It’s time that I connected with all of my regular supporters here as I’ve taken a huge break from traktorips.com over the last couple of years, which occured due to a number of different reasons.

Firstly, it’s no walk in the park keeping a website running with regular content, new videos and maintaining contact with numerous comments and questions. Not to mention the amount of trouble shooting with technical issues and glitches involved with managing the back end of a website.

Traktortips was never born with an intention of making money, but instead, to help people discover traktor and to inspire them to become better DJ’s. As the popularity of my site grew, I drew the attention from the other big DJ sites, such as digital DJ tips and DJ tech tools and was asked to provide content for them, which I did (links provided).

I was also encouraged to provide a product to sell and was in some way mentored at a distance, by Phil at Digital DJ Tips, for which I am very grateful.

As things expanded and I developed the Traktor Basics Course, later followed by the Remix Deck Course, I felt pressured to continue to create more content, in order to be more successful, yet the multiple different tasks demanded of me for this, were difficult for me to manage.

The amount of work was not in perspective with the pocket change that Traktor Tips was bringing in and I could not afford to continue with the site.

I had to scale back my operations back in 2015 as I was unable to find a way to balance my time between traktortips and my “real world” job.

I was beginning to feel the pressures of the “marketing” industry, with third party products wanting to advertise on the site and manufacturers wanting me to review their DJ products.

I realised that I did not start traktortips in order to promote DJ gear and the path of marketing products to people was not aligning with my intentions and my beliefs.

I reached out to Native Instruments to see if they would donate any gear to traktortips so that I may stay upto date with all the new product releases and hopefuly create new courses, but they were not interested.

I felt ignored and cast aside. Rightly or wrongly, I felt that they owed my something for fielding a lot of traktor support questions that otherwise would’ve landed on them. I felt that I’d promoted Traktor and encouraged it’s use to a point that I deserved some recognition.

But that was not the case. Without their support I couldn’t afford to update any gear and therefore my motivation fell a little flat.

Maybe if they’d have donated some equipment I would’ve been able to drive more interest in their latest invention of Stem decks and my use of them in a public forum such as traktor tips would have helped them swing the balance. But, it wasn’t meant to be.

Without taking into account the amount of hours I put into Traktortips, it’s possible I have broken even, however, countless hours were devoted to the site, which can not be quantified with money, and were simply a labor of love.

I realised that the current model was unsustainable and that my soul was being pulled in a different direction.

Dialing Back

As I began to dial back and “close down” traktortips, a subscriber recommended I submit the remix deck course to Udemy in order to keep it available.

I decided to put in the work, not with the intention to make money, but to keep the information available to others.

So after moving my self-hosted course to a third party site, I could relocate my website to a free wordpress site. During the move a few links were broken and images lost. But most of the information remained, so I was happy that there was at least something available to help others. It was nice that all the hard work didn’t go completely to waste.

So now with my finances freed up and pretty much zero running expenses, I was able to concentrate on my real world job and also to change my life.

Downsizing

As I had now downsized my online presence, I began downsizing my life too.

Long story short, we moved out of our home and into a motorhome whilst I built our very own Tiny House.

Fast forward two years and the house is complete. I have recently felt pulled back towards traktortips, but I will not be diving in quite as hard as I have before and will be coming at it from a different place.

Prior to the house build, and as loyal readers may know, I sold pretty much all my DJ gear: CDJ’s, technics, pioneer mixer, the kontrol S4 and the Audio 8. I kept the Kontrol X1, but without the Audio 8 was unable to make much use of it really. Just prior to the downsizing I had purchased an Allen & Heath DB2, which I am having a hard time letting go of, so I placed it in storage at a friends house.

The next year was then devoted to building a tiny house. No time, no space and no equipment to DJ with, meant I was fully able to immerse myself in the build.

I used youtube and the library to gather the knowledge needed to build a house and set to it.

As the house build started to take shape, I decided to buy an Allen & Heath Xone K2, as I was beginning to miss my forrays into the world of DJ’ing.

Returning to Traktor Tips with a Minimal Set Up

So as things start to settle down a little in my life, I may return to traktortips! But this time, I am armed with only a laptop and a Xone K2 as my goto set up.

The DB2 still sits in it’s flight case and appears very occassionally for special occassions along with the Kontrol X1, so that I may perform 4 decks, but with limited space in the tiny house, it very rarely occurs.

I’ve been toying with the idea of reducing my arsenal even further by freeing myself from the DB2 and X1, but as I sit here and write these words, I am undecided.

I have also been pulled back to my childhood passion of mountain biking and after getting back on a bike over the summer, I am ready to hit the amazing trails around here and start offering guided mountain bike trips too.

Thanks for sticking with me over the years, I hope you are all having a great deal of fun with Traktor and that I’ve been able to help you somewhat in your journey.