I'm going to cover how to scratch and
Serato DJ Lite, this is for beginners so
if you haven't ever tried scratching you
will learn two basic scratches in this
video; the baby scratch and the scribble
scratch. The story goes scratching was
invented back in the 1970s by a DJ
called Grand Wizard Theodore when he was
cueing a record in his headphones and he
liked what he heard. He decided he wanted to
leave the volume up to demonstrate this
fresh sound to his audience. Basically
scratching is scrubbing a sound back and
forth across the needle or play head and
rhythm with a beat or a track. So knowing
that will demonstrate this funky
technique with Serato DJ Lite and the
Roland DJ-202. To set up you'll want to
load a track to the deck you are most
comfortable using for scratching. You
should be able to figure this out fairly
quick as it's probably the same hand as
your dominant hand for writing. You will
want to use a scratch track or sound
that has silence before it starts. In this demo I'm going to use the typical "a"
sound that is very popular with DJ's now
you'll want to find something to scratch
to to keep you in time. Find a tempo
that you find comfortable, I'm gonna use
an instrumental track at around 100 bpm. I find this a comfortable tempo to start
at and since it has no vocals I wont interfere with a solo or vocal
performance. The baby scratch is probably the most common scratch and is easy to do.
Musically speaking it's a sixteenth note
rhythm over a 4/4 tempo. F ind the
beginning of your scratch sound with the
platter and hold it still.
It's a good idea to set a cue point here so you can always jump back to it with your other
hand close the sound off with the
crossfader with your beat track loaded
to start the track,
When you are ready, open the crossfader
and try moving the sound back and forth
in time with the beat in a sixteenth
note pattern, all while keeping your hand
on the platter.
Use the cross fader to
stop the sound when you finished your phrase of scratching. I suggest scratching in four beat
phrasing. One, two, three, four, rest.
Now try the same as above but letting the sound
go on the fourth beat. One, two, three,
release. Use the cross fader to stop the
sound and bring it back to the beginning
of the scratch sound. You can use your
headphones to cue the scratch sound
without the audience hearing it. One, two,
three, release.
Got that? Cool, now you've learned the
baby scratch. The scribble scratch is
actually not too different than the baby
scratch. Essentially it's just twice as
fast. So you will need to scratch a
30-second note rhythm over the beat. I
find this best to incorporate with the
baby scratch. So using the same steps as
above, you can just add the scribble
scratch to the first beat of the baby
scratch. Like this. Now combine the
scribble, baby and release pattern,
altogether. Take your time to get this
right as a scribble scratch is much
harder than the baby scratch and will
require some serious practice to get
comfortable with it.
There you have it, the baby scratch the
scribble scratch in Serato DJ lite
