To be “virtual turntablist” means your goals are generally the same as a turntablist who uses several turntables, a mixer and a sampler… excepting that you don’t use a turntable, mixer or sampler. Those functions are all subsumed by a computer.

It seems obvious to me that the turntable will go down in history as the last non-digital instrument to become popular and take hold. All new music “instrumentation” from now on will come from computers being driven by control surfaces exactly as smart, capable, analog and mechanical as a computer’s QWERTY keyboard — that is: insignificantly.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb. This situation has been around for a while and has been threatening to happen for at least five years, especially in the world of movie soundtracks and club DJ’s — both of which rely heavily on sampling. (Check out these guys who have documented there own migration from all synths through eleven configurations up to today wherein all the synths and almost all MIDI interfaces have been replaced with two iMacs and a bunch of USB cables.)

So what’s new?

The price/power point of the PC has hit a point where earlier this year, for the first time ever, I purchased an off-the-shelf commercial, consumer PC (an HP Pavilion from CompUSA in fact) and without mods, started recording, editing, mixing as soon as I had it plugged in.

How much life can there possibly be in the synthesizer/sampler business when I can buy 3 laptops, 3 controllers, 3 copies of FL Studio (Fruity Loops) for the same price as one AKAI box with a fraction of the features of one of those laptops?