« One of The Best DJ Investments I've Made »

The switch from straight Vinyl to Serato took me some time, not because of the software but rather because I had to build my digital library. So for a few months while I did that I was rocking both Serato with my Laptop and regular Vinyl records. Good thing too since one day I forgot to plug in the laptop and it ran out of power in the middle of a set, luckily I had an acapella on regular vinyl playing on one turntable and the instrumental was on my laptop playing through serato, as soon as I noticed the instrumental dropped and noticed my laptop had gone blank I quickly grabbed a regular record threw on the instrumental on there and kept the party rocking with no one the wiser. The ability top use either digital vinyl or regular vinyl with your serato set up obviously can save the day if something goes wrong as it did that particular day. It is a very versatile system and once you have your music set up in your laptop or on a portable drive to use on someone elses laptop if need be it really opens you up to be a more versatile DJ as you can now transport huge music libraries without having to lug 8+ crates of records. This also means traveling as a DJ is much easier now as well. The relative mode also allows you to create loops, samples and cue points to jump to allowing you to get really creative with your mixing and you can even remix beats on the fly using cue points to map out drums then use the cues with Novation Dicers, Rane or other mixers that have cue pads, midi supported devices or even with your computers keystrokes to use as mini drum pads. Serato allows traditional Vinyl DJs to make the switch to the digital music file world while still giving them the precision control offered by traditional vinyl turntables the perfect melding of the old with the new to free the DJ to do what they do best, create great mixes and keep the party rocking. This is one of the best investments I have made. There are plenty of products now that have serato built in including the Rane 62 and Rane 57 mixers and now even some new Pioneer mixers out there have serato built in as well. The SL Box is still a good thing to have in your bag in case you need to connect to an older mixer otherwise for yourself you can get one of the mixers with serato already built in.