3 Tips On How To Develop Your Own Unique Voice As A Scratcher
If your scratches lack emotion or personality, the #1 reason for that is when you practice, you’re focusing the majority of your time and energy into drills or memorizing scratch patterns. It’s not that you lack talent. It’s that you’re not spending enough time working on your own personal expressiveness. Scratching is about self expression, PERIOD! Free your mind. Stop thinking “Military Scratch” this, “2 Click Flare” that… By all means, get the basic movements down but when you practice, stop thinking about the names of the scratches and just flow.
If this sounds like a familiar issue, you’re not alone.
Here are 3 important tips on how to develop your own unique voice as a scratcher
1. Ornamentation
Spending time understanding how to place your scratches during a solo is crucial. Whether you’re going as short as 4 bars or as long as 16, understand that your ultimate goal is to tell a story in that time. So work on how to be spontaneous in structuring your scratch solos into 3 parts: intro, body and conclusion.
2. Scratch from your heart, not your head.
Most DJs ONLY practice to sound clean and accurate, as a result you risk sounding like a machine. I’m not saying technicality isn’t good. What I am saying is emotion coupled with technicality is better. So make sure you devote an adequate amount of time having fun and being creative while you practice.
3. Push yourself
• Creativity is like a muscle and muscles grow stronger the harder you push them. Challenge yourself to think outside of the parameters and boundaries a scratch tutorial imposed on you (be it one you see at Brolic Army DJ School or anywhere else). Always break the rules after you’ve mastered them. In Closing…
Scratching is a form of self expression. Once you’ve learned the name of a scratch and absorbed the technique that encompasses it, let your imagination take over and put your individual fingerprints on it. That’s what the masters you look up to do!