DJ Shadow Interview

Game Informer recently had the chance to talk with DJ Shadow, one of DJ Hero’s key DJs. Here are some excerpts from that interview.

GI: Sure. Since then it sounds like you’re in a position of serving some kind of advisory role with the game. Can you tell us a little bit about what that conversation has been as far as what you perceive as your responsibilities to the game and how you’re contributing to the project?

DJ: Well, it takes a number of different – there’s a number of areas where I’ve been able to contribute my “expertise”, for whatever that’s worth. I mean initially it was literally me sitting there going, “OK I hear these samples, this song, did you ever think about clearing this?” From menu music on down—just from my lifetime of listening to a lot of music that DJs have been using over the years. And a lot of the songs that DJs use, and a lot of the little things, little sound bites that are common on commercials and—you know, songs for the last twenty/thirty years—lots of times people recognize those sounds but they don’t necessarily know where they come from.

One good example is the “ahh scratch”: everybody probably in the world now has heard people scratch that familiar sound, like—it sounds like someone saying “ahh.” But very few people know where that actually comes from, I mean outside of the DJ world. So just being able to identify those types of sounds, or something like, “It’s Time” which is from a song called “Al Naafiysh” by Hashim—these were just kind of like underground 12-inch singles from the early 80s that helped form a basis for what DJs were doing. So pointing out things like that and on a musical level as far as what I was doing with my mixes, just trying to bring a level of… what can I say? I just basically wanted to provide mixes that were really, really tight, and had little references for other DJs and other peers to kind of pick up on and go, “Oh, he did that little scratch because that’s how it was done on this record way back when, the first people to scratch that record, and…”—so hopefully there’s a lot of authenticity in the mixes that I provided and then the song selection that I tried to contribute to.

And you know not all of my suggestions were able to be incorporated because of, you know, “Well we’ve already licensed this many songs,” or “We can’t find the original copyright holder,” or “The production team’s eyes are bulging out of their heads and their brains are going to explode if we try to actually incorporate this into the gameplay.” So it was a little give and take.

GI: Sure, sure. Well what about your music in particular? Are you planning on including any of your old tracks in the game?

DJ: I didn’t really have any overwhelming and burning desire to revisit my own stuff for the ten trillionth time [laughing]. So in the mixes that I did at least thus far, I haven’t used any of my own stuff. I think that anybody they’ve drawn into the game they want to have a couple of their songs somewhere in the game. So I think a couple of my songs are being used, but at least not at the moment, I haven’t done them. Because there’s only a certain number of times—like every time I go on tour I have to come up with new ways of incorporating certain songs that I know the audience is going to want to hear, and after you’ve done that the tenth or fifteenth or thirtieth time, it’s not—I mean I’m much more excited about opening up the master sessions of some other tracks that I’ve been inspired by and messing around with those.

GI: Well jumping from the music itself to the features of the game, are there ideas or features that you think are central or essential to have in a DJ simulator, like what DJ Hero is going to be?

DJ: Yeah—it’s an interesting question and it’s something that I think internally the developers kicked back and forth a lot, and I think even within the last few months there’s been some debate about all of the different—and that was actually one of the first things that I wanted to know when I got down to L.A. to meet with everybody and look at the game and look at the actual hardware, was, “OK well…”—DJ’ing is similar to Guitar Hero: there’s 500 different styles of playing guitar, and which style is going to be emphasized? If it’s going to be rock, is going to be a modern kind of post-heavy metal approach to playing guitar? Or is it going to be—I mean what if there’s an acoustic—you know what I mean? [Laughing] On a musical level, it presents a lot of challenges because to me there’s a lot of styles of DJ’ing that I respect a lot that don’t have anything to do with actual showmanship. I mean some of the best DJs I’ve ever seen play do nothing on a technical level that would blow any turntablist’s mind, but they can read the crowd really well and it’s all about their song selection and the progression of the music that they play over the night. You know, house DJs will do like a four hour set and play like maybe a dozen and a half songs within that four hours, but then there’s a set like what I did at the Hollywood Bowl, where we used all 45s and we played a couple hundred 45s in the span of an hour. So there’s so many styles of DJ’ing and there’s so many different disciplines, and so many different techniques and styles, and not all of it involves what I think a lot of people think of when they think of DJs in this era, which is kind of the battle DJ, the more hip-hop oriented scratching and doing crazy body tricks on the turntables.

So to answer your question, I think that a lot of the major elements that are important to DJ’ing, such as scratching—which really, scratching was created by disco DJs just queuing up parts of the records that they wanted to play. I mean, any disc jockey from the 40s on up is familiar with the sound of scratching, it was just not anything that anybody chose to emphasize. So hip-hop, which is based on the aesthetic of, you know, using whatever’s around you—that somebody decided, “Well, OK that sound is actually kind of cool, I’m going to let people hear it rather than hiding it from people.”

So again to make a long story short, obviously scratching, beat matching, using the crossfader in a way that is conducive to what people are actually hearing musically… And in terms of when I sat down to start doing the mixes, there was a very specific technical regiment that was involved in the sense that, “Well, OK, the songs have to be on a set BPM,” which when you’re mixing songs that were played by a live band, that’s a whole process in itself to get everything locked without sounding—to me I don’t like hearing the digital artifacts of getting things restricted to a certain grid or a certain beat map. So I take a really long time to do that, so that there isn’t anything audible, I don’t want to hear any edits—it’s sort of like… if you work at a special effects house, and you’re working on a film, you try really hard to cover up anything that feels digital or that feels touched up, you know what I mean? You want it to look normal, and that’s the way I approach music. I know I’m sort of going all over the place right now, but… feel free to stop me if you want to rein me back in. But basically it was like, “OK, you have one song and that’s going to represent the left turntable, and you’re mixing it with another song that’s going to represent the right turntable, and then there’s going to be a sample track”—sort of—some mixers starting in the 90s would have a little button where you could load samples in—and obviously then in PCs, SP-1200 era, drum machine era—lots of people would incorporate samples into their DJ’ing. So there’s a sample track. So that’s basically in a nutshell what you’re working with when you’re playing the game, is you have two records playing, and you have a sample track, and you have to basically simulate what you’re hearing.