TTL Interview, Turntablist World Interview
…within the DJ battle circuit, maybe right around 2001, things just got TOO technical for some. The funk was lost. Your style seems to balance both old and new. Can you touch on that at all?
I don’t think battling has really lost any type of funk since the 80′s. Sure, a lot of things have changed like the style of routines but that’s just how stuff works. In the 90s, it was all about funky juggles and clean cuts, in the early 2000s, people got more creative with feedback routines and stuff like that. Then in the mid to late 2000s, more people started to use routines that were pre-produced. Although I’m not very fond of pre-produced routines, who am I to judge what you do in your routine? This happens way too often in DJing and you can relate it to nearly every subject, like Basketball. When someone said that a peach basket shouldn’t be used for a hoop, but rather something different, I’m sure people were upset and had their negative opinions because a peach basket had always been used before that, but it improved the game, rather than destroyed it! Kinda like DJing and the direction its heading in.
What’s your practice schedule like? Do you practice scratching and juggling equally? How much time is spent on routines and how much on just practicing techniques and stuff? How many hours do you practice every day?
I usually get home from school and head up to my room to practice for a couple hours. I definitely prefer juggling over scratching as you can probably tell from a lot of my routines haha. I feel like scratching gets kind of boring to practice but that may just be ’cause I’m not good at it. As for my DMC routine, I spent about 10 months working on it. It went through massive changes since the first day obviously. I practice maybe 3 to 4 hours each day depending on homework, but I break the practice into parts.
