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These days, there’s a huge range of DJing equipment available – you only have to look at the gear section of IDJ to realise that! Of course, it is not all fantastic and it all does different things. Have you, for example, ever explored the use of CD players? Personally most of the DJ work I do is from CD, but this changes from venue to venue. For any vinyl junkies reading this: don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you to ditch your records! But I do advise you to experiment.

I have advised all my students at ACM to carry around with them at least a small flip-file of CDs, just in case. I know CD players are deemed less reliable than good old decks, but you never know when some idiot will chuck some beer on your decks or nick your carts! I believe the reverse of this applies too: I still take a bag of records when I’m only really going to be playing off CD.

The point is that CD players do different things from turntables. Looping, sampling and hot start functions, for example, are all now commonplace on a CD deck. This is where you may want to think about using one if you haven’t already. If you get all your acapella albums on CD, you’ll not only get more gain, but you’ll be able to clean them up and not have to worry about scratching them. Even better, you can hot start sections you like (so you can keep firing the track from the same point) and never ever get a whur on the first word. You can’t do that with vinyl!

So what good is all of this to a cool vinyl DJ? Well think about it: you can turn a small DJ booth with only two decks, a mixer and CD player into a DJ booth that has four decks. If credibility is what you’re after and CDs don’t do it for you, fair enough, but you could always use them as well as turntables. Tell me who would slag off a DJ for using all available tools to make their set better for a crowd (well, don’t actually – there’s bound to be someone out there who would!).

Other effects you may like to try are things such as flange, reverb, delay and filtering. These are built into some mixers, and indeed some CD decks; if not, you can use a separate effects unit such as a Korg Kaoss Pad or a Pioneer EFX-500.

A word of advice, though: when it comes to FX, less is almost always more, As anyone who’s ever sat in a bar or club, listened to the DJ chucking the same ‘Jet’ effect over every track and groaned “So what else did you get for Christmas, then?â€