Scratching tutorial, some basics for you.

0:05 I could make an absolute fool of myself here, but I generally do anywa

Right, I could make an absolute fool of myself here, but I generally do anyway. And of course if I do make a fool of myself, I don't really care. Right, this particular video is all about a little bit of scratching. By the way, I suggest you go and check that out there, Thud Rumble. Yes, be impressed. Alright, so scratching now. A while ago I did a video... Oh God. A couple of years ago, when I scratched on a zip, I was going like this. Think about it. Because loads of people are always saying, how do you scratch? Well, it depends where the itch is really and how far your arm can reach around your body. Just kidding. Start again. Okay. Well, if you think about it, of course we've got scatting, where you hear a person go...

So, by the way, look in the description side of the video and you'll see the names of the tracks. This guy here, I'm going to have a mess around with this bit. The first thing I'm going to do is take away a little bit of the bass. That will stop a lot of the low sort of rumbly sounds. So I'll reduce the bass on the mixer. The EQ, bass, mid and treble will be at 12 o'clock but what I've done, I've got it at about 9 o'clock so we've taken a little bit away. That as opposed to if I put the EQ all the way up to 12 o'clock, the bass. Now what you may find as well is because you've reduced the bass quite a lot you might have to increase the gain slightly to match the levels with the other side. Now, I'll tell you what the tracks I've got is Eric B and Rakeem track entitled Paid in Full, which is that guy there. I mean, I've caned this particular track because it's an absolute classic. And then we've got on the other side, Kashmir featuring Deja, track entitled I Need You, and it's the Green Velvet mix, and it goes a little bit like this. It's awesome. I've got this because it's bouncy. Now, first of all, before I do any... Try the hat, by the way.

2:43 Thank you to Staff Record Player for the hat

Thank you to Staff Record Player for the hat. Wicked. Right, listen, before I do any scratching, what I'm going to do... That one there. I'm going to play that one over there and I'm going to do a little bit of scatting to it. Alright, so here we go. Now just imagine this. You're laughing but that makes sense. Get this. Here we go. Well that's one way of doing it. Just... But then you can do... A-you, a-you, ah. Now, this is where it gets slightly more intricate because what's happening now, instead of doing uh, uh, uh, uh, forward motion and the backward motion is identical to the forward motion, what you're doing with the forward motion is you're almost starting, let's say for example you're in a car and you're slamming the brakes on. Well of course, if you're doing 50 and you slam the brakes on eventually you're going to go to zero. So that's what's happening, you go eww, stop.

4:49 The philosophy behind this tutorial is to try and explain it

To a slowdown, so I'll try that. Here we go. Right, this time what we're going to try and do is go from, let's say we're back in that vehicle and we're doing 50 miles an hour, what I'm going to do now is go from 50 up to 100, then back down to 50. Okay, here we go. As you can see, I'm not that good, but hopefully with this particular sort of tutorial, you'll get a general idea of the whole... The philosophy behind this tutorial is to try and explain it. And if I can explain it in a certain way, then hopefully even one person out there can think, ah, that's how it's done. Then you're sorted, aren't you? Right, what I'm going to do now is, I suppose, yeah, the element of scratching is of course like that. But if you imagine this, what do you do when you've got an itch? You scratch. So, in a sense, if you think about it,

Let's say, for example, you were listening to some music on the bus or whatever and you haven't got a zip. You could maybe do this. Have a listen. I hope you've got that. Let's make a fool of myself. There's a lot more to scratching than meets the eye. It's a complete total utter culture. But one thing you need to learn first, of course, is baby scratch, which is if I just go to the pump up the volume bit. We'll do that one. What I've got is the fader on that side and I'm just going to go backwards and forwards. That's it, here we go. Platter's moving underneath, here we go. Now there, my finger's on the vinyl. Another way of doing it is to almost imagine that you've got a magnet in between your finger and the piece of vinyl. So the platter will take the piece of vinyl forward, you take your finger off and the platter will make the vinyl move forward.

You almost follow the record with your finger and then when you get to the point where you want to bring it back, you put your finger down and you bring it back. So I'll do both ways first. I'll do the first way where I'm moving the piece of vinyl with my finger and then the next way I'll do it like I said earlier with the magnet. Just pretend there's a magnet holding my finger slightly above the vinyl but then when I reach the point where I want to stop I'll put my finger on the vinyl I hope that's been a bit of a help. And go and check out Thud Rumble. Practice and enjoy. And by the way, Mr Q, if you ever see this video, I challenge you to a rather nutty video. Practice and enjoy. Thank you. What? I've got to change my nappy now, sorry. Will you... Please will you stop... What?

Thank you for watching.

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