Last week, you had the chance to read part one of my in-depth interview with DJ Babu. Check out part two where the Dilated Peoples & Beat Junkies member speaks on his struggle to accept Serato, how DJ’s are historians, going off the cuff, and a thorough rundown of his equipment setup…. old and new.

Jeremiah: What equipment do you work with?

DJ Babu: Well DJ wise obviously I use Technic 1200’s. I’ve been rocking with Rane and Serato for many years now so I use a Rane 57S mixer. As far as production goes, I’ve got an old G4 Mac running Pro Tools for my recording and mixing needs. As far as production goes, I’ve been pretty exclusive to Reason for the last, I don’t know how many years now, but I work close with that company since I met them at a NAMM convention many years ago. I’m currently on Reason 6. Before then I was always an Ensoniq man, I started out on Ensoniq Mirage many years ago [and] for a while I was on an EPS – 16Plus then eventually I got a couple ASR-10’s. I still have all those keyboards lying around… I’ve got a couple keyboard modules, a Yamaha Motif, a Fantom and a couple other things. A lot of that stuff is just collecting dust because I do a lot of my work inside Reason. Like 99% of my work happens on my laptop now and the whole other side of my studio is collecting dust… it’s kinda sad. It’s all museum shit now but I keep it around because I couldn’t imagine where else that shit should be but right here in my studio.

Jeremiah: No doubt. It’s amazing how much technology has changed or the past ten years for producers and DJ’s.

DJ Babu: I was definitely skeptical about some sides of things, especially being with Dilated you know, I wasn’t used to recording and mixing in big rooms, hiring a proper engineer, and going to a big mastering house. We had ADAT’s and 4-Tracks and stuff like that but we still wouldn’t go to mastering unless we had something properly mixed and were hitting analog tape. So it took a long time for us to convert to Pro Tools because I was very skeptical until we saw how much it took over and we slowly evolved into that.

I remember getting Serato before anybody… it took me a good year to feel comfortable accepting myself DJing with a laptop. Obviously times have changed and things have become more acceptable and more – I’m not gonna bring my expensive records on the plane, I can barely – you bring one crate of records on and you might as well forget bringing your clothes, their charging you per bag, losing your valuable records, having your records stolen by some airport hand. So it’s just, on a practical level, as a professional DJ I love all that I get from the digital movement. At the same time, my day still starts and ends with a record and a turntable it seems like. Whether I’m archiving records to be in my digital library or I’m sampling records, making a beat… it still seems like it starts and ends with a turntable and a record.

Jeremiah: Definitely. How do you feel about Technic discontinuing the 1200 line?

DJ Babu: It’s crazy… it makes me feel old I guess but at the same time you know, business is business. I guess I can’t…those motherfuckers aren’t doing it for art, those motherfuckers are selling record players at the end of the day. So, if people aren’t buying them, so be it. I’m lucky enough to… I’ve got eight pairs myself that I’ve come up on over the years. It’s just crazy to walk into Guitar Center and for them to have back-stocked 1200’s and they’re trying to sell them for $800 each or $900 each, I’m like wow, that’s incredible! I guess if shit hits the fan I could off some turntables to pay some bills but I love 1200’s. It’s such a beautiful creation. I love looking at my turntables and I love everything about the 1200’s… how sturdy and awesome they’re built, them shits are gonna be like, I’ll have them for a museum or something, at least on that level. I’m glad I have all these extra ones just in case one of these ever go bad.  So it makes me sad but I’m happy to say I’ve got a few sets put away for myself…my kids.

Jeremiah: Now when you play a set, not with Dilated, do you have a plan out your set or do you just kind of go off the cuff?

DJ Babu: I definitely go off the cuff but at the same time I know what records…there are records I’m more familiar with than others and it’s easy to fall into a mix that you remember you did like a week ago. I’m not really much for practicing for gigs…these days it’s more like if I know I have a gig coming up and there might be a particular thing I need to do, I might add some things to the playlist and add some things from my record collection that might not be in there, know my BPM’s, practice catching a double or two to make sure I’m familiar with the record, how it starts and ends, and where I can get in and out of it.

I think I do better when I don’t rehearse…when things are spontaneous. I’m the type of guy where my songs aren’t necessarily marked up and if they are marked up it’s because I put the cue point and loop on it the last time I DJed. I almost feel like when I’m going out on a gig I’m experimenting as it’s happening…sometimes I crash and burn but most of the time lately, especially this last summer, I’ve just been spinning off the cuff. I had a huge computer crash over the last year and it forced me – I lost like six years of playlists that I had developed for every occasion that I could possibly DJ. It was different because I was depending on these playlists…it made me lazy. This last year, I’ve been spinning without playlists, I’ve been going straight off my library, DJing off the cuff, literally searching through thousands of songs, typing them in, no BPMing, no leaning on a mix that I prepared from a previous gig I did.

I think that’s the beautiful thing about DJing live… you have to feed off the energy of the people. That energy is going to help you dictate what’s your next record and where you’re gonna take it, are you gonna take it there, you gonna take it up, do I need to change the tempo? It’s really kind hard to practice rocking’ a party. You can imagine things all day and like I said do the basics, be familiar with the music, know that this song ends abruptly and there’s no break but at the end of the day there is so much more that happens in the heat of the moment. I find most of my mixes I like or records I like to use comes from using them at the gig and playing them, after playing them out a few times you get to know a record and how it works with other ones. Before you know it, I guess I kinda have a playlist built in my head at this point, but I definitely love opportunities where I’m not forced to have to play anything, where it’s not bottle service. Where I can really go out and do me, play stuff off the cuff and honestly having that relationship with the crowd. It is so important to get into the crowd and feel their energy and being on the same page as them. Yeah, I like to go off the cuff definitely.

Jeremiah: Nice! Kind of going off that, is there any one track that comes to mind that you would throw on when the energy isn’t there or you’re trying to hype the crowd up a little?

DJ Babu: Obviously that’s always depending on the crowd you’re dealing with but for my bread and butter that comes out to see me do me, I don’t know… there’s a few of them, I guess I could never go wrong playing “Hip Hop” by Dead Prez.

This summer DJing has kind of evolved for me… this last year I should say. DJing has changed so much and to be honest with you, even to myself, you know, for years for better or not, I’ve been in the box of “Mr. Keep It Real” you know… only gonna play Hip Hop, gonna play 90’s Hip Hop. In the last year or so I’ve really taken it upon myself to get out of that box and challenge myself. This year, the set I played at the Do-Over was one of the best sets I’ve had in years. To be honest with you, I’d say like thirty minutes of it was Hip Hop. By the time I got to Hip Hop…you know I was playing dance music, I was playing Yaz and Fonda Rae & Wish, playing House, playing Nightcrawlers, you know just really going there and really going outside the box but putting my twist on it. I was kinda weird about it… this is one of the few times I practiced for a set. I DJ’d 4^th of July at the Do-Over here in LA.

The Do-Over is a big thing… you’ve got the biggest DJ’s in the world wanting to play at this summertime party and they don’t get paid…they want to be there. If Jazzy Jeff or ?uestlove or someone like that is in town they make time and say, “I want to be here on a Sunday so I can play the Do-Over and then I’ll go to the Grammy party,” you know what I mean? So when I got offered to play it, I hadn’t played it since the previous summer and I thought there is no way I can come in there and play “Come Clean,” East Flatbush Project, “Simon Says” and shit like that…it’s so predictable and so cliché. I really made a point to play all the music that I love that people don’t really expect me to play. I knew it was either going to crash and burn or it was going to go the fuck off. Luckily it all worked out and the latter happened. It was just the most… I mean if I had hairy arms, the hair would have been standing up the whole hour and a half I DJed…it was just awesome. I didn’t really practice much but I made it a point to say, “I’m going to stay away from these records, I’m going to put a whole bunch of new records together, get to know them and know I can go to them.” Low and behold I got there and I ended up playing all this different shit for the first hour. By the time I did get to Hip Hop, it was just bonkers. People really appreciated me going deep and by the time I went to my bread and butter – even the Hip Hop I was playing was different… I didn’t go to those regular records and I even surprised them. I think sometimes I think it means a lot when a certain DJ, I mean two DJ’s can play the same record, but when one of the DJ’s plays it in a certain way it just makes it so much more of a difference. Even for me going up there, the way I drop a Lil Wayne record in the mix of all these other records I’m playing, I mean who is going to mix Lil Wayne with any of those records and make it pop? I was just really, no boxes, I was just going to play shit that I think is dope, new, old, whatever’s going to make you move and have a good time.

So I’ve been really on this thing, as far as my DJing goes… trying to shed being in that box. I don’t quite fit in Vegas and do the bottle service thing. I don’t think I’d enjoy that at all but something like the Do-Over or just like the more mature crowd that is open to good music, whatever the genre is, I could really see myself excelling in that like, after I’m done with the rap game maybe if I’m still DJing.

Jeremiah: I think that’s huge for DJ’s now that some of us older heads are… we’re getting older and more mature about our music and listen to more than just Hip Hop. What advice would you give to the younger DJ’s just starting out?

DJ Babu: Just to have fun with it. I think that it’s really important to know that DJing is a real spiritual thing. Obviously when you’re a kid and you start DJing it’s gonna get you girls, it’s gonna get you in the cool crowd, there’s always dumb ulterior motives like that. People think it’s all cracked up but DJing is very hard work. You know, I just want to tell up and coming DJ’s to enjoy it, love it, love music, love being able to play music for people. If there is a particular DJ you like, study him, find out who their influences were, and study your idols, idols. Do your homework.

I think the big part of DJing that the new kids miss, besides the obvious things like digging for records and going to record stores and that kind of stuff, is that DJ’s, in every genre, we’re kind of historians. We are the ones who are tracking the movement of music, whatever genre you’re into, whatever kind of music you listen to. It says a lot about a DJ to be a tastemaker and to have good taste and to know good music and to be honestly in love with music. You can tell when someone is just playing some songs off a list or they are playing some music that they fucking love.

The most important advice I can give DJ’s is just, love what you do, do what you love, all that other stuff will fall into place if you’re true to what you’re doing. Don’t bite, be original. There is so much shit out there that you can do versus copying the next man. I’m really on that anti-biting shit. I mean, me as a kid, you couldn’t dress the same as a homie. A graffiti writer couldn’t, if there was a Rob One [Rest In Peace], you couldn’t come out as Bob One. Even as a DJ, I make it a point myself, when I went to the Do-Over, I’m like these are records that no one is playing…there was at least six or seven records no one has played at the Do-Over and the shit went the fuck off. Now I’m like, why are all these motherfuckers playing that song now? I’m like c’mon man, there’s millions of songs out there dude, that was mine, you know. I was raised in a different generation, I always tell kids there’s so much inspiration everywhere, there’s so much knowledge at your fingertips, why would anyone at this point do anything un-original? There’s just so much out there and so many ways to express yourself now. Be original.

Jeremiah: Well said.

Read Part 1

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Over the course of October and November, The DJBooth and Event Electronics have been bringing readers Booth-exclusive world premieres from a variety of the game’s hottest underground artists. Today, we are proud to present the 20/20 Music series in its Booth-exclusive mixtape form. The compilation features 20 original records (and one exclusive bonus cut) from a wide variety of acclaimed emcees, producers and DJs—all powered by Event’s 20/20BAS speakers and mastered by go-to engineer Pat Mundy. Among the artists featured on the set are Phonte, Montage Øne, Ras Kass, Rapper Big Pooh, Strong Arm Steady and Ron Artiste (Chali 2na & Roc C). Production comes courtesy of 9th Wonder, Khrysis, Montage Øne, DJ Babu, and many more.

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