Thoughts on the Pioneer XDJ-1000

I finally joined the club and bought a Pioneer DJ deck. I avoided this for a long time but here we are. After playing with it for a while there are some good things and bad things about it. However there are also some ideas I’ve had that would be really cool improvements.

I’m the kind of person that treats every piece of gear in my setup as an instrument. I like doing realtime tweaks and things so the closest cohort of users would be turntablists that scratch and back-cue on their decks. I’m getting used to the way the cue and play buttons work on the XDJ. One weird thing is that the cue can be on another track if one wasn’t set up on the currently playing track. This strikes me as a little strange. If you don’t put a cue point on the currently playing track explicitly it might bounce you back into neverland somewhere in a previously played track unexpectedly. I might be missing something here but it’s weird. I think you can set hotcues up to go back and forth between tracks so maybe some DJs use that for doing mashups and megamixes between tracks. So in that sense the cue behavior seems more reasonable.

Ok, so there are some other weird things about the vinyl mode. I like to cue using the jog wheel and for some reason when you let go of the wheel it jumps back to the previous cue point. I wish there was an option to keep the deck at the same point when jogging in vinyl mode.

One killer feature of the deck is slip mode. This is called something else on Traktor but it’s familar to me. You can scratch and do some random beat repeat stuff and have the deck pick up as if it was always playing. This makes it way easier to do manipualtion and have things end up back on track at the end. I really wish the slip button was a physical button on the deck though. It’s a little hard to enable and disable quickly on screen. Also each track that loads turns it back off so you end up having to double check every time that you are in the right mode.

Rewinding using the wheel only goes so far before it snaps back to the cue point for some reason. I wish you could turn this behavior off. Again, I like searching through with the jog wheel instead of the search buttons.

One thing I think is really great is that when the pitch control is set to “wide” meaning that it goes all the way down to 0bpm – you can do a cool “freeze” effect by setting the bpm to like 1 bpm.

This all is making me want to create a custom firmware or something to do crazy manipulations with a deck-style interface. Sort of a sampler built into a deck.