DJ equipment, music news, art, and anything else related to the life of a dj.

Some of you may remember hearing about a guy called Paul Mawhinney several months ago when he put the worlds largest private record collection in the world up for sale on eBay due to advancing age and health problems. Mawhinney started the collection 46 years ago, which has been appraised at about $50 million, and includes more than 200,000 vinyl 45s, 300,000 compact discs and a total of more than 2 million recordings.

Well the sad news is, the eBay auction in february fell through, and even at a (reduced) asking price of a mere $3 million, no one wants to buy it. Or as he puts it “no one gives a damn”.

Here’s a clip from cinematographer Sean Dunn:

The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

Read more about it Here

Embrace your inner geek with the AV T-shirt.

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Opting not to follow the traditional route of installing obnoxiously loud sub woofers into the trunks of their cars, this group of Trinidadian teenagers from Queens, NY instead chose to modify their bikes with several massive speakers.

The bikes range in size and have fierce names such as “Tinnitus Rex”, or the above pictured “Basszilla”. There’s even a movie about these kids called Made In Queens thats directed by Nicholas Randall and Joe Stevens. Check the trailer:

via The Tastemakers Society

If you use Reason 4 for your music production, then head over to the Propellerhead website as you can download a free ReFill that was especially made to honor the legacy of Robert Moog. The ReFill giveaway was an idea proposed by Propellerhead in an effort to assist the Bob Moog Foundation, in addition to Propellerhead donating money themselves.

There are 20 patches in total, all of which were created by three leading synthesists who were asked to create a series of Thor patches inspired by Moogs innovations.

Free Moog Foundation ReFill Download

Propellerhead + Moog Foundation

Making remixes, mashups, or original music has gotten significantly easier in the last several years, but there’s still a lot of important factors one needs to know about that are crucial to making something that actually sounds good.   The first of which is learning how to properly EQ, a skill that gets passed over surprisingly much.  The reason I bring it up is because I found a nice graphical guide to how frequency works, and how you can tweak certain frequencies to boost or eliminate specific sounds.

Check out the Guide To Frequency Here.

The book See Label For Contents: A Survey of 45 RPM Label Art In America 1955-1980 is an exclusive collection of record label art compiled by long time crate diggers Josh Davis (a.k.a. DJ Shadow) and Dante Cargagna.

The collection feaures 254 images that highlight the “arcane, imaginative, befuddling, and often hilarious graphics” used as label art on the 45 RPM format.

Go to powerHouse Books for more info

The bald guy at 1:40 kills it.

My post about the boombox pillow got me feeling all nostalgic, so I started looking around for more pictures of oversized boomboxes., I mean you can never have enough pictures of those to throw on flyers and such right?   After a bit of browsing I finally came across an artist called Lyle Owerko, who assembled a series of photographs called The Boombox Project, which depicts a “visual timeline of the era of the boombox”.  The series includes 15 photographs, and an excellent introduction that briefly explains the fascination that surrounds the boombox.  Here’s an excerp:

Initially, it became identified with certain segments of urban society, hence adopting epithetic nicknames, like ‘ghetto blaster’, and ‘jam box’.  But as the masses began to embrace the gargantuan conglomerations of electronics, lights and chrome plated gadgetry an inherent form of portable entertainment and expression was born.

The photos are definitely worth checking out, especially if you used to walk around with one of these.  For the full introduction, and complete set of boombox photographs visit his website.

A-Track talks about his DJ career, touring with Kanye, and his move into producing electronic music.

I frequently come across videos on YouTube that contain snippets of audio I really want in mp3 form, usually for sampling or for throwing on at the end of a set for comic purposes.

While capturing audio from videos is nothing new, the website VidToMP3 just made it a bit easier. All you do is paste in the URL for the video, wait for the conversion (takes less than 1 minute), and download the mp3. Sweet!!

Here’s the first thing I grabbed.