Back in the day when I first began learning how to scratch, a lot of my inspiration came from the group the X-Ecutioners, specifically the album X-Pressions, which I remember listening to over and over and over…until the tape fell apart!

What I liked about the group was how smooth and accurate all their scratches were. Instead of stuffing as many advanced scratching techniques as they could into every song, they instead seemed to focus on delivering precise scratches and rhythmic patterns.

While most of my friends claimed Roc Raida as their favorite, I always sided with Rob Swift for some reason, which is why It was a pleasant surprise to come across this video of him doing what he does best.

Nothing new here in terms of the scratching, but just as good to listen to as it ever was!

Shout out to the homies at The LAB for the link!

Peep this old school scratch lesson from Wiz Kid and Jazzy Jay. Serato what?

While I initially imagined the Mixmeister Scratch Tool to be a fun, and perhaps entertaining feature for the iPhone, a single viewing of the promotional video made me realize that for any actual dj, its just an annoying piece of software. While the average Joe might find pleasure in “scratching” a set of programmed noises and beats, the obvious limitations of the software render it incapable of producing anything better than the garbage noises I made the day I bought my first set of turntables, which quite frankly, I would rather not ever hear again.

Before I get into the actual review part of this post, I wanted to share some personal history on how I came to own one of these since it was the first real mixer I ever owned, and was instrumental in the progression of my own skills.

I first started dj’ing after buying a 2 channel Gemini mixer from a friend who had recently upgraded. I spent the first two months destroying my mother’s record collection by using the an old record player we had at home and attempting to duplicate the scratches I had observed my friend perform. Naturally I quickly became frustrated with the constant skipping, and headed back to my friends house in search of advice. After pointing out that I needed some better turntables and needles, my friend let me use his new mixer which was a Vestax PMC05. Although I still had no real skills at that point, I quickly started reproducing similar sounds to those my friend could make, simply on account of the smoothly gliding faders on his new mixer, which was a sharp contrast to the stiff feel of the mixer I had at home. Feeling inspired a month later, I headed over to a music store and bought a couple Technic 1200’s and a Vestax PMC07 Pro. From that moment on I was hooked on mixing music and scratching, and I attribute it in a lot of ways to the quality of the PMC07 mixer, which I wound up using for over 7 years, and still own to this day!

Now 12 years later, here is why I love this mixer, and also some reasons why I hate it.

Like most Vestax 2 channel Vestax mixers the 07 Pro was very much created for dj’s who liked to scratch. It came with a Vestax pcv fader that claimed to be able to survive 2 million passes before audible audio loss, and in my experience it easily surpassed that claim. The mixer had a session in jack(RCA) which meant I could plug another mixer into mine and run both through the same speakers, a common feature today but somewhat novel back then. Another useful feature was that it had both RCA and TRS master outs, so I didn’t have to worry about using adapters that could reduce sound quality when doing gigs at new places. And most importantly, the thing was built like a tank. Despite the fact that it got dropped, slammed, and spilled on with beer more times than I can remember, the thing just kept working. The PMC07 certainly had some drawbacks though, some of which I didn’t even realize until I started using other mixers. First of all, it had no monitor output, which was just strange. There was always the option of using the unused master output jack, but then I had no control of the monitor volume as it was dependent on the master volume. Also, while the cross fader was great for scratching, its volume curve(despite being adjustable) was not as smooth as I wanted. Another issue I had with it from a mixing point of view, was that the knobs for the three band EQ moved up and down, as opposed to being rotary knobs which are much more precise and easy to use when mixing tracks rapidly. Finally, it had these massive panning knobs, which seemed cool at first, but in reality were pretty useless. Overall I highly recommend this mixer to anyone more interested in scratching. There are certainly newer and better mixers out there now, but this one is still worth a few bucks.

And for good measure, here are the specs: