Also, to cram in jogs plus all of those buttons, it was big – borderline for taking in hand luggage on a plane, for instance. The Twitch has a lot of tricks up its sleeve, not least this one: Here it is running Traktor, complete with keyboard overlay.Ī runaway success, the S4 has proved that if you offer the right innovations, the DJ market will respond positively. However, the S4 didn’t make as bold a move as to drop the jogwheels entirely.
The first mass-market DJ controller to recognise this was the, which shrank the jogs and pushed them to the top of the unit, replacing them with banks of buttons for controlling hot cues, samples and the like, and coupling this hardware to new features in software like sample decks and a loop recorder.
From DJs using just laptops and keyboard shortcuts, to those hacking Midi keyboards or dedicated buttons and pad banks, to Ableton Live DJs performing radical sets with performance tools, a whole underground of DJs have “ditched the jogwheels” to prioritise different aspects of digital DJing in their sets. Meanwhile, a parallel scene has developed. In getting bigger, these units have at least partially sacrificed the portability that, on paper, is one of digital DJing’s great promises. Since then, in search of better “feel”, and also to try to escape the “toy” appearance of many of these devices, DJ controllers have slowly got bigger and heavier (witness the latest batch – the jumbo and, the not-much-smaller, the, plus of course the daddy of them all, the humongous ). Over time they got better and better until the performance of the best of them pretty much matched vinyl, with convincing spinbacks, nudging, cueing and scratching all possible from their tiny little platters. To some it was great – the feel of vinyl with digital music! To others, it was the worst of both worlds – none of the simplicity of playing real vinyl, yet you still needed all the old equipment for it to work at all.
So, back close to the advent of digital, digital vinyl systems (DVS) appeared, to let DJs use “real” record decks to control digital files. It’s something that’s proved hard to get away from. Yet that’s what DJs have always done – spin things that are round. The truth is, digital music files are not like records – they’re not round, and they don’t spin. Since the advent of digital DJing, DJs have faced a bit of a dilemma. So we’re in a great position to answer the question: After all the hype, is this diminutive little controller the way forward, or a brave failure? Let’s find out… We’ve devoured the manual, tested the features, and played a real-life gig using it. We’ve had a Novation Twitch for review for a week now. Ever had the thought that jogwheels are a bit unnecessary when DJing with digital music? Or dreamt of a controller that replaced them with functions more suited to digital DJing? Looked at technogeeks with their custom controllers and wanted in on the action? If so, the new Novation Twitch DJ controller may be right up your street.