One of the greatest music mastermind's of our time, DJ Shadow, did an exclusive interview with Game Informer speaking on the upcoming DJ Hero game by Activision and how he seemed to become a consultant of sorts on the game.

GI: Well jumping from the music itself to the features of the game, are there ideas or features that you think are central or essential to have in a DJ simulator, like what DJ Hero is going to be?

DJ: Yeah—it’s an interesting question and it’s something that I think internally the developers kicked back and forth a lot, and I think even within the last few months there’s been some debate about all of the different—and that was actually one of the first things that I wanted to know when I got down to L.A. to meet with everybody and look at the game and look at the actual hardware, was, “OK well…”—DJ’ing is similar to Guitar Hero: there’s 500 different styles of playing guitar, and which style is going to be emphasized? If it’s going to be rock, is going to be a modern kind of post-heavy metal approach to playing guitar? Or is it going to be—I mean what if there’s an acoustic—you know what I mean? [Laughing] On a musical level, it presents a lot of challenges because to me there’s a lot of styles of DJ’ing that I respect a lot that don’t have anything to do with actual showmanship. I mean some of the best DJs I’ve ever seen play do nothing on a technical level that would blow any turntablist’s mind, but they can read the crowd really well and it’s all about their song selection and the progression of the music that they play over the night. You know, house DJs will do like a four hour set and play like maybe a dozen and a half songs within that four hours, but then there’s a set like what I did at the Hollywood Bowl, where we used all 45s and we played a couple hundred 45s in the span of an hour. So there’s so many styles of DJ'ing and there’s so many different disciplines, and so many different techniques and styles, and not all of it involves what I think a lot of people think of when they think of DJs in this era, which is kind of the battle DJ, the more hip-hop oriented scratching and doing crazy body tricks on the turntables.

So to answer your question, I think that a lot of the major elements that are important to DJ'ing, such as scratching—which really, scratching was created by disco DJs just queuing up parts of the records that they wanted to play. I mean, any disc jockey from the 40s on up is familiar with the sound of scratching, it was just not anything that anybody chose to emphasize. So hip-hop, which is based on the aesthetic of, you know, using whatever’s around you—that somebody decided, “Well, OK that sound is actually kind of cool, I’m going to let people hear it rather than hiding it from people.”

PacoDG via gameinformer.com »