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It was 1998 in a club called the Unit in Sheffield, UK, when I first witnessed live scratching. Like many I was transfixed. I didn’t have a clue who the DJ was, but I remember how utterly amazing the noise sounded and how the fingers would move so fast they appeared to dance around the fader often in a ‘pinching’ motion. It was bemusing, fantastic, and mysterious all rolled into one.

Before the time of YouTube it took many years to understand why the hands and fingers moved the way they did. Partly by trial and error and partly by scanning a VHS tape of the 1998 DMC world championships and a Vestax Prime Cuts tutorial, I worked out that the key to it all was the ‘orbit’ scratch.

What is the Orbit Scratch?

The orbit was invented by DJ Disk, a member of the influential DJ crew Invisibl Skratch Picklz which also included DJ QBert and Mixmaster Mike, with the technique since becoming one of the bedrocks of the scratch DJ’s arsenal.

To take a deeper look on how to properly perform and learn the Orbit scratch technique, follow this link and read away.