Pioneer DJ have announced ambitious plans to unveil a state of the art “hands free” mixer in early 2016.
The announcement was made at Pioneer DJ’s annual general meeting in Tokyo earlier this week, the first since Pioneer DJ was taken over by private equity firm KKR in September last year.
“This is the natural evolution of Pioneer DJ,” claimed KKR spokesperson Barry Greaves. “We didn’t buy this company to continue making industry standard equipment that we can be proud of, we bought it to milk the EDM explosion like the cash cow that it is.”
“And the best way to do that is to make all of our equipment as gimicky, cheap and easy to use as possible,” explained Mr. Greaves, “so the hands free mixer, or the EDMDJM 5000 as it’s likely to be called, is going to be our flagship piece of kit to bring us into the next chapter of the Pioneer DJ story.”
“It’s a work in progress and we’re going to be playing this one very close to our chests so there isn’t too much we can give away at the moment,” revealed the KKR representative who lists doing things that normal people can’t afford as his favourite pastime. “But it will be easy enough for a child or even David Guetta to use.”
An unnamed source from within Pioneer’s Product Development Department has confirmed that the mixer will be activated by a small number of voice commands, which will be picked up on a small bluetooth mic, similar to those found on mobile phone hands free kits.
“There’ll be four main voice activated commands on the mixer. Obviously the most important one will be ‘play’, it’s also the only one most EDM DJs will actually use,” revealed the anonymous Pioneer employee. “But for the more adventurous DJs there’ll also be ‘sync’, ‘fade left’ and ‘fade right’. It should be a fool proof system but we won’t know for sure until we’ve tested it on Steve Aoki.”
“It’s early days in development and we’re still considering adding a couple of additional, more advanced commands like ‘flange’ and ‘spin back’ but we’re not sure if our targeted audience will have the brain capacity to remember more commands than they can count on one hand.”
News of the hands free mixer has been very well received by the EDM elite, who see it as the perfect way to “free up time to wave your hands in the air, take selfies and make heart hands”.
So far a number of the world’s top DJs including Diplo, Afrojack and Avicii, who is said to be delighted to finally be able to “wank during sets”, have publicly shown their support.
