Born into a musical family with rhythm a foundational part of his life, DJ, producer and drummer Spinscott followed his father’s footsteps as a drummer before moving into a career as an internationally active DJ – and pioneering a musical style he calls Jungle Plus Drums.
He began DJing using the traditional combination of turntables and mixer, before adding a sampler. ‘I incorporated a sampler into my rig because it gave me a way to “finger drum” along with the music, adding a live performance element to my sets,’ he recalls. ‘That refined and spun off further into a unique format – doing entire tracks in real time, just with the sampler, custom, loop-free, sequence-free and quantise-free. It kind of bridges two worlds for me – live music performance and DJing.’
His performance makes monitoring on stage a critical consideration. ‘You typically remove the right headphone ear cup to be able to hear your monitor, which exposes your right ear to very high sound levels,’ he says. ‘You have to have that speaker right there, near your ear. Most DJ equipment has evolved over time, but headphones have kind of remained the same.’
When he discovered ASI Audio’s 3DME Active Ambient in-ear monitor system he realised that the challenges of DJ monitoring ‘could be solved with the 3DME approach’.
The 3DME system uses Active Ambient earphones with embedded binaural microphones that pick up ambience – the direct sound around the performer including the audience – paired with a bodypack that houses a headphone amplifier, dual mic preamps, earphone and monitor I/O and DSP for signal processing and blending the ambient and monitor signals, under control of the free companion ASI Audio App for iOS and Android.
‘I’m now an avid user of the product,’ he says. ‘It just makes sense for the application. It adds a lot of value, particularly when I’m playing live elements and mixing at the same time. With the 3DME, you manage the overall sound and the volume, and you’re more able to keep things at consistent levels. As a result, you protect your hearing in both the short- and long-term.’
Spinscott’s innovative monitoring set-up involves feeding the 3DME beltpack from the headphone jack on his mixer with the cue split panned left and the 3DME ambience turned down almost all the way on the left channel. On the right-hand side, the ambience is turned up with no programming being fed from the mixer – he listens to the monitor speaker via the 3DME right channel mic, using the ASI Audio App to EQ the full-range monitor output.
‘I tend to mix to the hi-hat,’ he explains, ‘It’s the most staccato instrument. It’s usually the timekeeper, especially in 808-based or other electronic-type music. I don’t have to turn up the volume as loud because I’m only hearing what I need to hear to mix. The 3DME IEMs stay in my ears the whole time – if somebody does come up to speak to me, because of the ambient microphones, I don’t have to take my headphones off. It frees up my hands to do other things. If I am drumming or triggering samples and cues, it’s a game-changer.’
The system is simple to operate, he says: ‘It becomes a set-it-and-forget-it type of thing. That’s so important to any performer. You don’t want to focus on your equipment while you’re on stage; you want to focus on the music and get into that zone that we all crave.
‘I love the sound quality of the 3DME and, even more, the control,’ he notes. ‘It just creates this consistency that removes the room variables, so I am free to be creative and spontaneous from the very start of the set. This is a huge step forward in ensuring that just about every set starts off great from the first downbeat.’
Hearing protection is a major benefit of the 3DME IEM system for Spinscott. ‘Everything is lower volume in my ears,’ he says. ‘You’re getting the protection while you’re enhancing the experience by being able to hear everything.’
More: www.ASIaudio.com
