DJ Times: But you’d rather have a consistency regarding what comes out of the mixer?
Hawtin: Yeah. I prefer something that can bring together all the different components, all these different frequencies, into a warm, rounded, thick kind of sound. I mean, this is just my opinion, but this isn’t the era of disco or the era of electro-pop, when you needed more of a tight mid-kick and a lower-mid bassline to create the energy. Techno and house played over massive club systems—I think the new Funktion-One has 32-inch bassbins—sounds great when it’s rumbling, when the music is hitting you in the pit of the stomach and vibrating your whole body. When you’re in the middle of a dancefloor, I think most people want to have a physical experience. And that’s the kind of mixer we wanted to create. We wanted something that could bring everything together in a beautiful, well-rounded way, and have it be something with balls. We wanted it to add just a little bit extra, to want to make you dance just a little bit more.
DJ Times: How did you go about facilitating that vision?
Hawtin: We had a fundamental question when we started this project: Do we go digital, or do we go analog? Digital is very good at creating a very pure, transparent sound, but we went the analog way. We wanted to have some circuitry, some components, some filters, some EQs, of the sort that would bring that warmth. And that’s where we started. We made a very simple channel strip, and we plugged in turntables and computers—and then we simply played with the circuitry until we heard something that we liked.
DJ Times: How can you tell when that something is the sound that you’re looking for?
Hawtin: There’s sound quality on a technical level, and there’s sound quality on an emotional level. The sound we were looking for was on that emotional level. It’s just a feeling, really. It didn’t have to sound exactly how it was made to sound, but it had to sound warm. I use that word, warm, quite often, but I also use smooth. I love it when DJs play records, and they’ll just kind of melt together. For me, on a very basic level, that’s what makes an incredible DJ. It’s someone who puts two things on top of each other, and it becomes something that doesn’t exist. Some people call it the third record.
DJ Times: And that’s obviously easier to do if you have that consistent, warm sound coming out of the mixer.
Hawtin: Exactly. And I’m an extreme example of that; I’m always trying to get everything to just melt into place, no matter how many channels and effects I’m using. That’s what we wanted each input on this mixer to do—to melt everything together, no matter the source. And we tried to enable it to do that for any kind of DJ. For instance, for people who plug in turntables, we re-engineered the phono preamps by playing a little bit with the RIAA curve—and turntables sound amazing with this mixer.
DJ Times: How about with digital inputs?
Hawtin: Well, there are quite a few different digital signals. There is one rule that I’ve learned from sound guys as I’ve traveled the world is that the more A-to-D and D-to-A conversion steps you have, the worse it’s going to sound. At this moment in time, with the way people are playing and the sources that people are using, we felt that bringing all those digital signals right into analog was the way to go.
DJ Times: So you just have one step from digital to analog, and just stick with that.
Hawtin: Exactly. Of course, with most sound systems today, you will have one more A-to-D step after that. But think about it—when you have a lot of different sources and a lot of steps, none of these things are clocked, and you’re getting crazy jitter and stuff like that. But going back to electrical currents is the right idea, I think. It’s analogous to what happens in a pro recording studio. Most people have ended up using a mix of analog and digital—maybe a couple of great digital effects boxes, maybe a computer with Ableton and some nice Apogee converters, maybe an old Moog, maybe a new Moog, maybe a couple of Dave Smith Instruments, all put together in a unique way. And then, very often, it either gets mixed or downmixed on a high-end analog console.
DJ Times: And in your analogy, the PLAYdifferently mixer is equivalent to the studio’s analog console.
Hawtin: Yeah. In my mind, the DJ market is five or 10 years behind the pro-studio market. Because the DJ market is so big, the impulse is to make mixers in the cheapest way possible, with the cheapest production possible—and that usually means that the manufacturers go the digital route. Which doesn’t mean digital is necessarily the wrong way to go—but we have this massive market, and all we have are DJ mixers that are maybe 10 or 15 or 20 years old in design. Then there are the kind of DJ mixers that are created for the mass market, just to sell as many as possible. That’s it—and that’s disappointing, given the size of the market. And that’s kind of where we come in.
DJ Times: Other than its sonic consistency, what else differentiates PLAYdifferently from other mixers?
Hawtin: We’ve made changes from the ground up. The main thing is the quality of the components—the quality of touch, of tactility, of finding the right button or the right knob to attach to a certain effect or parameter.
DJ Times: So it’s sort of a redesign of the interface between the DJ and the machinery?
Hawtin: That sounds pretty simple, but there was a lot to think about. The problem is that a lot of products have multiple uses for each button, knob and fader on the device—they can become overly complicated and less intuitive, less playful, really. I mean, a guitar has six strings, arranged in a certain way; a keyboard has black and white keys, arranged in a certain way. They have a certain feel. These are instruments—and the mixer is the instrument of the modern DJ. It’s where you decide how to cut and modulate and filter, or whatever else you want to do. And if the mixer doesn’t have the kind of feel that makes you want to touch, turn and press things, it’s not going to inspire your best performance.
DJ Times: And that is the ultimate goal.
Hawtin: Yes, and I don’t think that there’s been something quite like that before—a mixer that’s designed to be an instrument that a performer plays. Each of our knobs does one thing. Once you know the mixer, you don’t have to think about it. Your hand goes there, and that’s the filter; put it there, that’s the high-pass; over there, that’s the low-pass. And we’ve designed each part for functionality. Everything is designed to match human movements, which are very much connected by our human emotions. And that can sometimes be achieved by simply changing the shape, location or feel of a button. I mean, how do we put our own stamp on other people’s prerecorded music, on other people’s records? First of all, you need an instrument that enables us to translate our movements, one that can bring those movements into the mix.
DJ Times: You’re a pretty good ambassador for PLAYdifferently.
Hawtin: Well, I’m one of the designers—I better be! [laughs] Honestly, I’ve been involved in a number of different technologies, and I won’t say that everything I’ve been involved with has been the right choice. But I try to be aligned with things that I’m passionate about. As far as mixers go, I’ve been waiting for years for someone to design one, and that never happened. But this is finally here, and it’s something that excites me and inspires me when I use it in front of people. I can hear the difference, and I can see that the crowd feels something different.
DJ Times: They feel that just through the sound quality alone?
Hawtin: It’s more than that. They can feel that you are playing differently, too.
DJ Times: Hence the name.
Hawtin: Yeah. Think about the professionals, people who go out every weekend and make their living off of DJing. Most of them are using three or four different mixers as they play in different clubs. And one manufacturer’s EQs might sound one way, and another’s might sound another way. But there are actually not that many differences—isn’t it time for something different? We all have great music, so the challenge was to find a new way for people to manipulate it.
DJ Times: How have your fellow DJs liked PLAYdifferently so far?
Hawtin: I’ll be very honest—most people can’t just jump on it and expect to do their best performance right away. The two filters and the parametric EQs can throw people off. But once people get over that initial, three- or four-gig hump, wonderful things start to happen. Of course, there are some people who can jump on it right away—when we were Output, François K joined us, and he did the best set I’ve ever seen him do.
