Short Stuff: Scratching

Listen in today as we salute turntablism, aka, record scratching.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
there's Jerry. Let's get it started. Wow, is that the
best you got? That was? Yeah? I thought pret good?
Was it not? It was great? So this coincides with
our Vinyl records UH full length episode, and we just

(00:24):
want to be clear record Scratching could be a full
length episode easily turns out. Um, we're going to concentrate
mainly on sort of the early history because we've also
learned that trying to describe musical things and audio things
is a little awkward, a little. I think it might
be the most difficult thing we've ever tried to describe

(00:44):
for real, you know what kind of sounds like this? Um,
So we're it's going to be light on that. But
let's talk about record scratching, which although and apparently in
the nineties and fifties people were creating music from turntables
to posing and sampling. But if you really want to
talk about uh turntable is um a term coined in

(01:06):
the nineties, You really got to start in the nineteen
seventies in New York City. Yeah, there was a guy
in n seventy five. His name is Theodore Livingstone. He
was a teenager in the Bronx and he went by
DJ grand Wizard Theodore unfortunate name but in nineteen In
in nineteen seventy five, Theodore was um playing records apparently

(01:30):
too loud on his home stereo, and his mom came
in and said, you better turn that down. I guess
his mom bust in and said, what's that noise? Right?
And when he went to go turn the volume down,
I guess, rather quickly accidentally scratched the record. And instead
of being like, man, I screwed up my record, Theodore
had the presence of mind to be like, that sounded
pretty cool. Let me see if I can do that again. Yeah,

(01:52):
I can, like totally see the movie version. Apparently she
was downstairs yelling at him and he went to stop
it so she to hear what she was saying, and
then he goes over and it goes and all of
a sudden, like the lights in the room get brighter.
He's just discovered a new musical genre. Close in on

(02:13):
Brian May, looking totally astounded and amazed in awe, oh goodness,
I still like that movie. Um, it was very corny, though,
you're correct, So he technically invented the scratch and started
doing it at parties and house parties and clubs and stuff.
But if you were to ask hip hop enthusiasts sort
of who the forefathers of turntable is um are, they

(02:36):
would point to three people for sure, maybe more Uh
Cool HERK, Grandmaster Flash and Africa Bombada, all of which
we talked about in our hip hop episode. Yeah. So
from what I can discern, Chuck, there's basically two categories
of turntable is m One is scratching that was invented
by Grand Wizard Theodore, and then the others called cutting,

(03:00):
and that was most people say invented by DJ Cool
Hirk again, I think in the seventies, the very very
late seventies. And scratching is exactly what you think it is.
It's moving the record back and forth back and forth
against the needle, making it scratch um and uh cutting
is where you have two you have to have two

(03:21):
records and you're using the cross fader that turns one
on and the other offer turns that one on and
the other off, depending on which way you slide it.
That is cutting, and everything else is either a subcategory
or a combination of those two and when you put
it all together, that's where you get turntablism, which is
this incredibly sophisticated, incredibly talented combination of scratching and cutting. Now,

(03:47):
doesn't cutting me in the same record though? No, Cutting
is you're cutting back and forth between two records, but
not the same Sorry, so to two identical records, like
two of the same record, one on each turntable? You mean, yes,
not necessarily? Cutting is the larger category of that. I
think that is breakbeat um usually when it's to two

(04:09):
different ones. Yeah, breakbeat, which seems to have evolved into
the juggling beat. Juggling seems like just a sort of
more complex version of breakbeat, right, Yeah, and breakbeat is
a type of cutting from what I understand. All right,
so cool Herror apparently came up with a breakbeat break
beat technique. That's hard to say. I would be a

(04:30):
terrible hip hop artist because I can't even say breakbeat technique?
How is your breakbeat technique? But that's when you have
the two copies of the same record put on two
different decks, and basically you mix between them to extend
um whatever indefinitely, like the climax usually or the break.
You can just extend that forever because you're going back

(04:51):
and forth. And like, I know how all this stuff works.
But I watched a lot of videos on YouTube. There's
one called scratch School. We're scratch scratch Bastard. Uh, kind
of shows you how to do the stuff and when
you if you don't know a lot about it, but
you've long admired the sound of it and you look
at it, Um, it's really kind of cool to see

(05:12):
how it works. It's really a lot, way more complicated
than I thought. Um. I didn't know that they actually
physically marked the record and like a clock position to
know where the beats were. Um. I always wondered how
they got the needle back to the point in the
song whether they needed that beat, And they just move it.

(05:34):
So they're they're scratching the records, they're moving the fader.
They're literally moving the needle to get it in the
right position, back and forth, and there's a lot more
going on than I thought. I knew it wasn't easy,
but I was just kind of blown away. Yeah, because
here's the thing. If you play a part of a record,
let's say like a drum roll, and you want to
play that again. If you spin the record backward, which

(05:55):
I believe is walking it right um or pausing it,
I can't remember what one it is. Backward would be
moonwalking right, Okay, So if you moonwalk the record, um,
it's going to make its own sound. But if all
you want is that beat over and over again, what
you're doing is through creating breakbeats, is just going from
that drum roll on the one record, And when that's done,

(06:18):
you've moved a cross fader to turn the other record
on so that the drum roll starts then. And then
while you're playing that, you pull the other record that
you just played back to the spot again. And by
doing that you can keep that drum roll going, just
moving back and forth seamlessly, add infinitem. Basically, you could
just keep it going forever, keep it going forever. So

(06:40):
that's what we would do if we didn't have to
take an ad break. But we're going to do that.
We'll be back to finish up right after this. That's
why skodol my dumb nat sk I just want a

(07:09):
second chuck before we start again. I'm with you that
scratch school with scratch bastard was so easy to watch.
The guy's like a total natural at explaining things, and
he's also astoundingly talented too, Yeah, and talented and with
like he was having fun and he was messing up
and hit his whole point, and all the videos I
watched was like, this is what it's about. Like I
screwed up there, I lost the beat. You gotta play

(07:31):
around with it, you gotta get funky and just sort
of like roll with mistakes and trying mistakes into happy
accidents and for a change, sort of look through some
of the YouTube comments and it was really supportive and cool,
like people are like, man, I'm trying to learn, and
you are. You make this so much more accessible. And
seeing someone kind of screw up and then get it
back is like and not edit that part out. It's

(07:54):
like really valuable. So without being start again wait or
else being like wait, wait, hold on, got it, hold
on wait wait a second. Yeah, it was pretty fun.
And I also want to recommend there were some more
fun videos from DJ Babu b a bu um that
we're pretty awesome as well at explaining things. Um, maybe
let's talk about a couple of more quick little moves

(08:14):
and then we'll go back and finish up with some history. Yeah.
I think that's a great idea, dude, So I would
highly recommend you go and watch these videos if you're
interested in knowing what something like a transformer scratches so
perfectly named though. I know it's named because it sounds
sort of like a transformer transforming um, cash money. Jazzy Jeff,

(08:35):
lots of DJ sort of helped pioneer this technique. And
once you see it and hear it, you're like, oh,
I just you know, if you don't know much about it,
you're like, I didn't know what was called the transformer scratch,
but I've heard it a million times. Yeah. And and
by the way, yes, that Jazzy Jeff d J Jazzy
Jeff isn't he's the DJ. I'm the rapper DJ Jazzy
Jeff who apparently invented that. Um. And then there's another

(08:58):
one that's called the scrap, the crab that scratch bastard does.
And the reason it's called that is because you're flicking
the cross fader back and forth using your thumb and
then one finger thumb in the next finger thumb your
other finger, and then sometimes your thumb and your fourth
finger and as you do it really fast, um, one
finger after another, it kind of, you know, is reminiscent

(09:19):
of a crab's legs walking. Yeah, it's again, it's really cool.
It's like you use your thumb as to kind of
put pressure against the fader and basically what you're doing
is you're turning the fader on and off really quickly.
But you know that thing if you're if you're bored,
you do like I'm gonna do with my fingers on
like a piece of wood. But that, yes, well did

(09:40):
that come through it? All that? That's what you're doing
with the fader. So whenever you hear a scratch, go
like arrow, that's what they're doing. And it's just it's
a technique called the crab. It's so cool. The thing is, though,
is when you watch dj Is doing these things and
explaining it, it becomes so much more I guess, admirable
because the the different coordination of your hands doing two

(10:05):
different things at different times perfectly syncd up is so
hard for someone like me that just to see somebody
who can just do it like it's nothing is really
it's really My hat is off to those people. Yeah,
it's super impressive. Um, jumping back to history, Uh, things
are happening in the Bronx obviously in the late seventies. Again,

(10:27):
if you listen to our hip Hop episode, we talk
all about it. And then the big, big breakout as
far as the mainstream America music loving public goes, was
in when Herbie Hancock's Rocket came out Landmark video, Landmark
performance at the twenty six Grammy Awards, which really pushes
it into the mainstream because that was the first scratch solo, uh,

(10:52):
and it was amazing. It was performed by another Bronx DJ.
Uh and it said in this one Arcole Grand matt Ster,
but it was Grand mixer d s T who then
changed it to d x T. Yeah, and I think
so this was like the first song that ever had
scratching is like not only like a rhythm, but there's

(11:14):
like scratching solos in the middle of the song. And
like at this point, like people just especially just the
general people, and I'm sure every single person at the
Grammys did not think of turntables as anything particularly interesting.
Like at that Up to that point, a DJ was
what a lot of DJs are still today. You've got
one record playing and you let it play most of

(11:34):
the way, and then you mix in another record, and
then you take the first record off and put another
one and mix that and which is it's really hard
to do. You have to have a really good ear.
That's not scratching, that's not cutting, that's not turn tables,
and that's DJing. And that's what people thought of turntables
as that was it, that's what they were for. But
with Rocket, it was like, Nope, this is a completely
different era now starting in Yeah. And I remember, man,

(11:58):
I remember being twelve and thirteen years old and seeing
Rocket the video for the first time, and this was
Herbie Hancock was a sort of star fading jazz musician
at this time. This really revived his career. But I
remember the video was so weird and so and looking
at it now it's very kind of disturbing and odd looking.

(12:20):
But I remember seeing it and just thinking, what in
the world am I seeing and hearing right now? Uh?
And it's and it's not like I immediately started. I
didn't get into hip hop until probably four or five
years after that, but uh, it blew my mind. I
was just I had never heard anything like it before.
It was super cool to be of that generation to

(12:40):
have seen like a new genre being born before your
very eyes. Yeah. Um, Apparently that one performance is credited
for basically getting a lot of kids into scratching and
then eventually turntable is um starting in the nineties, which
is pretty cool. And also it's a little side note.
That was the same Grammys where Michael jack And carried
Emmanuel Lewis around like a baby. You actually, if you

(13:05):
watch the performance of Rocket, I think at the end
after when everybody's clapping, they cut to them sitting together
in the front row. Oh goodness, it's a it was
a weird Grammys. Dude, you got anything else? Wait? Wait
wait wait wait wait wait wait wait waited. That means,

(13:25):
of course, everybody short stuff is out. Stuff you should
know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more
podcasts my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.