This Bit of DJ Kit Cost Me Only £20 Pioneer CDJ-200S from 2005

0:00 Monday morning, you wait outside that store

The trouble is with today is everything has got to be faster, stronger and harder. And you have to have the latest piece of technology to be seen, to be tweeted and liked. So imagine this. Monday morning, you wait outside that store. You go and buy the latest tablet, smartphone, iPhone gadget. You take it to a coffee shop and there you are once you've done all the loading. Do all of that stuff. Anyway, just imagine that you take it out the box and it's fully charged and all the apps are on there and you can just do that. Yeah, okay, so you take it to the coffee shop and there you are, proud to show your new device because you're the only one who's got it, possibly in the town. Or at least... In that coffee shop. Because there will be a line of people behind you desperately trying to buy the same thing, doing the same thing and wanting to be the same person who's got it for the first time, who can show all their friends on Facebook and they'll all think how wonderful you are. But you're a bloody idiot because you spent an absolute fortune on something that probably could do the same as the one you had before but this one's just like green and the other one was blue.

But the trouble is, you see, during that week you're going to love that item and then come Friday you'll realise that there's another one out because they've made something else and that's old now. It's getting ridiculous. It's absolutely getting ridiculous. Now the same applies, I think, with a lot of DJ kits. And I'm not saying new DJ kit is bad. There's always nice bits of technology coming out that makes it... easier for you but let's go back in the day i mean to when it was two turntables and a mixer and your mixer didn't even have bass mid or treble it had what was known as tone control that's it so you had one dial you moved it one way and it went high you moved it the other way and it went low and that was it you had up faders a cross fade wasn't even known about and if you were lucky you had a master volume it was really simple and if you were very lucky

2:39 This piece of kit works

You had low and high on the output. But I want to show you something now that I bought for £20. That's it, for £20. Look at this. Right, check that out. Now that is the Pioneer CDJ-100S. And that cost me 20 quid. Now, I've given it a clean. Alright, but you know what? It works. This piece of kit works. Now, I don't recommend now that you go out and the first CDJ-100S, you see, you go and buy it, because you do need to check them out. These are quite old now, or old-ish, alright? Not dinosaurs, but for tech sort of oldness they are, Date on the back of this, on the sticker, is 2005. So let's have a look and see what you can expect to get. Now first of all, of course, you've got your input and your output. You have here controls, so that is for some mixers where you can have a mini jack.

From here into your mixer so basically what that means is on some mixes you put the volume up and the track will start without you having to press play which is great for mobile djs because it means you know one of your hands is holding the mic the other one is holding the volume bring the volume up and the track starts instead of one of your hands is holding the mic the other hand is holding the volume and your third hand is pressing play but you know what Us DJs are very clever. We've got three. In fact, we've got 10 hands. We can do so much. All right. Now for copyright reasons, I'm not going to be playing all of the track, but I'm just going to be playing little bits of it. So what do we get? We get track search. We get search through the track. We actually get some effects here. Yes. Jet, zip and wah. Now that's what they were called back in the day. We can also hold those effects as well.

4:46 Let's have a quick listen to Jet

We have our time, mode and auto cues. So in other words, count up, count down. If we want the track which I've done now to cue up, we can have that done. Also, we can press that again to let the tracks play all the way through. So if you've got a CD in there that's got 10 tracks, it will play from 1 to 10. If you set the auto cue correctly, on the other hand if you've got it on auto or you disengage sorry the auto cue if you've got auto cue engaged which is what I've got now then it will load up a track when you want a track to be loaded up for example track three and that will just queue up at the beginning of that track until you press play. That's it. Okay so let's have a quick listen to Jet. Now what I'm going to do again

Only play a little bit of the track. So I'm going to just hit my finger on cue and press jet. Now, at the moment now on the screen we can see jet flashing. So if I just bring the camera there and do that. Right, there you go. So I'm just going to make sure that it's not blurred. Hold on, I need to press, right, press that button there. And do, you know what, I love old school. This is proper old school my videoing where it's just rough but it's all good. Alright so Jet, let's have a listen. So basically what I'm doing to get that sound is I'm using the jog wheel. I'm moving the jog wheel around. Now if I wanted to, but I don't want to now because I only want to play snippets of this track. If I set a certain sound on the jog wheel and I got a nice kind of sound.

With the jet if i press the hold button that will hold that sound for me until i press the whole button again then we're back to the original sound of the track without the jet effect now here's something called zip now that's the equivalent really of using the pitch control without the master tempo on all right so what happens is that if you take the master tempo off And you start making the speed go slower or faster, then what happens is the key of the track will dip if you slow the track down and the key will rise if you speed the track up. The only difference with the zip... is that the zip using that it will still keep the same speed where the pitch is so you're not going to change the bpm of the track whereas master tempo off with the pitch slow it down you will do two things one you will lower the key of the track it'll sort of dip and the other one is when you speed it up it will the speed of

8:08 Gotta love it, don't you?

The track of course will go faster, but also the key will rise. So slow it down, track goes slower, the sound of the track seems to dip towards you, the track goes faster and the sound of the track will seem to rise. So that's zip. Now wah is very similar to the filter effect and this is quite a nice one, have a listen. Very similar, so clockwise it seems up. And anti-clockwise, down. Gotta love it, don't you? Alright, so master tempo on, have a listen. Minus 10. Now I can definitely hear a digital kind of sound there. Again, this is old technology. It's almost as though you can hear the track overlapping itself. Have a listen. Speed it up. Oh, sorry, let's just bring the camera to there so you can see all of it. That's better.

Now, if we disengage master tempo, have a listen. You can definitely hear a change in tone. Okay, so this is known as the Pioneer Digital Performance Player, CDJ-100S. And eject, and there you go. Alright, now as I said earlier, this is 15 years old, alright? Someone has looked after this, okay? Alright, admittedly, yeah, it's a bit scratched, but what do you expect? I'm well chuffed I've got this. It's a nice player and it does the job. So, let's get back to what I was saying earlier on about tech. Alright, if you're a DJ or if you are a new DJ and you want to get into being a DJ, I think personally some really good advice here. Now let's do another analogy. Let's say you have got loads of money or let's say you haven't really got much money at all, but you want to buy a car. In the showroom there are Ferraris, there's Porsches, there's Lamborghinis, there's Bugattis, there's Fords, there's Minis. Well what I'm getting at here is let's say you potentially could buy a Bugatti Veyron.

10:22 Drive, search

You could buy a Ferrari, you could buy a Porsche 911 Carrera Turbo, but you could also get a Mini and they're both about the same price. Cap's going mad. Now if you buy the Ferrari there's a lot of tech in there and your mind could explode with what you've got to do to just get that car on the road and get it moving and drive from A to B. On the other hand, with a very simple car you get in, oh put the key in there, turn it, if you're in America, put your foot on the throttle. Of course if you really want to drive properly you'd have a stick drive and it's a little bit more easy to drive. Now that's exactly the same with modern day kit. So if you are a new DJ and you're thinking of getting into DJing but you don't know what kit to buy.

Then don't just think you've got to get the best technology with loads of buttons and dials because it could confuse you and it may put you off learning the very basics. Now that player has got the basics, it's got all you need. Start, stop, track search, search through the track, you've got a few effects and guess what? You can speed the track down, you can speed it up and you can kick in master tempo on and off if you want to and you've got that all important auto cue. Alright, maybe you've got to search around for those, but I would say you could probably, if you search hard, you could be looking at the CDJ-100, there's the CDJ-200 or the 400, and so long as they're working, you know, you could possibly spend about £100 and have a mixer and two CD players and away you go. Lastly, before I finish, you're thinking CDs, who uses CDs now?

People still do. Guess what? At least you've got something tactile and visually inspiring to hold. You've got something that you can look at. Instead of, look at my stick drive, there's 20,000 songs on that. Oh shit, it's just gone down a rabbit hole and you've lost your entire collection. That's about it really. This is my little look at the 100 from Pioneer. Practice and enjoy. Thank you.

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