Turntable Needles & Arm Adjustment

Video Transcript

What's up everybody? My name is DJ Colione on behalf of Expert Village. In this clip I am going to show you how to set up your needles all perfect for vinyl Djing which you are going to be doing. The first thing you want to do is get a nice solid case just like this Sher case. It protects your needles because your needles are very delicate so you don't want to be just tossing those around. When we first started, we used to put them in little cans with tissue paper. Not really the best idea. So you want to get a solid case to carry your needles in. Next thing you want to take them out the number one tip that you want to do is lick your thumb, rub the back of the connectors and then you want to screw it in. What that does is that is cleans the back of these connectors and it makes sure you get a clean signal through both channels. Sometimes if you don't clean it, you are only going to get one side. You are only going to get your right side or your left side. So you want to make sure you clean those needles when you screw it in. From there what you need to do is you need to balance your tone arms so all the needles are going to have different weights so what you need to do is you need to take your tone arm off and hold it in your hand. If it is too light what is going to happen is it is going to float up so you are going to see here the needle floats up. Just if I let go, it floats up so that means obviously there is too much weight on the back. It's like a little teeter totter. Ideally it depends on the needle but what you need is 3 ½ grams per weight on the thing. So what you do is you line this little rolly up until the little 0 aligns on the weight. Once you get it to about 0 where it balances perfect, you turn the little knob so that it says 0 and you turn it until it has 3 ½ grams from there you have the perfect weight just the right amount on the needle. From that what you can do is you can start playing. So it is very important to have the right amount of weight in the needle just so if you are Djing and you are scratching hard, it doesn't skip and you are not wearing down on your record too much. If you put too much weight on it, you are going to wear it on your records completely. It's just going to wear the grooves right out and if it is too light, it is going to skip when you are trying to juggle or when you are just beat matching and somebody is dancing around you on the dance floor. So 3 ½ grams, you are pretty good.

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