Since the first time I ever hit the decks the essence can be reduced to play one song after the other and make people dance and enjoy their evening. The first big change in the way I try to achieve this came in 2009 when I ditched physical media for mp3s. CD players were replaced by controllers and the silver discs stayed in their sleeves as a backup solution.
I was in love with traktor dj and quite fast I was hooked on my Allen&Heath Xone4D & Native Instuments Traktor setup. For about 8 year Traktor and I had an utterly happy marriage, the "kid" grew up to a Xone DB4 and later we adopted a Kontrol S8, but we never had any issues or hickups. Untill the start of 2017 ... I saw Soundswitch, the perfect integration between dj-software and lighting control ... finished with sound-to-light, always a balanced light show ... an allround dj's dream.
There was one catch though, my marriage with Traktor would be over if a adopted a bastard-kid named Soundswitch ... after some thoughts I jumped. It was a very clean divorce, I even tried to stay friends with my ex, and kept her as my home-studio setup for a while. But after a few months with Serato on the road I reprogrammed the control D2 controllers for serato and I completely ditched Traktor.
First of all, Traktor is a great piece of software that is reliable and works flawless. If I wasn't an allround/wedding dj with my own sound/lighting setup I would probably still running on Traktor. I tried DMX controllers, DMX dongles with Ableton linked to Traktor all with "medium" success ... when push comes to shove you put on sound-to-light because you don't have the time to think about the next song and to put another light-preset.
Apart from some minor differences, smaller complete waveforms, some strange behavior from time to time with sync & pitch (yeah I use sync ... whatever), Serato is just as good. Both Serato and Traktor do what they are designed to do ... let the dj play 1, 2 or more songs at the same time. Although I get a more classic dj experience and feeling with Serato, probably because Traktor got rid of the jogwheel and made us more button pushers.
But Serato opened up their software, beatgrid to a 3rd party that created a dream product for us mobile dj's ... Soundswitch. A piece of software/hardware that runs together with Serato and gives you the opportunity to create a specific lightshow for every song, pre-created loops run on-time with the Serato grid if you don't program a specific song. You can create different venues, if you have different setups of you have acces to the dmx scheme of the bar where you play often, and so on and so on.
For the price of a small lighting-desk you can give even the smallest gig a spot on lightshow over and over again, without changing a slider, pushing a button or even a glimpse on the lighting controller next to you !!
