DIY DJ mixer

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I don't have schematics at hand, but you can either simply select your favourite commercial products and try getting service manuals for them (often there is a DJ somewhere on the net who scanned service manuals of his gear and put them online) or you can design a DJ mixer yourself exactly the way you like it. It's easy if you don't mind extensive use of operational amplifiers (almost all commercial DJ mixers are opamp based anyway). I've built several simple mixers - I'll try to help you if you like. The case is the most difficult part of building a mixer.
 
Hi,

Bricolo said:
Does anyone have shematics for this?

Schematics for these things are not that difficult to find. What I find much more important is that if you want to build sucha mixer from scratch you really think about the features you need to DJ well.

I ended up in my days using two heavily modded DJ "Battle Mixers" with a homebuild "loop in" tonecontrol (one per mixer) and all that into a big Pro Audio 12/4/2 Mixer to get enough effect loop ins and the like, plus really good facilities on the Vocal channel and for my Korg Musicworkstation/Keyboard.

I made sure I had a Bass "punch-in/out" in case I wanted to mix tracks that had either clashing bass lines or snares. Punch out the bass, mix on the snare and when you feel it's time get the right cut and punch the new tracks bass in, the previous tracks bass out. Of course, running the two mixers allowed me a full "preview" option so I could put a full preview of the mix I was doing on my local monitors (JBL Control 5's) to hear broadly how it would sound.

I think a setup such as described is more than extreme, but it is an example of having customised the whole setup to a certain style (seamless music most of the time, MC over that). Other styles may need other setups.

Sayonara
 
DIY Dj mixer

Hi all

I just joined this community,as I have recently realised my goal in life-to build a Dj mixer! I hope I can find the help here that I need,even from reading the posts I get the feeling I'm among the right group of people! OK,so here's the requirements of the mixer-to-be....

2 channel (no EQ)
Triple crossfading system (like Red Sound's Infader)
High and low pass filters on each channel
LED Metering

So can anyone recommend a suitable design of mixer that I could modify for myself? Also,the filters could be tricky-if they're to sound good. I read a post from a guy called Matt who also wanted to make DJ style filters,but I don't know whether he succeeded or not...

All comments and suggestions greatly appreciated.

Best Regards,

Daz
 
It's hard to compete with either the inexpensive made-in-China mixers, or with the price of good used mixers on eBay. However, it does almost make sense to build something like or inspired by the UREI 1620. These mixers were designed back in the early '80s, and continue to be favourites of world-class house DJs playing on gigantic club systems. Rane built a "tribute" mixer, the 2016, and something resembling the reanimated corpse of UREI is selling a new version of the 1620.

The service manual, with schematics, is available from JBL: http://www.jblproservice.com/pdf/Vintage JBL-UREI Electronics/UREI-1620 manual.pdf Board layouts... searching will turn up some pictures that show the phono card solder side clearly. The circuitry isn't exotic, but there are some nice touches like the Alps rotary potentiometers, and the use of two opamp stages in the RIAA preamp.

Possible improvements: change the phono stages from quad to dual or single opamps, or discrete. Replace the many electrolytic coupling caps with film caps, or add DC servos as appropriate. Better voltage regulators, possibly one per input channel (or pair). Crossfader, tone controls or kills for each input channel, if you need that kind of thing. A wide range level meter would be nice, as would clipping or headroom indicators for each active stage.

There's also a Bozak mixer from the 1970's that inspired the 1620, the CMA-10-2DL, which is also still sought after. A copy of the owner's manual with schematics can be found, along with pictures of some of the boards.
 
HAS anyone built themselves a dj mixer yet?
I'm looking for people who can supply information on the build/sourcing parts/general do's+dont's

On http://www.wavemusic.com/community/ there are some people who have modded "normal" mixers to behave / look like the classic rotary disco mixers, but apart from this one:
http://www.tribemagazine.com/board/showthread.php?t=149343
I haven't found any totally self built mixer.

I'm hoping to start the build of a 'discrete' 4 channel line (no phono) dj mixer with excellent 3 band channel EQ and PFL.

Suggestions are also very welcome.
 
Not me, so far. I did inquire into the cost of Penny & Giles potentiometers. They're coke badger superstar DJ expensive.

I'm leaning towards making a minimalist two-channel rotary mixer using the 1620 phono stages that will double as a preamp for digitizing vinyl.

I've also considered converting the Aaron-Gavin DJ-1 mixer to rotary. Aaron-Gavin was best known for making graphic equalizers in the late '70s, and not surprisingly this mixer has 15 band EQ for each side. Apparently they refused to use any stereo slide pots, so even the crossfader consists of two pots side by side. Naturally, since there's a staggering number of slide pots on this thing, they were as cheap as possible, and are now noisy, and many are broken. (As are many of the cheap toggle switches)
 
Not exactly a battling DJs dream, but I'm currently planning an extremely bare mixer by hooking the outputs of two valve phono/line preamps into one output using a couple of resistors.

No EQ, no filter, no cross-fader, just two volume controls and true bypass send-returns for each channer, so that I can add a separate isolator if and when I want to. I might even keep the headphone amplification in a separate box (with own power supply). Idea is to get audiophile grade quality but maintain the ability to do basic crossfading, without having to spend £1500-3000 on an E&S, Allen & Heath V6 or Bozak and also keeping to limited size.

Medium term project that will at best take 2-3 months, but will let you know how it goes, post pics etc and eventually schematics, assuming it works well. Pretty straightforward to add more DJ friendly functions to it, assuming you
 
I started thinking about this...I got as far as working out ideas for a modular op-amp based design, with breakout points to add in things like tone controls etc as I built them.

I have schims and layout ideas on my PC if I can get it to fire up - I have no actual knowledge about electronics beyond what I think I've worked out through self teaching, so they may well be a load of old b*****ks!

My idea was to breadboard each part, and then eventually start putting them together in a 2 channel system.
 
nah, the only experience i've had with that mixer was an emulation of the channel strip in a waves package plugin. yeah IMO EQ is indispensable for any type of mixing duties. if you need to isolate and filter, or isolate and remove a percussion sample or something, you cant do without it.

indeed God luck is good ;D
 
Any type of EQ/isolation will colour sound. I appreciate that in the majority of mixing situations, this colouration is acceptable, particularly given the need to be able to isolate frequencies. Nevertheless, there are enough people out there who's mixing style does not require EQ and who have a taste for as pure/clean sound as possible. Bozak/Urei users tend to be that type. At the extreme of this group is David Mancuso, who actually uses a dual class A Mark Levinson pre-amp to "mix", although he never really mixes but rather plays one song after another in full, but with no "gap" in between.

Apart from that, if you do want EQ/isolation, the "pure" mixer also allows you to use a much unit than anything built into a standard mixer (for instance, the Dope Real isolator that Theo Parrish uses or the E&S stuff).

For me it's a combination of the two. I want to have the option of pure and clean sound, for when I mix things like brazilian funk, vocal jazz and other things where I'd never really use EQ anyway and would benefit from a clean signal path and am keen to get an external isolation unit for mixing anything electronic.
 
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