real music

about a month ago, i shelled out for a load of dj equipment on ebay.
the bloke i bought it from was super nice about throwing in extra stuff for free, so for £130, i ended up with quite a decent deal.

of course, getting into this kind of thing means sentencing myself to a life-long addiction to buying records – the costs of which add up pretty quickly. i’ve already spent well over a hundred quid on them, and i’ve only just started. nevertheless, i’m glad to have finally taken the plunge. i’ve been dabbling with djing with other people’s turntables for a few years now, waiting for the excuse to get some of my own, and this summer seemed like as good a time as any.

alex tried to convince me to buy ms pinky – stuff that allows you to connect turntables to your computer, and physically play / mix / scratch your mp3s as if they were records. it sounds cool, functional and much cheaper in the long run, but nevertheless, i wasn’t really interested.

part of the reason i wanted to get into all this stuff was because i want to own a real collection of music that i can hold and be chuffed about; and when it comes to that, there’s nothing better than vinyl. once you get a feel for the satisfying tactility of handling records, their soft, warm sound, and the big, sexy 12″ sleeves they live in, there’s no going back. a hard drive full of pirated mp3s and stacks of CD-Rs begins to feel
a little empty and soulless in comparison.

so as a newly converted vinyl snob, i think it’s a good thing that, alongside the experience of a live performance, there are nice things about music that we can’t steal over the internet. i look forward to actually wanting to buy music again. yum yum.