Turntablism is the term used to describe the art of creating original music using a phonograph turntable and a traditional, plastic vinyl record. In the late 1970s, it was influenced by creative “disc jockeys” (DJs) spinning recorded music at dance parties. DJ-ing, along with Master of Ceremonies (MC-ing), break-dancing, and graffiti art, is considered one of the foundational pillars of the urban culture that became known as hip-hop. Hip-hop is described as a street life of scratching, rapping, breaking, and tagging by more commonly used slang terms. Scratching is just one of many physically demanding ways to manipulate a spinning disk to change its original musical recording.
The first DJ’s phonograph was a two-turntable disk player with only one audio output channel. Slide levers known as cross-faders were among the controllers, allowing the DJ to fade out of a musical track on one turntable while fading into a track on the opposite turntable. The recorded disks were made of hard vinyl plastic with irregular grooves that served as direct transmissions of sound vibrations. The microscopic vibrations were picked up by a fine needle mounted on a freely moving arm, which was then amplified as audible sound. Turntablism’s musical instrument is this.
One of the pioneering DJ’s first tricks was to apply pressure to a turntable to cause it to stop spinning, resulting in a “break” of silence in a musical track. It took a lot of timing to release the pressure and resume playback of the song without breaking the rhythm. The new cadence of breaking beats adapted the dancing of the partygoers. Other DJs were quick to pick up on the technique of repeatedly playing short segments of music by spinning a turntable counterclockwise to the exact position where the segment began. Releasing the pressure would cause it to happen again.
When using this technique quickly, the finger motion resembled “scratching” an itch. Turntablism became known as scratching as this unique sound effect became more popular in mainstream music. More aspiring DJs meant more innovative new scratching techniques and corresponding sounds as acceptance and legitimacy grew. The physical and sonic demands of its new use as a musical instrument rather than a simple playback device prompted DJ equipment manufacturers to respond.
The ability to finely adjust the rate of rotation of each turntable was a significant improvement in the equipment. This meant that the musician, also known as a turntablist, could manually match any two disks to have the exact same beat. Both turntables could be played and manipulated at the same time with a higher level of assurance that the rhythmic coherence would be maintained. Beatmatching is the fundamental technique.
The pitch of a sound changes when it is slowed or sped up. As a result, manufacturers combined the turntable with an audio mixer capable of pitch correction and/or the creation of new complementary tones. Additional input channels for other musical devices, such as programmable digital drum machines, are usually available when beatmixing on such instruments. Turntablism has been influenced by computers and digital audio processing technology. In this musical art, pressure sensitive touchpads, “vinyl emulation” software, and other applications are agents of evolution.