Happy Birthday to the legend DJ Grand Master Flash..9p est he’ll be in the mix on #FreshRadio
2 January 2013 Fresh Radio
Joseph Saddler’s family migrated to the United States from Barbados, in the Caribbean, and he grew up in The Bronx, New York. He attended Samuel Gompers High School, a public vocational school, where he learned how to repair electronic equipment.[2] Saddler’s parents played an important role in his interest in music. His parents came from Barbados and his father was a big fan of Caribbean and black American records. As a child, Saddler was fascinated by his father’s record collection. In an interview, he reflected: “My father was a very heavy record collector. He still thinks that he has the stronger collection. I used to open his closets and just watch all the records he had. I used to get into trouble for touching his records, but I’d go right back and bother them.”[3] Saddler’s early interest in DJing came from this fascination with his father’s record collection as well as his mother’s desire for him to educate himself in electronics.[4] After high school, he became involved in the earliest New York DJ scene, attending parties set up by early luminaries.
He is also a nephew to the late Former Feather Weight Champion of the World Sandy Saddler.
[edit]Innovations
Grandmaster Flash carefully studied the DJing styles and techniques of earlier DJs, particularly Pete Jones, Kool Herc, and Grandmaster Flowers.[5] As a teenager, he began experimenting with DJ gear in his bedroom, eventually developing and mastering three innovations that are still considered standard DJing techniques today.
- Backspin Technique (“Quick-Mix Theory”) a.k.a. Early New York party DJs came to understand that short drum breaks were popular with party audiences. Aiming to isolate these breaks and extend them for longer durations, Grandmaster Flash learned that by using duplicate copies of the same record, he could play the break on one record while searching for the same fragment of music on the other (using his headphones). When the break finished on one turntable, he used his mixer to switch quickly to the other turntable, where the same beat was queued up and ready to play. Using the backspin technique, the same short phrase of music could be looped indefinitely.
- Punch Phrasing (“Clock Theory”): This technique involved isolating very short segments of music, typically horn hits, and rhythmically punching them over the sustained beat using the mixer.
- Scratching: Although the invention of record scratching is generally credited to Grand Wizzard Theodore, Grandmaster Flash perfected the technique and brought it to new audiences. Scratching, along with punch phrasing, exhibited a unique performative aspect of party DJing: instead of passively spinning records, he manipulated them to create new music.[6]
DJ Bee DJ, Flash, GMF, Grandmaster Flash, Happy Birthday, Hip-Hop, South Bronx