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Old 7th July 2009   #4
brian_delizza
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You just have to practice.

After a while you learn to connect your thoughts with your turntables/mixer and you can kind of just think of a scratch and know how to move the record/fader to pull it off.

The two fundamentals of scratching (and music in general) are rhythm and pitch. The pitch is determined by how fast you are moving the record (for the most part,) and the rhythm is being determined by the record movement and the fader.

You essentially create a combination of rhythmic values to get a scratch. You use the fader to turn the sound on and off to create rhythm and/or to leave out certain record movements. Try to look at it like any other instrument (1/4 note, 1/16 note, 1/8 note triplet, etc). Combine different crossfader rhythms with different record movement rhythms. Note that you can be doing a slower rhythm with a fast speed or a fast rhythm with a slow speed, and therefore change the tone or pitch of the scratch. For example I could do 1/8 note record movement with short hand bursts (resulting in a higher pitch sound), or I can take the same 1/8th note and move the record slower so that the pitch of the sample is lower.

I hope that makes sense.

The Qbert video is definitely worth watching, just be sure to practice and don't expect it to come instantly (be patient.)
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