|.| Early Reflection Recordings

The art of using a record turntable as a musical instrument in its own right can be dated back a lot further than you might first think. As early as 1930, Edgard Varese experimented with turntables although he never actually produced anything useful with them.

Experiments continued and throughout the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s, composers such as John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer were sampling and creating music which was produced by the turntable
itself.

Moving into the 1960’s and 70’s different turntable effects started to show up in commercial music. The song ‘Walk on Water’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival included a backspin effect for example. However, turntablism as it is understood in its modern form did not really come into its own until the appearance of hip hop in the 1970’s.

The actual term ‘turntablist’ was first used in 1995 by DJ Babu and is intended to describe the difference between a DJ who just plays records and one who uses records, stylus and mixer in combination to produce musical sounds which are not part of the recording being played.

Different techniques started to evolve as the style matured, such as beat mixing and matching which allows for a continuous beat throughout the night as the DJ pitch shifts and timestretches different tracks, seamlessly blending one into another. With no break between tracks and no reason for people to leave the dancefloor, the DJ reigned supreme. An extension of this phenomenon was developed by DJ Kool Herc. Called the break-beat technique, it allows the DJ to endlessly repeat the climax to a track by continually flipping between two copies of the same record. While one turntable is playing the climax, the DJ quickly moves the record back on the other turntable to the start of the climax before fading it back in. If the DJ manages to do this seamlessly, then the dancers have no idea that the track is being manipulated in order to keep them on the dancefloor.

Scratching is the art of moving the record backwards and forwards under the stylus using one hand while manipulating the cross fader with the other. The technique was discovered by accident by an apprentice of Grandmaster Flash, Grand Wizard Theodore.

Beat Juggling combines the beats and sounds from more than one turntable. This means that the DJ essentially creates a new piece of music on the fly, turning the turntablist essentially into a live performance composer. The combination of the continuous evolution of the techniques and styles along with dedicated DJs with a multitude of skills has established turntablism as a musical artform.