Hard to Find Records Open Day 10TH April 2010 Movie

0:05 A pub right next door to a record shop, that's exactly what you need

Alright guys, here we are in the middle of Birmingham, the 10th of April 2010 and it's the opening day for Hard To Find Records. But of course before we go there, I mean, the guy's got it sussed. A pub right next door to a record shop, that's exactly what you need. So just bear that name in mind so you know exactly where you're going and in all the videos I do for today I'll put a link to Google Maps. Let's go and take a look inside.

Gearhaw, you'll love this place. With your EQs on the channel and your software as well. So say if I'm Ableton, I've got my beat repeater or something on my filter set up on Ableton, I can actually assign these controllers to control any one of those parameters that can add to your time. Right ladies and gentlemen, Artisfying Records, what's your name sir? It's Gary. Gary, and where are you from? Hertfordshire. You're interested in touch, is that right? Yeah. Alright. Shall we go and take a look? Yeah. Let's go and have a look. Right. So where was it? Aha. Right now, rumour has it, it's got, I think it's got the best latency going. In other words, you know, there's not much delay in between the track, the movement and you kind of thing.

4:56 What's the light of say Traktor like?

I believe as well someone's coming later on to give this a demo. So how long are you here for anyway? The day or...? Well, I'm here all day. Oh dear. Right, so have you given yourself a budget? No. I reckon you should go straight away. Nice one. All right. Very good legacy. Yeah, it's probably the largest legacy I've ever used in 13 years. So have you got the CDs in as well? There's one CD and one vinyl. OK, so there we go, we've got 1.2 milliseconds latency in and out which 3.2 BPM, which is pretty good. What's the light of say Traktor like? I'm not really sure dude. They are quite, some of them are actually quite slow because the actual latency is like, they don't execute at all in an app latency. So it's all like...

Like you might get like 5 milliseconds out. Right. Or it might be like 6, 8 milliseconds back in there. These ones by the way are the limited edition as well. I think they're only selling them in Europe. Right. For mine as well. You'll see the prices of items and they could vary so... If you see something like that, it could go up or go down, depending of course on when you're watching this video. What company do you work for? Roland UK. Roland UK, alright. Best keyboard so far that Roland is selling? One of our big sellers has been the SH-201. Okay. And it's great for training your sounds, very easy to use, but in actual fact it's just been replaced by a brand new product called the SH-01. So in other words, people are

All right, can you tell us a little bit about it? Yeah, of course. The main thing with this synth is that it's just dead easy to use. As you can see, no screen on it or anything like that. So if you just want to get into your sound design, it's dead easy. Just follow the signal from left to right along here until you get to the effects at the end. Nice. So if you want to make a patch, you just select preset D8, which is an initialized patch. I think you can start changing things like the pitch, changing the way forward. Filter, put my hand over that to do various different things so, or I can change it to be a filter. Seems to me very tactile and like you said there's no screen. You have to go to this menu to go to that, to this, to that. This guy here. What it says on the table. Yeah brilliant, excellent. The other thing is it's got a USB cable.

9:34 I think the street price is around £399

DJ could, in a sense, incorporate this into a normal mixer and play along to a mix. That's one of the other ways you can use it live. Because we've got this real-time kind of country, we can play music through it, whatever kind of music that is, and then play some beatmixers over the top. Excellent. That is excellent. And how much do these retail for in the UK at the moment? I think the street price is around £399. Okay. That's pretty decent actually. Great price. It's also got an arpeggiator on it so you can make your own patterns. You've got to record it so you can be like... All right, thank you very much. Right ladies and gentlemen, I am talking to, what's your name sir? Matt, Matt. And you work at Hard to Find don't you? I do, yes, yeah. Right, we've just been discussing actually the new layout and in this particular room it used to be full of vinyl didn't it? It is, yeah, the majority of the shop was vinyl. Okay. Yeah, we've got a lot tidier layout now so more out of just the equipment. We've got the vinyl section upstairs now but yeah, it's a lot tidier shop now. Am I right in saying you've got over a million pieces of vinyl?

Possibly, yeah. Pretty much, yeah. I'm not sure exactly how much, but we're pretty sure there is over that amount now. That is crazy. Can you just tell people, let's say for example they're looking for a specific piece of vinyl, how would they go about enquiring? We'll basically obviously have a look on our website. Chances are we will have it listed. If it isn't listed, we've got the option on the website that's called a wishlist. Basically you just type in the name of the record that you're after and obviously we take your email address if we ever do get that vinyl in. Obviously we've got buyers that are constantly looking for vinyls. But if we ever do get that vinyl in, once it goes onto our system you'll receive an email just letting you know that we've got the recorded stuff. And then also I was just discussing before I started this piece of video footage that for a new DJ who wants to just play vinyl

You do job locks as well, don't you? Can you just explain about the job locks? Yeah, we do. We do the bargain, they're basically called bargain mystery packs. They start as small as five records and they go right up to a 200 pack that we do. Obviously, they're just a selection. We do different genres of the packs. They're just a random selection of records just to help people out. I mean, obviously, if you buy the packs, you're saving a lot of money instead of buying the records individually. So they're good for starter DJs who can buy these packs. I get a selection of the music that they're into, and it really helps. And also you deliver worldwide, don't you? Yes we do, yeah, obviously we've got a mail order system, we'll ship pretty much anywhere in the world, really competitive prices, so yeah, we do do that. Excellent, alright, thank you very much.

DJ tutorial by Ellaskins, The DJ tutorial by Ellaskins, The DJ Tutor.

14:07 Here he is, producer Matt's got a new big thing

Here he is, producer Matt's got a new big thing. He's holding his big thing right between his legs. Do you like playing with your new big thing? Come on, here you go. Do you like playing with your new big thing? Yeah. Right, here we go. Your name, sir? All right, now then, we're looking at touch here, aren't we? Now, this is the new version. 2.2, how does this differ to the first version? The first version, basically there's a lot of things that have been updated. I just noticed here we've got BPM like 144.7364. Am I right in saying then that it's got to the stage where it's got? It's actually quite accurate as well. That's excellent. The thing is, obviously with drum and bass it can be a bit hit-and-miss. If you notice on this one, it says 75 BPM. That's actually half of what the actual BPM should be. You can right click on it, times it by two and it puts you to the right BPM. Some other software doesn't actually... Because I've noticed on some CD players

It will save the hard time. And for you or I, we'll suss it out, but for some people it's very confusing isn't it? Yeah, it is confusing, yeah. And it is, like you can set your BPM on there. Like if you wanted to put another BPM that you wanted to attract a player, it would actually play at that BPM for you as well. That's what it does today. You can change the names. Thanks for watching! Can you use more than one effect at the same time? Not really, no. Not on the channel. On the VST plugins you can though, right? I don't think there's any VST actual plug-ins on here. You can actually add the plug-in there. Add the certain plug-in. So you just click on no plug-ins. So if there was a... If you had plug-ins...

Thank you very much indeed. Nice one. That's Touch by Intimidation.

18:18 A lot of ugly people there

I've just been informed as well that the Blue Vinyl is exclusive to Hard To Find Records, so it is hard to find because you can only find it in Hard To Find. You work that one out. A lot of ugly people there. We've got a couple of bits of totty here, so we're going to show some of that. What's your favourite bit of kit then? What's your favourite piece of music? Is it about six inches long and vibrates? Is that right? Oh, you cheeky monkey. Don't feel pressured. Don't feel pressured. All right guys, this is me upper arm, this is all jointed. Bye!

24:06 We'll see how this one goes

Really appreciate it. We're uptown, okay? Just letting you know, just in case. We'll see how this one goes. I haven't played it for a while. I'll get her high, show her what I got. Now, oh, oh.

This is the bit where we normally like, jump around and stuff.

33:56 Board for us

I don't think he's going to welcome me. No ending. Cheers, thanks for coming out. This is Martin Daly, I'm the sales manager of Allen & Heath. Okay, would you like to explain the board for us? Okay, what I did was we used one of our iLive T80s, this is a Surface, via Cat5, which was here, using network audio called Ace. We were talking to and picking up the sound from the rack on the stage. And in this case we had... Two singers, a bass and two guitarists. It was a two minute sound check but it sounded pretty good. So basically if we go to this, it's a layered mixer so you notice the first layer was my master level control bringing the channels down to it from here. And I did a bit of work on Paul. Paul had a little bit of

We've got a little bit of top end sparkle. We could have put a parametric on it, we could have filtered it, we could have done anything we like with it, but it was a two minute sound check so it sounded great out of the tin. We didn't use any of the gates, I used a tiny bit of compression, just 1-3-1 which is hardly any guitar, just to savor it at the top and bring him up a little bit at the bottom when he's talking. So on every input we can delay all the inputs, we can gate them, we can use parametric EQ, we can use a compressor, we can use the limiter. And if we go to the outputs, every output has the same. I wasn't using that on the gig. We've got the graphic which we could have used. And then you flip the group fader flip and the channels become the graphic. Brilliant, very good. We could have delayed all the outputs. We could have put a limiter across the output. Now that's just the front of house part of it. Then we got the auxes which we use for the monitors and all the outputs have got the same again parametric

38:03 On his voice and Mikey's voice, just on the choruses

Graphic EQ, compressors and limiters. So an awful lot of processing. And on his voice, when we were doing the gig, I just used, mostly on this gig, I just used a little bit of Hall, which is a large Hall reverb. On his voice and Mikey's voice, just on the choruses. Just to, you know, give it an anthem, a kind of chorusing feel. Considering they're quite small, you know, ensemble units. So I was just playing around with that really. So in this gig, Harvey and EQ sounded great out of the tin. They used their own mics, which they like, which are EV. So EQ sounded fine. The room didn't need adjusting really. The speakers sounded great. Two things happened that I do like about this. ...is that generally the stereotypical band mixer has the guy on the mixing desk where you are and another mixing desk for the band. So of course this eliminates that because it's all in one. There's a lot of technology moving on. We've always been known for making mixers which are front of house and monitors. But with this mixer you've basically got two in one. There's the front of house clock there, but we've also got...

Completely dedicated monitor mixer here, so you can see we can set up a variety of alternative stage mixers. To be fair there are a lot of really professional engineers and a lot of bands still like working with monitor engineers because I could be 120 meters away. In other words, so you need a bit more tweaking on the guitar. If someone's near you, you've only got to go like that. Yes. I won't see that 120 metres away. Yeah, I agree. But again, which I suppose, yeah... You have almost, not necessarily contradicted what I'm about to say, but the other thing I did like about this is that you said earlier, you can set a delay on the headphones. Yes, you can, yeah. So in other words, like you said, if you're 120 metres away, you can hear the precise sound as it's coming, as they're hearing it. But of course, like you did say, you cannot see them giving you that little wink in the eye when they need it tweaked up or down from 120 metres away.

Monitor Engineers is a real science and often Some engineers do both, but a lot of engineers specialise either in doing front of house or doing monitor. And it is another science. You know for instance you're sitting in a poker band, you're the violin player, and you just decide to start, you want to talk, and you've got your violin here, and you're coming very close to your monitor speaker, the monitor engineer would know that he's going to get feedback at that point. So it's almost, you're thinking in advance aren't you? And your job, the band are only as good as what they hear. If they get a great monitor mix, they'll give a great performance. Precisely. Your job at Pioneer House is obviously to give a great sound to what's coming out. And it is doable when you do both, but...

A major band or a band that can afford it would, on the whole, choose to go with it. But here's the interesting thing. Alphabets have been out of tour recently. The monitor engineer has got this, okay? The front-end house guy, Steve Cruz on our website, he's doing front-end house mixing for his laptop. He sees something quite different on his laptop than an engineer does in here and he is now free to roam Anywhere in the military. Because he studies laptop. Yeah. Fantastic. So that freedom. So, I mean, speaking about it, one system, one printer, but they are both seeing something quite different and people doing something quite different. And that's pretty phenomenal. It is. And it means that... Technology is crazy. If someone says to you, you know what, it sounds a bit quiet on the side fields, on the far side of the festival, we think there's a go there. Right.

42:38 We've also got facilities now to link these things together and stuff

A walk around Glastonbury, and then what you get then into is being doomed a bit to reverb, and while looking, you're in here, and there's the artist. You know, it's like a relationship, rather than being... In one place, in one place, yeah. Where, you know, up to a live gig, that one place... Thank you for watching. As it's been heard by everyone. Yeah, and they can do anything. You're not stuck doing the same thing. You have custom layers within the monitor guide where you can be seeing something quite different from what you've done on the house guide. Fantastic. We've also got facilities now to link these things together and stuff like that. So you can share a brain. Fantastic. Or use this one with a small brain.

Or not even use this at all, just go out with a laptop and the bit over here. Can I show you the bit over here? Yeah, sure. Let's go. So behind these young ladies is the rack that we used. And you can see all the inputs. And outputs over there, that's an IDR48 that we made. So there's 48 inputs there and all the outputs are down that side and you can plug your laptop into this here or you can plug your laptop into this surface. Of course all they were using was a set of 15 and... 2-inch compression drivers. Yeah, it sounded great actually. They're excellent. I've got some RCS at home. Right. Very good. Well, sir, thank you very much indeed. Thank you. It's all good fun. And just say, where are you from again? I'm from Allendon Heath. We're based in Falmouth and a great company we've been going for over 30 years. Fantastic. And we're also here downstairs with our DJs. Brilliant. Well, we're going to go and check those out very shortly. Thank you. Thank you.

Right ladies and gentlemen, once again a beautiful day. It's the 10th of April 2010 and I'm outside Hard to Find Records in Birmingham and sir, your name? Jamie O'Callaghan. And can you tell everyone what part do you play in Hard to Find? Yeah sure, I'm a store manager for Hard to Find so in charge of the retail that we've got here and we're in charge of getting products in, cataloguing, the adverts, promotions, anything to do with the DJ equipment side of what we do here at Hard to Find. Excellent. Right, now I've done my normal punk style which is very punk of just walking around but this guy here is going to do the pro side so you're gonna take us on a guided tour. After you sir. Hard Fine Records is our retail store. It's been open for about 10 years. We refurb it every year and I think now we're probably at the best stage we've ever been in terms of a retail outlet for DJ equipment and music technology. Excellent.

DJ tutorial by Ellaskins, The DJ Tutor Say, for example, someone wants to order something that isn't in the shop. Can you get it? Yes, we can do. Any manufacturer, we get our hands on it. Because I've noticed you've got a decent amount of PA there. So, for example, if someone wanted 20k of Nexo, could you get it? Yep, we could do. RCA, PAW, we're main dealers. We stock it up. We carry at the minute 5,000 different product skews. Around 80% in stock. All available for delivery within 48 hours. Any one of those products are available for in-store demo, mail order, whatever you want. We've got latest software, so we've got Traktor Pro on demo there, we've got Zaun DFs, Serato Itch.

46:55 Gemini PS8 to 8 for people who don't like the very understated quality

All available, as well as Serato Scratch Live, Pioneer's rekordbox software, Mixed Vibes, Nextbeat consoles, all the latest equipment, all available hands-on demonstration. Probably the only centre in the UK where you can come and turn around and play with all this equipment in a hassle-free zone. It's great, yeah, you can have a mess around with everything. What's your best-selling mixer at the moment? Best-selling mixer is either going to be Behringer DJX 750 or Korg KM series of Chaos Pad mixers. Right, because at Behringer it's only about £150, isn't it?

Yeah, around about 150 quid. No brainer. Bedroom DJ product. Two-year warranty. Built-in effects. You know, it works. Excellent. Yeah, a lot of things. Gemini PS8 to 8 for people who don't like the very understated quality. You know, there's a lot of things out there that are really moving in volumes, especially in the bedroom DJ end. Good, good. Let's have a look at some PA. Yeah, sure. This is one of our new areas, again, dedicated PA demo centre. We've got all the brands. We've got Walthdale, we've got JBL, we've got Community, we've got RCM. One of the only demo centres Ellaskins is a retailer at Boyd Acoustics. We're the only approved Function One retailer for the F8-1 and F55 speakers. The only retailer in the UK and Europe, so you can come in, sit down and listen to F8-1s or F55s by as many pairs as you want. What's the best selling make for PA you've got at the moment? Wharfedale is the best selling. Can't argue with the prices, can't argue with the sound.

EVP-X15, best selling PA cabinet in the country within its price bracket. And then we've also got things like the SVP-15X, EVP-X Twin 15s and they do their active versions of the Titans and things like that. Again, wherever you need stage, band, DJ, bedroom, Wharfdale provide the speakers for that. These are the latest round from Wharfdale, EVP Neo, fantastic speakers, new Neodymium drivers. Basically, this cabinet, Twin 15, Would usually be about 40 kilograms, but because of the drivers in this, you can actually see it's lightweight and it's manageable by one. So, they are right for more plastic cab portability with wooden cab performance. Excellent speakers. Nice. Real good price points as well. Okay, now again, the shop has had a refurb. Can you take us through a bit of a guided tour of our small area over there where we can listen to the speakers? Yeah, sure, no problem at all.

Speakers are a big thing for us. For every band, install or mobile DJ. We also do incredibly well with studio monitors, hi-fi speakers, palm speakers in every context, anything from quad acoustics to KOK. This is one of our latest projects, dedicated speaker demonstration facility where you can come in Come in and speak to us, whatever speakers you want, Genelec, Mackie, KRK, Samson, Alesis, all there. We can hook them up, have them demoed, have them room for nice clean amplifiers, a Yuri 1620 mixer for great analog sound. Bring your own CDs, come and sit down, we'll get you a drink, you can spend a good half an hour, two hours in here, demoing the speakers you want. AB them, have a listen to which ones you want, no problem at all, we can do comparisons.

Probably one of the only centres within 100 mile radius of us, probably nationwide with this kind of facility in this kind of context. And also not looking at it, not just for a DJ, for someone who's in a studio mixing as well? Yeah, producers, they love active monitors, Hi-Fi as well, there are Hi-Fi retailers around the country who would kill for this kind of facility. We've got the JBL Hi-Fi range. And we also do things like cue acoustics, we do semi-vega hi-fi, as I mentioned we do quad. So we've got a lot of speakers, a lot of brands for all functions and all purposes available here in a proper acoustically consulted room. There's no flutter echoes, no harsh high frequencies, you can sit down, critically analyse the speakers, get a feel for what they're actually doing, what they perform. Yeah, and whatever you want, we can set up, you can demo, you can play, you can compare, and we'll be more than happy to help with that. Okay, and then upstairs? Yep, sure.

Can we have an interview with you? Just to touch on, for the Prime Musician, also got a dedicated lighting booth. Ah yes. So before we go upstairs, a little blackout area. Again, not many DJ shops around the country can offer this facility, but you can come in and you can demo any one of the existing lightings we've got up here, or any one of our range. We carry around about 250 different lighting products in stock at any one time, and they're all hooked up, all switched. Come in, demo if you want or you can get a consulted demonstration where we can close the booth down, get one of the smoke machines on and give you a blast with exactly the light that's in it. Sweet. The kind of environment that you're going to be using it in. Yeah, that's right, yeah. Fantastic opportunity to really evaluate the lighting effect before you get to your bike. I mean there's also the videos you can get on the internet. We provide videos for all our lighting effects but seeing it hands-on... There's nothing better than seeing it hands-on absolutely, yeah. I agree. More demonstration areas. And again, everyone...

52:15 All hooked up, every single one of these works

You can mess around with these, can't you? Yeah, I get impartial advice from us and expert advice. Every single person who works on Shoppro is a working DJ or producer. So we really help out with giving you a good idea of what you need. Okay, and this is again a new area upstairs, isn't it? Yes, this is our latest venture. This is good for the DJ who wants to get into music production, also for the guys who know all about music production, who want hands-on facilities and coming in demoing the products. You spend a lot of money on your signal at your producer station, so why not come and have a play, get a feel for what the equipment does, and again, get some comparisons. We've got one of the UK's only tour pro centres, we've got a whole pooled range on demo, everything from the micro samples, the count, 3DM series and the radius, hard disk recorders, drum machines...

All hooked up, every single one of these works. Just play into it and you get an idea what's going on. You can get a feel for the sound, get a feel for the way that the actual keys work. And again we've got dedicated staff working here, experts in this field. One of our keyboard guys actually played on stage with Stevie Wonder, so we're talking expert musicians who can really advise and go through all the equipment they should need. So we've got Chord, Akai Elysis, We've got the whole MPC range, the APC, MPKs, every piece of Echo, at least his music groups and stuff in stock, he's a dev over here. We've got the Roland range, so everything from the Junos to the Phantoms, the SA series, V-Sync, tapeworm setup on a laptop.

We've got the SP-4R4, SP-555s, samplers, whatever you want. We've got all the brands including Nord. It's all here for you to get a hands on demonstration. Excellent! And then, hard to find records would not be hard to find records without... Records, yes. Records. Let's go and see some records. The record area. As we're finding more and more local independent and small record stores going, we'd like to still provide a good choice of vinyl practice. There aren't many places you can still go and flick through Bro's brand new, second-hand, classic, limited edition vinyl and then come and listen in a dedicated environment. Now also you do mail order? We do mail order. In stock at any one time we've got over 1.2 million pieces of vinyl record.

All listed on the website. MP3 samples for over 90% of those. Fantastic. If you can't come to Birmingham, you can't play in here, or you want a wider collection, go online. You can sample them all there. Okay, and how can people get hold of Hard To Find Records? HTFR.com And also I'll put a clickable link in the description that will take you directly to the website. So... Just one more area, Jonathan. Thank you very much. Just be the... Beg your pardon? A new dedicated computer music suite, which is very important to what we do. A lot of DJs want to get involved in computer music so here we've got Ableton, Reason, complete Steinberg catalogue with Rendo, Cubase, the complete Cable catalogue and the complete Active catalogue all available. Hubs done working on every computer with controllers that can be easily wired into the demo controller software combination of your choice.

Alright, thank you very much and as I will always say, practice and enjoy. Thank you. Now that's not bad. And that is from a company called Pro-Tech. I'll say it aloud. Pro-Tech Metalwork Unlimited. Quite a sexy deckstone there. Okay we're coming up to the end of the day. It's around about 4.30. Still not hard to find records. We're packing up. Still a decent crowd in there. It's been a very good day. Alright, thank you very much and as I always say, practice and enjoy!

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.