northern comfort

As you’ll have noticed if you regularly read the site, or indeed come to any of the NC nights, we’re devoted followers of vinyl. I’ve been having a few discussions with people over the past few months, here and there, about vinyl and thought I’d put these down into some kind of post.

First, let’s go back, way back, back into time. Once upon a time, to be a DJ you had to be a record collector. There were no two ways about it. And the more records you had, the better you would be. The deeper you dug, the better you would be. (There’s an old DJ Shadow quote saying that digging won’t make a bad DJ good, but will make a good DJ better. True). The only way you could play out, was by buying vinyl. And the deeper you dug, the more b-sides and obscure album cuts you waded through, the more chance you’d have of standing out, of finding those amazing tunes that no-one else had. To the point where DJs would rip out the list of record shops from the Yellow Pages of the towns they visited so other diggers couldn’t go to those shops, and play the tunes they’d found covered up with white labels. You had to collect, dig and cherish vinyl.

Nowadays, you don’t need to do this. You can be a DJ, a very good DJ, and never, ever touch a record. Is this a good thing or not? You can guess my answer, but I’ll explain why, in my humble opinion, that if you’re a DJ or even just a music lover, you should, nay must, collect records.

First, I should probably set something straight right from the start. If you’re a dubstep DJ, say, or you just play/listen to brand new spanking hot-off-the-mastering-equipment tunes, then you probably don’t need vinyl. This isn’t for you. This is for the DJ’s who play soul, funk, jazz, hip-hop, house, drum and bass – in fact, anything where the vast majority of the music was originally released on vinyl. Also, I’m not going to bang on about ‘it just sounds better’. There’s nothing more irritating than buying a record only to have it sound like someone’s frying bacon in the background – and you don’t get that from an MP3. That’s a personal preference.

But if you’re starting to DJ, or even just getting into older music, then you must, must, must buy vinyl. Not for the tunes that you know. You can get those on MP3 of course. But for the tunes you don’t know. Let me explain.

Often, I’ll buy an album for just one track. I’ll pay a lot for the album, and in effect I’m just buying one track off it. I’ll get it, check out the one I want that I know on there, then bpm it, stick it on the shelf/in my record bag, and play it out. Ace. So far, so MP3. But 2 years later, when I’ve stopped playing it out, and it’s sat on the shelf, I’ll pull it out. I’ll stick it on the turntable, flick past the one I know, and listen to the rest of it. And BAM – there it is. An amazing track that I hadn’t heard of, didn’t realise was there, just sitting on my shelf for 2 years waiting for me to find it. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing for a music collector to discover. Not just revisiting a track and realising how much you like it, but revisiting an album and finding a tune that you didn’t even know was there. You don’t get that with an MP3.

Next, digging. How on earth you dig for bits is beyond me. If I hear a DJ play a tune I love, and I ask what it is, if they show me a blank CDR with the name of the track on it they may as well just do a dance for all the good it does me. I’ll never remember it. Show me the sleeve. Let me read the back, see who the musicians are. I’ve covered this before a bit in ‘Tips for digging for records‘ but it’s so important.

So what? Who cares? Well – it goes back to what I said at the beginning. If you only buy MP3s, you’re only buying the tunes you know, or the ones someone else has recorded. That limits your repertoire as a DJ, and as a music lover. Digging makes a good DJ better, and that only works with vinyl. Next time you want to buy a soul tune, for instance, search for the vinyl on which it was originally released. There’s no excuse really – ebay makes it all easy. You’ll not only come across much more good music as a result of it, you’ll also start to fall in love, just a little, with these records as objects. As pieces of artwork. As things. Not as a filename on a computer screen. Music is love. Music is life. Zeroes and ones mean nothing. If I come to your house I want to flick through your records, not scroll down your iTunes directory. Not look at a book of silver CDRs with various things written on in black magic marker. It’s like the difference between a wonderful library of books, a physical manifestation of a lifetime of love for the written word, compared with an Amazon Kindle list.

You local record shop is a store of knowledge, of music you don’t know and are just waiting to stumble on. Don’t miss out.