The Spank! Records Blog

Traktor Scratch is on the way

Just spoke with our Native Instruments distributor, and Traktor Scratch will be here in the next 7-10 days. RRP for the full version will be $1090, whilst owners of Stanton FinalScratch, Rane Serato Scratch Live, and Traktor 2 & 3 are eligible for a special crossgrade price of $799.

The crossgrade offer is only available from May 1st to May 31st. There are some conditions for this, so contact us if you'd like more details.

Buy Three Get One Free Sale!

We’ve let our hair down just a little and come up with our annual Buy Three Get One Free sale for this week only.

What this means is that if you buy three records (full price, no member discounts and excluding this week’s new releases) you get one record free. It’s as simple as that.

The sale ends Sunday, April 22.

For online orders, we will calculate the cost of all the records instore so just do an order as per normal.

This is a great opportunity to pick up some quality wax at a bargain price.

Happy shopping.

Spank Turns 5!

We have some big news to tell you about.

You may or may not know that Spank Records has turned 5 years old and to mark this fantastic occasion we will be inviting everyone along to a special evening of celebrations up on the Terrace at Home nightclub on Saturday, May 19.

The good people at Famous have let us use the Terrace for one night only with our fave Sydney DJs and an opportunity to thank everyone who has supported us over the past five years.

This will be a great night and one not to be missed. More details to follow so stay tuned.

FBI Discounts

We now welcome FBI members to the Spank family.

FBI is Sydney's leading underground dance music radio station on 94.5FM.

Now, what this all means is that FBI members will now get 10% off all full-price vinyl and most DJ accessories like styli, UDG bags and headphones.

All you need to do is show us your membership card when you pop instore or click on the 'FBI member' drop-down menu online when you get to the payment section of your account.

We'll then validate your card and then you're in the system as a member.

My impressions on Conectiv/Torq so far

So I've had Torq running for just over a week now, and I have to say that I'm just loving it. I initially had some trouble with tracks skipping, but realising that I hadn't replaced my styli for quite some time I decided to buy myself some new carts & needles. I went with the recommendation of almost everyone on the Torq forums and bought a pair of Shure M447s, and I've had absolutely no issues since.

For the record, this is my setup:

• MacBook Pro, OS X 10.4.8
• Torq vinyl control records on Technics SL1200 MKII decks
• Shure M447 carts & stylus

Things I love about Torq:

• Built-in effects and the ability to use my own VST plug-ins
• The convenience of digital
• I still get to play on my decks using vinyl
• Loops are really easy to setup on the fly
• MIDI control wherever I want it (i.e. on effects controls)
• Snapshots

Things I think they need to improve:

• The 16 cell sampler is great, except that you can't sync it to the bpm of the tracks you're playing and there isn't any way to nudge/push them whilst they're playing
• I'd love a keyboard shortcut to load tracks into the decks instead of having to drag them in
• There are a couple of safety precautions that need to be built in. For one, it should give you a warning if you try and load a track into a deck that's already playing. Secondly it should also warn you if you quit the program - at the moment you can just quit in the middle of playing and it just shuts down on you. I know that these are things that we shouldn't do anyway, but it wouldn't be hard to incorporate these features

For the moment I'm happy to put up with a few shortcomings as I'm sure that these are things that will be addressed in free future updates. M-Audio has enormous resources behind them and this product will only get better over the coming months. For my money this is such a great value product at an RRP of only $699 (even cheaper if you buy it from us!), saving a few hundred bucks compared to Serato. Of course, Serato has a great reputation for it's stability and has a lot of years behind it which is something that Torq will have to earn. For a first generation product though it really is very impressive.

You can buy Conectiv/Torq from us here.