in any mounting position. FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT LIGHTSOUNDS, 2/72 MC LACHLAN ST, FORTITUDE VALLEY
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