Follow Your Own Rhythm
There are three aspects of scratching. These are harmony, melody and rhythm.
Harmony is a blending of the different pitches you reach within a solo. Harmony is important because it prevents your scratches from becoming monotonous. Melody is the sequence with which you scratch. As a scratcher you must be able to scratch what you think on the spot.
Rhythm is what unites harmony and melody together over a beat. No matter how well you think you know the mechanics of a scratch you learned or “created”, inability to perform said scratch alongside music makes the scratch you think you know useless.
If you can’t give form to your ideas as they come, then your cuts are echoing the melody of your influences.
Scratching is supposed to be an extension of your own personal cadence. Not someone else’s, and discovering it takes work! One doesn’t become a distinguished scratcher by turning themselves into a clone of the scratchers they admire. Yes, at first you learn through imitation. You go through a process of acquiring the techniques involved with scratching by copying in the initial stages of becoming proficient. But there has to come a point where you let your God given creativity take over and improvise on what you already know. If you’re not there, then you’re a replica of someone else’s style and you’ve stopped short of the last stage of scratching, inventiveness.
DISCOVER YOUR RHYTHM
No two people speak the same and so the way you voice your melody as a scratcher should be different from the next DJ. Sky’s the limit with your imagination and that very fact should inspire you to have fun while you train and try out different rhythms or invent your own! Whether you’re a guitar player, drummer, bassist, pianist, etc., the creative ones around us have these four common traits:
- Perseverance: Success isn’t a straight line and in this social media, “I want results now,” aesthetic we all live under, it’s easy to talk yourself into giving up when you’re not seeing progress. The irony there is failure is what helped me create my “Nobody Beats the Biz” routine.
- Openness: To innovate you must be willing to investigate. Questions like, what if?, are what trigger new ideas. So, once you’ve learned a new scratch from a Brolic Army DJ School tutorial, open your mind to the possibilities of how to build on that scratch. Being inquisitive is a key part of nurturing your creativity.
- Temperament: It’s important to practice knowing that by the time you’re finished, something good would have come from the energy you’ve channeled onto your gear. Power up your equipment trusting you will tap into your creativity. But if you’re working out under the facade of tapping into your imagination, when in reality you’re chasing what you hear the scratch masters do on social media, then the only thing you’re pursuing is self sabotage. Practice to progress, not impress.
- Draw from your experiences: Scratchers who can improvise are successful at it because they can draw from their creative experiences on the spot. Putting thought into form spontaneously comes naturally because there’s a connectedness between their heart and mind. When you’re drilling out your cuts, are you grooving to the sound you’re coaxing out of the turntables and is your body receptive to the way that sound being forged from hands feels or are you in a state of numbness and your limbs go through the motions?
EXPLORE YOUR INDIVIDUALITY
If it’s your desire to stand out as a scratcher, your sense of individuality can be realized through freedom. Be willing to break away from tradition. Creativity has no boundaries and if you scratch within the confines established by the DJs who came before you, you’re essentially stuck, waiting for someone else to introduce something new to you.
Stagnancy is the antithesis of creativity so stay flexible when it comes to the music you scratch to! Your ears must be nourished by different genres of music and sound if you want to stay stimulated. Move away from the familiar scratch loopers you practice to and introduce yourself to fresher rhythms. It’s through exposing yourself to genres of music you didn’t think of that your imagination gets accelerated.
Lastly, allow yourself to be led. There will be times when your intuition will provoke you to try things that at first may seem strange. This is not your gut leading you astray. On the contrary, a creative hunch to walk down uncharted territory is where you discover new ideas. So always follow where this intuition of yours is leading you. Work with every moment of inspiration, not against it. You will never personally experience expansion as a scratcher if you hang on to what other DJs have done in the past. Give yourself the creative space to outgrow someone else’s technique by putting your own personal style on it!
