Review: Pioneer DDJ-S1

Review: Pioneer DDJ-S1

Written by Chris Cartledge on April 20th, 2011 56 Comments

Pioneer’s 2011 products have definitely had an ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ bent, and feature much improved integration with DJ software. The announcement of the DDJ series surprised many with two different products, one for Native Instruments’ Traktor and the other for Serato’s Itch – with the Itch focused DDJ-S1 on the bench, we dig in and find out whether Pioneer can transfer their hardware calibre to the controller realm.
Product Reviewed: Pioneer DDJ-S1
Price: $1599/£1099
Available: Now
Included software: Serato ITCH
External dimensions: 26.8 in (W) x 3.7 in (H) x 12.5 in (D)
Weight: 11lbs

THE GOOD

• Itch integration provides hassle free plug-and-go play
• ‘Slip mode’ has some great uses
• Nifty laptop incorporating design

THE BAD

• At £1099, it’s expensive
• No opportunity to add extra controllers to the setup

THE BOTTOM LINE

If you love Serato software design (especially considering this autumn’s Itch 2 release which will bring it much more into line with Scratch Live) and Pioneer product design, the DDJ-S1 is going to be right up your street. Pioneer have put a lot of thought into how to take ‘classic’ two channel DJing and completely focus the user experience on the controller.

HANDS ON CONTROL

Big, but light, the S1 has the same sort of plasticy feel that the midrange CDJs have – initially a little disheartening but ultimately very sturdy despite the ever so slightly ‘hollow’ feel. The jog wheels feel like CDJ400s and have a nice light that rotates around the edge of the CD sized platter to aid positioning, the lightweight pitch fader will be familiar to a CDJ user and feels the same resolution, and the faders are similar to most DJM mixers – a fairly light crossfader and slightly stiff upfaders.
The size of the S1 has allowed sound ergonomic placement of the effects, cue and loop controls, and they feel good to the touch. Pioneer haven’t shifted much from their design blueprint, and whilst things like the play and cue buttons are a bit smaller than the one on their biggest CDJs they feel much the same; cue buttons and effects knobs offer lightweight clicks and rotation, respectively. The clever raising of the S1 on its underside provides a perfect place to slip your laptop’s keyboard, just leaving the screen on show and strengthening the illusion that the controller is the power house.

Two things that controller users frequently revert to keyboard and mouse for, library searching and finding a specific position in a song, have been thought about by Pioneer too; the S1 features a Needle Drop ribbon strip, which instantly seeks the position on the track on deck and doubles up as an alphabetical search shortcut for your track library in shift mode.

BORN SLIPPY

Slip mode, a popular feature on Pioneer’s CDJ900, has made its way into the S1 version of Itch. Slip mode is essentially the logical extension of the idea behind roll; any manipulation to the deck’s playhead while slipmode is engaged creates a Donny Darko-esque tangent whereby time and space are meshed and melded freely up until the inevitable moment when the sound must return to the ‘real world’. Spin back the platter and you’ll get a rewind, but rather than picking up x bars previous, at the end of the spinback the track will return to where it would have been if you’d never touched the platter. It’s a really elegant implementation of effects modifiers; loops become loop roll effects, deck reverse turns into censor mode, and cues can be used as pseudo sample banks.

HARD AND SOFT

Of course, the S1 relies on Itch to create the noises that will emanate from your speakers, but it does have an integrated audio interface and some hard wired function – the mic/aux has dedicated hardware EQ and an emergency straight to master passthrough. Quality is good – nothing particularly jaw dropping, perhaps, but it’s loud and crisp and it has decent headroom on its aux inputs. Aux and mic inputs can also be routed through Itch’s effects. Itch is largely the same across its incarnations in different packs, so it’s somewhat academic to go too far into Itch – this is, afterall, a DDJ-S1 review. It’s worth mentioning that the S1 Itch is pretty fully featured, though, with beat gridding, two effects banks, and a full complement of low/high pass filters, beat crusher, flanger, phaser, delay, echo, reverb, tremolo, repeater, brake and reverse, and the S1 handles the 1:1 mapping of Itch’s features – like instant doubles – with panache.

One of Itch’s biggest shortcomings, which transfers to the S1, is its closed off nature. Despite the total 1:1 mapping of controls, certain things like cue point juggles are less intuitive on the S1’s cue buttons than a pad or button controller, and ideas like our super combo mapping principle are a no go. It’s for this reason that the DDJ-S1 is best thought of as an excellent solution for DJs who want to emulate the functionality of a two CDJ and mixer setup with a light, all in one controller solution, rather than an experimental controllerist’s wet dream.
Check out our announcement of these new Pioneer controllers to take a look at the Traktor controlling DDJ-T1 and how it compares!

The Search for the ultimate Turntable Surrogate (By Dj Solomon)

For Serato Scratch Live DJ’s looking for a turntable alternative, we asked DJ Solomon, a Serato roster DJ and Golden State Warriors resident, to try out the DDJ-S1 for a month. Here are his thoughts.

When I first heard about Serato’s program to launch their Itch platform a few years back, I was overjoyed. Finally, a way to play gigs using Serato software without lugging turntables around. While most of my gigs are in Nightclubs where 2 technics 1200s are the norm, private events where I’m responsible for providing the equipment are a regular occurance.  Anyone who has ever lugged a pair of 1200s in flight cases knows that the frustrating process is just not worth the hassle for your average wedding.
Enter the Vestax VCI-300, the 1st real attempt at a portable mobile solution for Serato users.  In my 1 year plus tenure with the VCI-300 as my preferred controller,  it has completed the task at hand but left me yearning for the next big thing, which seems to have just arrived in a shiny new Pioneer DJ box.
Here are the good parts:

• Just the Right Size

While I do love the compact package of the VCI-300, it almost appears toy-like. When booking high end corporate events, I often feel like my professional DJ equipment should be large enough to look “professional”. The other Itch controller offerings I’ve demoed to this point are either too large, too heavy or generally too awkward a form/package to easily move around (NS7). The DDJ-S1 seems just right. Easy enough to move, yet from afar, its appears to mean business.

• Proper Headphone Cue

The headphone cue on the VCI 300 was as basic as possible, while the DDJ-S1 has an almost identical system to its every popular DJM-800 cousin which is arguably the worldwide standard for club mixers.  This similarity makes headphone cuing a snap when coming from the DJM-800.

• Proper Power Supply

The Pioneer is basically a powered mixer that can be run completely independently with both 2 external mic inputs and a 2nd “Aux in” which can be operated without a computer running. Very convenient if you have a scenario where you need music playing but dont want to leave your computer running.

• Nice Control Layout

The DDJ-S1 doesn’t have EVERYTHING you may want in a turntable replacement but it’s a whole lot closer.  The jog wheels are quite a bit more expressive than the VCI-300 and boast a chase light that is the equivalent to the sticker on a record, which allows the user to juggle songs without looking at the screen.  It also sports five cue buttons as well as a complex array of looping controls. Also worth noting is the ribbon control that helps the user quickly scan through songs.
I also found some significant inadequacies:

• The looping is complex and based on the CDJ

I understand that one of the goals of this controller is to lure CDJ users over to the Itch platform, however if you are used to the “scratch live” way of doing things then this might not be a welcome change.

• Vinyl “start/stop” adjust is a single control knob

The standard setting for this control should be to be set to an instant start and a slightly delayed stop (to simulate the stop button on a technics 1200 turntable). This is achievable on the VCI-300 as it is an internal control, as well as on the CDJ as there are two separate knobs for “start” and “stop”, but in this case, I see no way to have an instant “start” and a delayed “stop”, arguably a HUGE design flaw (which I hope can be remedied in a software fix).

• Sync button issues

The Sync button is in a very vulnerable position that begs to be miss-triggered. When resting my palm on the device to ride the tempo slider, I found myself dangerously close to pushing that button which could cause the songs to jump out of sync. When “instant doubles” is used, both “sync” buttons are activated, which is fine for playing doubles, however when the next song is loaded, “sync” remains active. This makes for one extra step to deactivate the “sync” every time a song is doubled.
I can safely say that this is not quite the “perfect” turntable surrogate, but it’s getting much closer. Since Pioneer seemed to pretty much nail the footprint and basic hardware controls, it seems that with some tweaking to the software most of the shortcomings can be resolved. Grade: A-. Nice work Pioneer!