I recently decided to begin and be bold by combining 2 of my absolute most favourite things in the world – Scratch DJing and wisdom / philosophy.
I recorded myself speaking one of the main quotes that inspired the creation of my Be Deliberate website:
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”
– Goethe
Then I took to my turntables to scratch my vocal over a beat I made to create something which I refer to as “Scratch Wisdom”. Here is the result:
I have so much fun creating these. I hope it inspires you too.
Up until now I have resisted using my own voice to scratch with and have previously only ever used other people’s spoken word recordings to create with, which I really love. It also felt good to push past that resistance and I’m wondering what else is possible.
How can you push your scratching forward? If you always use the same samples to cut with, what would happen if you took some vocal samples and scratched them over an instrumental? Is there something that inspires you? How can you combine that with scratching?
If you are wondering how I technically produced this, read on.
Production Details
I recorded my voice speaking the quote in time to the beat (100 bpm).
I then cut out the gaps / most of the silence between the phrases so I can scratch them close together more easily in time with the beat, rather than having to wind the record forward so much.
Delay Settings
I used the delay effect built into my Rane TTM57 in Serato Scratch Live with the following settings.
First of all I followed these instructions to set it up the delay effect so that the echo BPM matches the BPM of the beat that I am playing automatically:
I use slightly different settings than shown in the linked article. Here are my exact settings:
- Wet/dry (mix) setting of 20%.
- Feedback around 22%.
The delay effect is set to x1.
That’s it!
More Scratch Wisdom
If you’d like more #ScratchWisdom videos, you can watch some in this post here:
studioscratches.com/scratch-wisdom
If you’d like more wisdom or want help with your own creative projects and vision, visit me over at BE Deliberate and let’s have a conversation.
What will you begin today? Be BOLD!
Begin Learning How to Scratch
If you’d like to start learning how to scratch, I can help you in my online School of Scratch:
Happy Scratching! 😀
– Emma Short-E aka The Scratch DJ Philosopher