Help with Using Vinyl for the First Time for the New DJ

0:00 Jonathan the DJ Tutor here

Alright guys, Jonathan the DJ Tutor here. So, you are using vinyl for the very first time and again, if you're not familiar with my videos, practically all of them are for the complete and utter novice beginner DJ. So, apparently vinyl's coming back in and I'm going to say that in six months, a year, two years, ten years from now because to be quite honest, vinyl has never gone away. Okay, it's a little bit more expensive and there may not be as many shops where you can buy vinyl from but it's still there, it's still being used and to this day, it is still in my eyes number one for sound quality because you've just got that... Anyway, we won't go there. Alright, so you're using vinyl for the very first time. I'm going to show you a couple of things that maybe you didn't know even if you have used vinyl for quite a while. You probably thought, ah, I get it.

1:43 What's known is, and look how I'm holding it

Right, so there's a record. Let's open it up. Now, of course, you have the sleeve but inside, quite often, you'll have this thing here. Now, that's actually known as the dust cover. Why would you have something like that? It's inside the sleeve in the first place because, I mean, pure logic would tell you that, well, the record goes in there. It's not going to get scratched. Well, it shouldn't really get scratched but have a look. There you go. There is the record as clear as daylight and guess what? Once you place that inside amongst all the other records, it's going to probably get covered in dust because it's open to the environment. That's why we have vinyl. What's known is, and look how I'm holding it. That's why what we have is known as a dust cover. There it is. Now, also as well, what I'm going to do is when I place my piece of vinyl inside the cover, there's the opening for the dust cover.

I'm not going to put it in that way because we've still got the record open to the environment. I'm actually going to turn it 90 degrees and put it in that direction. So now, he says hopefully. Sometimes it does get stuck. There you go. The record is inside there and theoretically, it should not get as much dust on it as it would have done if the record was not in the dust cover and also facing the other way. So there you go. Did you know that? Well, if you didn't, you do now. Right. So I'm now going to take the record out. I'm going to put that down there and I'm now going to take the record out of the cover. Note, I'm going to open up, put my finger in the centre, put my thumb on the side. And there you go. So at no point during the time that it took me to take that record out, have I put my fingers actually on any part of the vinyl except the centre point where you've got the sticker and the side.

Now this is, of course, if you want to really, really look after your vinyl. In other words, you don't want to get any fingerprints on it or anything. If, of course, you're a scratch turntablist, then that's completely out the window because you're going to get some dust.

Get your dirty mitts over the entire record back, forward, front and side. But doesn't really matter. So I'm now going to place that onto the vinyl turntable, press down if I need to. And there you go. So at no point have I actually had to touch the grooves on the record. I haven't had to touch them. So let's sort of finish the video there, except we need to put the record back in the cover. So I'm not going to lift it off. I'm holding it on the sides, take it like that. I'm now holding it there like that, which means if you can see, I have the record in complete control of that record. All right. If I tipped it a little bit more, it would fall out of my hands. But I'm not going to do that because I don't want to scratch it.

4:42 My vinyl isn't stored correctly because I have so much of it

So I take my dust cover, open it up, place the record back in the dust cover. Notice at no point have I had to touch the record itself. Open up the original. Original cover. Put that in there and put it away for the next time. But also what I will be doing is placing it either that way inside, along with the other records. Not that way because again, I'm opening that to the environment or I can place it that way. So really how you store your records is entirely up to you. Sadly. My vinyl isn't stored correctly because I have so much of it. And I'm going to say something here that some people in comments may go, yeah, but we've seen your vinyl collection and I do apologize. A lot of it is about the room I've got, but it's not a good idea to put your vinyl flat on top of each other like that,

Because that's a great way of getting them warped. You need to place them that way up horizontally. Okay? Sorry. Vertically. Oh God. Now I hope again, if you watch my videos for the first time, you'll know on not the odd occasion, practically every single time I make mistakes, but I don't care to be quite honest. Um, I just most of the time, the bloopers just stay in with the original video that's life. All right. So that's pretty much it for this video. Uh, that is a Technics SL 1200 mark two. They make a mark seven now. And what I was told. Okay. I'm digressing slightly, but this is all relevant that the day they brought out or very close to the day they brought out the mark seven. They stopped, um, selling the parts for the mark two.

So what I do recommend is if you've got an original mark two SL 1200, um, or the 1210, they're both the same except the 1200 is silver. The 1210 is black. That's all the difference there is. Uh, you start buying up some parts. Once they're gone, they're gone. Uh, the mixer by the way is the FF 2.2 L and it's from formula sound. And I will be using that a great deal in future videos when I work with vinyl. So that's about it. Big shout out. And thank you very much to get in the mix.com for sending me the auto font cartridge as well. There will be a link in the description to get in the mix practice and enjoy. Thank you very much. Thank you.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.