Scratching & Turntablist Definitions
Scratching
The basic principle of scratching is to take a record and pull it back and forth. You can incorporate the fader of a mixer and cut the sound off and on, but you can just move it back and forth in rhythm, on beat to a song that's playing. That's what scratching is. The motion is like scratching, but is also has a double meaning because people used to go, "You're going to scratch the record if you do that." -- Rob Swift of The X-ecutioners
Scratch DJ's
"Of course, outside of the hip-hop and dance communities, the notion of the DJ as musician is met with scorn (They're just playing records.) When I interviewed Bob James and Billy Squier (two musicians whom hip-hop DJ's have turned into breakbeat demigods,) about their opinions of DJ's, they had the same reaction, they both thought it was purely mechanical looping in a machine. They didn't know anything was done manually. Once I explained it to them and with Billy Squier I actually showed him a clip, there was tons of respect. I remember someone saying once that the recording studio is the musical instrument of the 90s." -- John Carluccio, producer of "Battle Sounds"
- BASIC TECHNIQUE: Use one turntable for a kick and a snare, and the other to scratch
- BEAT JUGGLING: Manipulating two turntables like a drummer
Turntablists
Experimental-minded DJs choose to reinvent themselves as turntablists: musicians whose instruments have styluses and motors, and whose reworking of beats and samples takes the records they spin so far from their original arrangements that they combine to create a new piece of music.
When they hit a groove, a [Skratch] Piklz live show is a dazzling display of inspired chaos. Synchronized jams fracture into bouts of solo turntable-juggling; beats are broken down and reconstructed; tempos shift; vocal tracks are transformed into stuttered mantras in a panoply of scratch styles (of which there are supposedly over 300): Forwards, scribbles, moving scribbles, tears, chirps, tear chirps.