50 Gadgets That Changed Just Blaze's Life

Check out what gadgetry and technology most impacted the platinum hit-maker's life.

Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

Intro

Just Blaze has an excellent memory. Moments after we took a seat in his new digs at Stadium Red Studios in Harlem, the producer behind a plethora of platinum tracks you can recite on command gets right to business and begins running off the gadgets he feels had a great impact, good or bad, on his life. Some date all the way back to when he was just a New Jersey young'in with a penchant for tinkering and reverse engineering. It's not the recollection of the list that surprises us—he had a bit of time to prepare, to be fair—it's the detailed fabric of memories he wraps around each entry. Memories like building the Pro Tools rig that led to him meeting Hov. Or deciding which keyboard to buy after seeing Rza in Rap Pages.

Technology has been ever-present in the lives of those who grew up in the era of the personal computer. It's affected the way we interact, learn, communicate, work, and play. Similar to the way you can hear a song and immediately remember the period of your life when it was blaring on the radio, if you're like us, you can take a look at an old gadget or piece of software, and recall how your life was when it was still stocked on store shelves, or being checked as regularly a Twitter an Facebook. Just Blaze is like us. Show him a phone, laptop, or piece of studio equipment he can tell you where he was, who had it, and what made the damn thing so dope. That's why we tapped him to run through the 50 Gadgets That Changed His Life.

See N Say

Fisher Price See 'N Say

Year released: 1965

Just Blaze: "Going back to the earliest days, the first gadget would have to be the See 'N Say. Basically, it was a circular toy, you pulled the string, and whatever animal it landed on it would play the sound of that animal. As a kid it's one of your first forays into learning association. To take it a step deeper, when I was around five years old—between five and six—is when I first learned the concept of scratching on a record. The original version of the See 'N Say was an analog toy meaning the sound was produced by some sort of tape that was inside of the machine. Later versions were digital, so this trick didn't work, but what I discovered was, if you took the drawstring and played it backwards, the sound would play backwards. That was my first understanding of what it was to hear a sound backwards. So then I would hear my cousin play these tapes with these guys playing a record backwards, and so, to be honest, where I first understood the concept of scratching was from these toys.

Talk 'N Play

Child Guidance Talk 'N Play

Year released: 1980

Just Blaze: "When I was a kid we had books that had tapes or records that went along with it that would say, "When you hear this tone, turn the page." This took that concept a step further. It had four buttons—red, yellow, green, and blue—and depending on which button you pressed down, different sounds would play. So, you put the tape in—my favorite one was about some animals that started a rock band and the story was about them making their first song—so depending on which buttons you pressed down, different sounds would play. One button was a drum, one button was a guitar, one button was a bass, one button was a piano. If you pushed all four of them down, you would hear the whole band playing, if you took one out you would hear one less instrument, if you only had one pressed down you would hear a solo of that instrument. 30 years later, you can see how that translate to what I do now. Through my tinkering I realized that it was basically a four-track tape machine. Eventually, I learned how to record onto these tapes, so I was able to make my first four-track records at seven years old. Not even realizing what I was doing was making music, I found it interesting that you could play different tracks with the same tape."

Star Studio

Star Studio Dual-Cassette Radio

Year released: 1985

Just Blaze: "This may be a little hard to find now. The Star Studio was a dual-cassette deck that had a mic input. They sold tapes of instrumentals and you could sing your own vocals and record it onto another tape. Looking back, I realized all it really was what they called "track 1" and "track 2" was basically just left and right. They took a balance button and repurporsed it as "track 1" and "track 2". So when you would buy these instrumentals you would record them on the left side of cassette 1, you play that back, sing into it, and it would take both your vocals and your instrumentals, sub them to Mono and put them on the second tape deck. But you could go back and punch-in and stuff like that. For a kid in the '80s that was an introduction into recording and I eventually learned how things worked, because I discovered that it was just a left and a right subbed into Mono and now we're making songs."

Pixelvision

Fisher-Price PXL2000

Year released: 1987

Just Blaze: "This was basically the same as the Star Studio except for video, so you could record a song into it and shoot a video into it afterwards in black and white. I never had one. My friend around the corner had one. We used to record songs and shoot video to them on this camera. "

GE VCR

General Electric VCR

Year released: Circa 1985

Just Blaze: "The VCR was huge! Besides being able to to watch movies at home, it opened up an entirely new revenue stream for movie studios. I remember when they first came out, we were fortunate enough to have a VCR, buying a tape was like $90. And some were more than that. I can't remember the exact model we had, but it allowed us to record a seperate track of audio onto your video tape.

"I had a school project where we had to score a scene of a movie. Everyone was bringing in VCR tapes and playing a tape recorder with the volume of the movie down. We took a second VCR and recorded the fight scene from the end of the Ninja Turtles Movie and laid music right over that. I walked into school stuntin'! I didn't need a seperate tape recorder, I walked in with my videotape."

Toshiba cassette player

Toshiba Stereo Cassette Player KT-4548

Year released: 1986

Just Blaze: "There was a Toshiba Walkman—well, I guess you can't call it a Walkman 'cause it wasn't Sony, but fuck it, it was a Walkman—and it had a digital LED display and it had fast-forward and rewind buttons. A lot of portable tape players at the time only had fast-forward. If you wanted to rewind it, you had to flip the tape over, press fast-forward and flip the tape back. And it had bass, mids, and treble. My Uncle Johnny gave that to me. Both me and my brother got one. That was heavy for us because no we can listen to our music anywhere. When I got that Walkman, I went and bought Criminal Minded, Salt-n-Pepa Hot, Cool & Vicious, and maybe Dana Dane With Fame."

Tandy 1000

Year released: 1986

Just Blaze: "I started learning to program computers in fourth grade on a Tandy 1000. My first program was really basic. The computer would say "Hello", you would say "Hi", it would ask you your name, you would say "Justin", it would say, "Hi, Justin, how are you?" Very basic, but for a fourth-grader in the '80s it was pretty good. It got to the point where I was designing my own rudimentary video games by the time I was in sixth grade."

Casio SK5

Year released: 1987

Just Blaze: "The Casio SK1 was the first keyboard to bring sampling to kids—well, not really to kids 'cause it wasn't marketed as a kids toy, but just to mainstream awareness. Before that there wasn't a keyboard where you could record sound into and play it back. The SK5 took it a step further. It had four drum pads that you could assign sounds to. No sequencing or anything like that, but you could put a sample on a pad and play it over and over. My best friend at the time, Greg, his sister got one and we jacked her for that. That was where I first sampled something. That was around the same time I realized that my mother's James Brown and Isaac Hayes records were the same one that rappers were rapping over. So I was like, Oh, Public Enemy used this? I'll put it in the keyboard and keep looping it over and over.

What really bugged me out was De La Soul had an EPK back then that Ralph McDaniels used to play on Video Music Box and at one point Prince Paul is breaking down the concept of break beats and the records he would get them and how you can get beats from anywhere. It could be church records, it could be rock records, it could be kids records, and he breaks out the Mickey Mouse Club theme from a Disney record and it has this crazy drum break. First you're bugging like, Yo! Mickey Mouse Club got beats! But then, you look at the top of his set-up, he has the same Casio SK5 sampler."

Gemini Flash Former

Year released: 1988

Just Blaze: "One of the next gadgets would be the Gemini Flash Former. Grandmaster Flash endorsed it—he may have helped design it. DJs used to do the transformer scratch using the line switches on the mixers. Say you have a two-channel mixer, for each channel you would have a phono-level signal for the turntables and a line-level signal for the cassette, and these line switches would be the way you would toggle between getting the phono level input on this channel or the line input into this channel. One of the DJs—I thin it may have been Jazzy Jeff, or Jeff may have perfected it—came up with a trick called the transformer scratch where they would take the line switch and flip it really fast while they scratched on the record. It was called the transformer scratch because it sounded like the sound the Transformers made when they transformed.

"So, Gemini came out with this box that was an easier way to transform. Basically, instead of having the flip line switches, you could just tap buttons. It had an "in" switch and an "out" switch: when it was out, the buttons weren't active, the record would just play. When it was in, the buttons would cut off and it would only engage when you tapped the buttons. You tap the button you hear the record, you let it go you don't hear it. I had the RadioShack mixer when I was in sixth grade, I didn't have regular line switches they were more like light switches, so I couldn't do the transformer scratches. When I got that it enabled to learn and perform transformers scratches, and it was endorsed by Grandmaster Flash."

Midi Workshop

Year: Circa 1989

Just Blaze: "Going back to the Tandy 1000, my Aunt got a Tandy 1000 EX and she gave it to us and we used to use it for nonsense. But I remember watching a Soul II Soul video for "Back To Life" that a dude had a computer in one performance scene. So I went to Software Ect in Willowbrook Mall and said, "I need a program for a computer that makes music." And they show me a program called Midi Workshop. It was a way for to sequence music on your computer. I used it for a while, didn't get anything out of it. But it came with this cable that had an adapter that plugged into your joystick, and on the other end had a "Midi In" and "Midi Out". I didn't know what Midi was. After being so disappointed in the JS 30, I look at the back and see "Midi In" and "Mini Out". Sure enough I plug the cable in and fire up the RadioShack program and hit a button on the mouse and it triggered a sound on the Roland. I was like, Wait a minute. I could sample sounds into this and sequence it using the computer. That's when the Roland JS 30 became important for me because it was the first sampler I could use to make a beat on."

Uniden Cordless Phone

Year released: Circa 1990

Just Blaze: "At 12-years-old my Mom gave me my own line. My Pops had his own home line for his home office, my parents seperated, the line was always active, it just wasn't being used. So she didn't have to pay anything, she just had to take a phone a phone, plug it in and say, Hey! Merry Christmas! You got your phone! It was supposed to be for all of us, but me being the oldest, it became mine. I saved up some money and bought a Uniden cordless phone. I don't remember the model number, but it was Uniden. It was white on the outside and the inside where the numbers were was a brown pad.

"Now you can sneak around the house. Moms said you had to be in bed by a certain time, you could sneak under the covers and still talk on the phone—whoever you're talking to at 11 or 12 years old. "

3-Way-Calling

Three-Way Calling

Year released: 1971

Just Blaze: "Getting a cordless phone was also big because we just got three-way calling. Three-way calling was big. The more people you had on the phone the worse the sound quality got 'cause it was analog so the signal would degrade with each connection, so it'd get to the point where you could barely hear anything."

Sega Genesis

Year released: 1989

Just Blaze: "People have this perception that I'm this video game fanatic and it's really not the case. But, anyone who was 12-years-old in '88 wanted that Sega Genesis and I was the only one who had it. Moms freaked it, though: That's all I wanted for Christmas. Christmas day is happening and I'm getting socks, underwear, random nonsesne. The whole Christmas morning goes by and I'm just like, Aight, I got mad socks and underwear. My Mom tells me to go get the phonebook from underneath a table in the den. I go to get the phonebook and there's this box. I pull the box out and I see the Altered Beast on the cover. Then, my Aunt, who was with us for that Christmas, came out the back with like 30 games. That was my crazy video game phase—12 to 15."

Gemini Mixer

Gemini PS-626

Year released: Circa 1990

Just Blaze: "Shortly after the Sega Genesis, Gemini introduces the first mixer with a built-in sampler. It had six or 10 seconds of sampling time. Now I'm a little older and I'm understanding the concept of loops more, I'm understanding the concept of drums and whatnot. So, now you're like, OK, I can sample something into this, hook it up to a tape recorder, hit that loop for two minutes, record that loop onto a tape, then sample something else and play and trigger that, and over dub it over the first loop that I made. With every over-dub you did the sound quality got worse. But now you could loop records up from mixtapes, 'cause sometimes a record didn't have an instrumental and you would try to do a blend, you could sample two bars of an end of a song that didn't have an instrumental and blend vocals with it."

Casio MT70

Casio MT-70

Year released: 1984

Just Blaze: "Pops was a keyboard player. He knew a dude who used to sell Casio keyboards. We bought the Casio MT-70. It had a function that would help you learn chords. It would play a pre-programmed song and above every key was a light. When it would play back a song, you could pause it at a certain spot and learn what keys were what. The Casio keyboards would all have pre-programmed drum patterns that you could play along to. And it also had a "fill" button. So at any point while the keyboard was playing a drum patter, you could hit the button and it would do drum fills. That was where I really learned what a drum breakdown was, what a transition was, what a drum roll was."

Gemini XLBD10

Year released: Circa 1989

Just Blaze: "The Gemini XLBD10 was the first real turntable I had. You couldn't scratch on it at all, you had to be very, very lighthanded. Eventually I did learn to cut on it, but you could only do the most basic of scratches 'cause it was a belt-driven turntable. But it had pitch control on it and that's where I learned to mix 'cause I was able to change the speed of records."

Gemini 24-second Sample

Gemini DS-1224

Year released:

Just Blaze: "Gemini then came out with a 24-second sampler. How it worked was, you had one bank that could hold 12 seconds and then you had three other banks that could hold four seconds each. Each sample had its own pitch control, so I could sample a record and play it back real fast meaning I could put the sample in at a faster rate and then slow it down.Now I could take what would normally be a 10-second sample and sample it in four seconds by speeding the record up and then slowing the sample down. That's a technique we all used—that technique was what the core of the Blueprint was."

Sony PlayStation

Year released: 1994

Just Blaze: "Up until the PlayStation, video games were largely considered for kids; something to shut to the kids up. The Sony PlayStation, and the title that came with it, was probably the first time that I saw titles that were more mature. Sony had great design for a system, invested well, and they marketed very well. I think part of the success of their marketing was that it wasn't just for kids. Nintendo had Mario, while Sony had titles like Resident Evil where people were getting shot up. There was blood, there was reality, it was a more mature level of gaming."

Roland JS30

Roland JS 30

Year released: 1995

Just Blaze: "It was a musical instrument and it was a scam. What it was marketed as was what we eventually got with machines like the MPC 3000 and MPC 4000. It was a table-top unit that had a one set of drum pads and stereo sampling time. The sampler sounded OK, it had no sequencer on it, meaning if you wanted four minutes of a drum pattern, you had to sit there and tap it out for four minutes. If you made a mistake you had to start over. I begged and begged my mother for it not thinking she was going to get it. It was $1,500. And she got it. What should have been a huge deal turned out to be a huge disappointment. The next year the thing was worth $200 at Sam Ash.

Motorola StarTAC

Year released: 1996

Just Blaze: "Before the StarTAC, cell phones were mostly Zack Morris phones. Then all of a sudden you had the StarTAC which could fit in your pocket. But people figured out how to clone the unique identifiers for the phones. By the time that trick made it to the hood they were calling them Burnouts. I had a dude who had a connect for those. In high school in the mid-to-early nineties no one had a cell phone and I was coming through with the StarTAC. They would only last for two months becasue the telephone companies would catch up, cut the line off and you had to go buy another phone for $200. But that was the first time I was the man for having a phone that no one else could get. That introduced a whole new thing into my life which was getting into gadgets outside of music."

ASR-10

Ensoniq ASR-10

Year released: 1982

Just Blaze: "Everyone who knows anything about production knows what the ASR-10 is. I got it becuase I was reading a Rap Pages article about Rza, he said that's what he uses, so that's what I had to get. I basically conned my Aunt—the same one that got me the Sega Genesis games. My great-grandmother had just passed. I remember her telling me that if I liked music that's what I should be doing, don't let nobody tell you different. I told my Aunt that and said I needed the ASR-10. She said, "How much is it?" I said, "Uh, about $2,000". She said, "What?!" We went to Sam Ash and they had a bunch of other cheaper ones, they had a Roland S-770, and I said, Auntie, Rza doesn't use these, Rza uses that. God knows how many years she spent paying it off on her credit card, but she got it. At that point, for me, things begane to get more serious in terms of making music. "

Technics 1200

Year released: Originally released in 1972

Just Blaze: We don't really have to get into this. This is a given.

MPC3000

Akai MPC3000

Year released: 1994

Just Blaze: "The MPC3000 changed the way people produced records. It wasn't the first MPC, but I think the 3000 is what made the MPC line legendary. I think it was the concept of phrase-based sample being triggered by drum pads. The MPC3000 wasn't the first to do it, but it was the first to do it well with 16-bit sound. That was a big thing, the fact that it was 16-bit sound, the fact that you had a greater amount of sampling time than the MPC60. And the sound of it. Aside from it being 16-bit, the converters in it sounded nice and heavy."

Pagewriter

Motorola PageWriter

Year released: 1996

Just Blaze: "Known as the Motorola TwoWay, the PageWriter, for the first time, allowed you to talk to people without really talking to them. You could just send messages over the airwave with ReFLEX. The first two people who had them in the hip-hop industry were Clue and Duro. I knew what they were, I didn't have any friends that had any so it was kind of pointless for me to have one.

"One of the dopest things about the PageWriter aside from a lot of the obvious was that it also had a built-in music editor. A lot of people, before they knew who I was as a producer knew who I was because I used to make ringtones for the PageWriters. The funny thing about it is, I remember stepping to a couple people I knew at phone comapnies back in the day and being like, "Yo, I'm making these ringtones off of popular songs, this could be a business. I can create them and you guys can sell them." They said, "Why would anyone want their ringer to be a song?" I got that from the AT&T executive. But it was crazy 'cause to make the ringtones was all programming. You had to program notes and durations and lengths and rests all by number. You could also program virbrations and you could program the LED lights to blink in rhythm. One of the bigget ones I ever did was Biggie's "Who Shot Ya". That was one of the things I got to be really well known for in the music industry.

"I used to get mad at DJ Clue 'cause he would take alerts that I made—I would know like, 100 people, and Clue would know 2,000 people—and take my name off the alerts. I would name them: "Who Shot Ya by Just Blaze". He would take off the "By Just Blaze". He ain't want me to get no props. "

RIM 950

Year released: 1996

Just Blaze: "Trying to be different, I went out and bought the RIM 950. Before RIM was callin them BlackBerrys, it had the 950. It was the same concept as a Motorola TwoWay. I swore up and down that it was better just because the salesman told me it was. To be different and to be exclusive, I go out and get this RIM 950. But eventually, I did go out and get a PageWriter."

Sony Mavica

Sony Digital Mavica MVC-FD5

Year released: 1998

Just Blaze: "The Sony Mavica wasn't the first digital camera ever, it was the first that was somewhat affordable for regular consumers to buy. It actually took 3.5-inch floppy disks. It was pretty big. It was all about stuntin', who else had a digital camera?"

TalkAbout

Motorola TalkAbout

Year released:

Just Blaze: "The TalkAbout was the sports version of the TimePort. Everyone was on the StarTac, so me tryign to be different, I went for the TalkAbout."

Panasonic DVD

Panasonic DVD-L50

Year released: 1999

Just Blaze: "The Panasonic portable DVD player, I want to say, cost $900 at the time, and I wasn't really balling like that, but I had to have it. A friend of mine used to let me buy DVDs for $5 each and they weren't bootlegs. I had a crazy DVD collection. When Panasonic came out with it, it was so expensive nobody had it. People didn't even have DVD players in their home yet. I have no idea where that thing is now, but at the time I carried that thing around everywhere."

Pioneer 1000HD

Pioneer Elite PRO-1000HD

Year released: 2000

Just Blaze: "I got my first flat screen TV in 2000, it was the Pioneer Elite. It was the best you can buy. It cost $12,000 at the time. It had the best plasma color out of any TV at the time. The colors were so rich, the blacks were so natural black as opposed to the washed out grey-black you're used to seeing, but also the frame of it was like a picture frame. It was a black lacquer piano-finished frame, so you could easily hang on your wall and people would think it was a picture frame. Pioneer did two runs of that TV and that was it. They never made another TV like it again."

Motorola V70

Year released: 2002

Just Blaze: "I had to have one of these. It was dumb small and I found a spot that had them in Navy, which nobody else had. It only came in black, and my man Beeper Man had 'em in blue. No one believed that it came in blue until they saw mine. I'll never forget, my girl got so mad at one time she took the phone and snapped it."

Technics DH 1200

Technics CD 1200

Year released:

Just Blaze: "The one worst gadget of all time as it relates to DJing is the Technics CD 1200. It was one of the worst things ever made. It disrespectful to its own legacy. Everyone was waiting on Technics to come out with a CD-based system and when they finally did it looked just like a 1200 but it played CDs. That's what everyone wanted... But it sounded terrible, the scratch action was terrible, and it was a huge dissappointment. One of my biggest regrets was buying one."

Motorola Accompli

Motorola Accompli 009

Year released: N/A

Just Blaze: "The Motorola Accompli was supposed to be the follow-up to the TwoWay, except it had a phone built in and a color screen. This is funny: Me and Boy Genius, from Boy Genius Reports, both got scammed by the same person on eBay claiming to have had the Accompli 009. I don't want to put her name out there 'cause I still want to show up to her doorstep one day. She posted pictures saying she had it—they were just press shots. She wanted $900. Back then, PayPal didn't have the same safeguards as they do now. So I sent her $900, she dissappears. I track her down, she eventually gives me a tracking number, but it's a old tracking number for something else. She was real stupid. She used her real name so I was able to look her up. I got her address and her other house number. I keep track of her movements, I have her current number, I know where she lives.

Years later, I became friends with Boy Genius and we realize we both got scammed by the same person. I later found a guy who had an engineering sample of the Accompli. What was dope was you could get your messages while you were on the phone which is common now, but this is when SMS was starting to hit it big. Ultimately, Motorola didn't support the device, it never fulled launched it and went by the wayside."

Korg Triton

Year released: 1999

Just Blaze: "The Korg Triton and Trinity definitely defined the sound of hip-hop, I would say, going from 1998 to 2001. The two major driving forces behind that were the Bad Boy production team and the Ruff Ryders production team. Those guys had entire sounds based on the Triton. DMX's first album was majority Triton sounds. The staple Bad Boy equipment when Puff had his Hitman production was the MPC and the Korg Triton. Two things happened: Everyone went out and bought Korg Tritons and Trinitys, and it got to a point where the sounds were pretty much unusable at a time. I was a fan of the Rolands sound more, I always thought they were more realistic. But as much as I love Roland—they definitely had sounds that defined a generation—Korg's sounds with the Triton and the Trinity were synonymous with that generation of hip-hop.

Apple Powerbook G3

Apple Powerbook G3 "Wallstreet"

Year released: 1999

Just Blaze: "I was the first person in New York to run Pro Tools on a Powerbook. We take running Pro Tools on a laptop today for granted. Back then it was something that cost me around $20,000 to put together. I had a 48-input, 48-output Pro Tools system running off a PowerBook G3. I remember when I was trying to build it, even DigiDesign told me, "It won't work, don't waste your money." I was determined to make it work. Back then no one was doing something like that and no one had a way of getting PCI cards to work with laptops. Pro Tools worked with PCI cards that would go into your desktop computer, laptops didn't have those slots. There were companies that made expansion chassises to give you more slots. Some companies were making adapters using these chassises with laptops but some weren't tested to work with Pro Tools and some were tested and didn't work. But there were a number of a chassises and cards you could use. It was all trial and error. I spent a lot of money I shouldn't have, but I eventually found a working configuration.

"I want to say, if anything, that was my forary into computer-based production as we know it today. One of the first beats I made on it was Jay-Z's "Streets is Talking", which is how I met him. Had I not needlessly spent all that money putting this monster rig together—to be honest, I did it just to say I did it—I wouldn't have met Jay.

Pro Tools

Digidesign Pro Tools

Year released: 1991

Just Blaze: "Pro Tools changed the way we worked forever. The first couple years of my career everyone was recording to two-inch tapes. I tended to be very intricate with my beats and had a lot going on, a lot of instrumentation and a lot of overdubs. Back then, with two-inch tapes you could only record 24 tracks of audio. Really 23 because you had to reserve the 24th track for timecode. If you went over 23 tracks you had to get two two-inch machines and slave them together which then gave you 48 tracks. What if you need more than 48 tracks? Sony used to make a machine called the 3348 which was a 48-track tape machine and you could string those together. All of that was very expensive, most rap budgets didn't have that kind of money.

"I used to engineer as well. I engineered Amil's first album for Roc-a-Fella. Eventually she ran out of budget, she couldn't afford anymore tapes. I said, 'There's this new thing called Pro Tools you record to the computer, we can try using that.' They said they didn't want to record to the computer. I said, 'Y'all ain't got no choice, y'all ain't got no tapes. Either we erase songs or we got to try this out.' I convinced the owner of studio or had the system to let us use his. By the end of the session everyone was in amazement that we recorded an album on a computer."

Apple iBook

Year released: 1999

Just Blaze: "The original iBook was probably the first time anyone had ever marketed mobile computing on a mainstream level. The iBook, if i'm not mistaken, is one of the first things Steve Jobs worked on when he got back to Apple. Apple was always looked at for education and the arts, not for regular people. That laptop, along with the iMac, was kind of the first forary into marketing their computers to regular people. Now, that's what they're all about. "

Pioneer CDJ 1000

Year released: 2001

Just Blaze: "The CDJ 1000 was the first time DJs were able to manipulate their music like vinyl. We had CD DJ equipment before, but never with jog wheels that had the feel of vinyl. Some people didn't like it; I loved it. You also had cue-points. I'll give you an example of the benefits of cue-points: Black Sheep "The Choice is Yours". Most DJs start it at the "engine, engine, number nine" part. Before, you had to go skip through the record and find it to play it in time. Now we had cue-points. I find that part of the record, make it a cue-point on my CDJ and no problem. I don't have to spin anything, it's already there.

"For me, the relevenace of that was I could take a more production-based approach to DJ other than scratching and DJing. Now I could use the cue-points like drum pads on a drum machine while another song is playing. Now i'm making my own drum track over another song, so it's like I'm using the CDJ like a drum machine. A lot of the work I do is cue-point based, as opposed to scratching and mixing. And that all started with the CDJ."

iPod

Apple iPod

Year released: 2001

Just Blaze: "I remember the day the original iPod came out and, along with it, iTunes. I was like, Wait a minute I can have this box and have 5,000 songs in it. And I can take songs from my CDs rip them to my computer and put them on here? Hell yeah. Me and Hip Hop, A&R for Roc-a-Fella, both went down to J&R and got 'em. That's what introduced digital music to the mainstream."

T-Mobile Sidekick

T-Mobie Sidekick

Year released: 2002

Just Blaze: "The Sidekick was ill. The Sidekick was like a hallmark was mobile technology development. I may have been the first device to have its own ecosystem, its own, what we now call apps and app store. Tightly integrated, everything was controlled by Danger. It was kind of the initial model for what we do now with the iPhone. It was the first time you saw all your info backed up onto a server. If you got a new phone it was no problem, all your info would come back to you. As dope as the Sidekick 1 was, it was the Sidekick 2 that really put it over the top. Until this day, the Sidekick had one of the best mobile keyboards ever."

iTunes Music Store

Apple iTunes Music Store

Year released: 2003

Just Blaze: "Along with the iPod, I would have to name the iTunes Music Store. For the first time you could easily go online and buy music legally. At the time it was encoded with DRM, but just the fact that you could buy all this music was big. And I think it played a strong point in proving to the industry: Don't be afraid of the digital revolution. Just play nice with it. The first day the iTunes Music Store launched I spent $700."

17-Inch Powerbook

Apple 17-Inch Powerbook G4

Year released: 2003

Just Blaze: "The Powerbook G4 was the first laptop to have what we now consider the Apple look, which is the sleek brushed aluminum, clean lines, but also being a workhorse of a computer. I remember being in L.A. working on Detox—God, I've been working on that album for 10 years. It was comparable to what was going on with Apple's desktops. You get the same performance in a laptop that you could get with a desktop. It was the first time I carried around a laptop as part of my everyday routine. "

MPC4000

Akai MPC4000

Year released: 2002

Just Blaze: "Even though I'm not the biggest fan of the MPC3000 now, I respect the 3000 for what it was and the signifigance it had. You can't have a hip-hop musician talking about gadgets and not mention that. I prefer the 4000, personally. For me, the 4000 is what I created most of what people consider my classics on. All the Blueprint stuff. The 4000 had way more sampling time, you could manipulate samples and filters in so many different ways that you couldn't do on any MPC before. You could edit samples using WAV form instead of numbers—on the 3000 you had to edit samples by numbers, I hated that. I never liked that. The 4000 had more sample banks. If I can name one piece of hardware that pushed my work to the next level, it's probably the 4000."

Motorola MPX

Release date: 2004

Just Blaze: "As I mentioned I'm good friends with Jon Geller a.k.a. Boy Genius. The way we met was, he had an at the time unreleased Motorola device called the MPX. The MPX was basically a Windows Mobile device that had dual hinges on it. It was rumored and then shots of it popped up in the wild, but nobody knew anything about it. At the time it was a revolutionary device. It was touchscreen, ran Windows Mobile, and it could open up like a cell phone or open like a TwoWay. Long story short, I get a message that this kid wanted to meet him, he was a big fan, and someone was like, 'Listen, this kid has a lot of gadgets, he could probably come through for you with something.' So I was like, 'OK, tell him to bring something through'. He calls him and he says, 'Yo, I have a Motorola MPX. Do you want it?' And I'm like, 'Yeah, right.' He says, 'No, really.' So I say, 'OK, fine, come down.' We had mutual friends and he came down moreso as a fan. But he comes with the sacrificial lamb, he comes with the phone. It's in a box, it's actually marked like it's straight out of a Motorola lab. We've been friends ever since. Not because he gave me a phone, but because we're on the same wave length.

"The looks that I would get when I would pull that device out—people didn't know what to do with themselves. They would say, "Wait a minute, your phone just transformed!" You could open it one way and use it as a flip phone or flip it another way and use it as a TwoWay. At the time that was something a lot of people wanted. But as usual with Motorola and their most innovative products, they couldn't really get it together. It came out in very limited quanities in, like, Singapore."

Motorola Razr

Year released: 2004

Just Blaze: "I had one of the first Razrs ever. It wasn't even made in a factory, it came from the Motorola Lab. You know how you open your cell phone and it has all the stuff printed out underneath the battery? This just pencil writing. I want to say we had it a year and a half before it came out. At that time there had never been a cell phone that thin. I think that was the first time we saw a phone with that many features packed into it but that thin with a battery that lasted a decent amount of time."

T-Mobile G1

Year released: 2008

Just Blaze: "I'm not the biggest Android fan, but I respect it. I respect what it kind of stands for. What it stood for when it first came out as oppossed to know is two different things. Back then it was open source, anybody could do anything they want with it, it's an experiment, then T-Mobile comes out with the G1. I loved the premise of Android and that the app requirements were less stringent than what Apple was doing with the iPhone. However, along with that perceived openess comes a lot of dysfunction. That's why I feel that Android's biggest boon is also its biggest hinderance because you'll get an Android phone, every app looks different, there's a lot more jerkiness in the scrolling, some apps don't work on some Android phones. And being that they made the OS open for carriers and manufactuers to skin it however they want, a phone will get released with 2.0 and never get upgraded to 2.2 or 2.3. It'll be interesting to see how this all ends up because Google is now taking a more Apple-like approach now where they withhold certain things. They made their point. They now have the lion's share of the smartphone market. Now they have to reel it back in and do the right thing."

Serato

Serato Scratch Live

Year released: 2004

Just Blaze: "Scratch Live is probably the most important gadget in the DJ world since the Technics 1200. I remember Grandmaster Flash refused to use anything but records, but it got to a point where promoters were paying more to ship his records than it cost to ship him. Serato wasn't the first to do it. Final Scratch was similar in principle to Serato and it was cool. It had a lot of the same functionality, but was a bit bloated and a bit cumbersome to use. Then Serato came out very barebones—all it gave you was two turntables and a mic—same operation as using vinyl, but you're using your computer. Thanks to their aggressive and smart marketing the hardware became a standard. Now all nightclubs have a Serato box. All I have to do is show up with a bag."

MacBook Air

Apple MacBook Air

Year released: 2008

Just Blaze: "One of my good friends, Jonathan Geller, who runs the Boy Genius Report, and I always wanted a small Apple laptop. We went through all different ways to go about it. I mentioned the Sony UX, I had hacked Mac OS X on those. I put OS X on netbooks over the years. I put OS X on an OQO. Any small laptop there was, we tried to put Mac OS X on it. When it comes to my work, I need to use a 17-inch MacBook Pro, but I don't want to carry that everywhere, but you want to have that experience. What I had been looking for was a slim-profile computer that I can take to DJ. I didn't want to lug a 17-inch computer to the party every time.

If you ever see one taken apart, you will truly appreciate the work that went into designing that custom motherboard. The original MBA had a processor that was on par with older MacBook Pros. You could get it with an SSD which wasn't too common at the time. It had some design flaws, like one USB port. But for the first time I had a MacBook that was so small I could throw it into the smallest bag and go DJ somewhere, which was all I wanted. And I finally got it."

iPhone

Apple iPhone

Year released: 2007.

Just Blaze: It's obvious. I think the iPhone already proved why it's the king of the smartphones.

iPad

Apple iPad

Year released: 2010

Just Blaze: "A lot people's criticism was that the iPad was that it is just a big-ass iPhone or a big-ass iPod Touch. That's what makes it great. All it is, is a big-ass iPhone and that's exactly what I want. After I got it, I realized it was the device I was always looking for. Let me give you an example. At home I have a Mac Mini that runs X and Xbox Media Center. I have a server at home that I built by hand that has all my music, all my movies, everything—all the computers and all the TVs are networked to this computer. I can access any movie or any song from anywhere I am. I was always searching for touchscreen remotes that to interface well with the set-up I built at home. I've spent thousands of dollars on them. I bought a Pioneer universal remote, that was about the same size as the iPad, to control all the movies and all the music and I never got to program the way I wanted it to—programming it was a bitch. One day, I didn't screw in a light fixture properly and it crashed down and broke it. I wasn't going to buy another one, so I was searching for a cheaper alternative.

"Sometimes I'm going on a short trip and I'm like, Damn, I don't want to bring my 17-inch MacBook Pro. And I don't really want to bring my MacBook Air, either. I needed something to do some light computing. Sometimes I'll be out DJing and I'll want to live stream the event. In order to stream it I had to use a tablet PC—a Samsung Q1—tethered to a Sprint mobile card and that's how I would live stream the event. Or sometimes I'd be at a family event and I'd want something I could take pictures with, shoot a little video with, share some video with a family member who couldn't be there. I had a Sony UX that I would connect to wi-fi, but it was very thick and cumbersome, kind of like carrying a netback.

"When I got the iPad, I went through the App Store and I'm getting these applications and I thought to myself, This is what I wanted the entire time. Something I can use as a remote for my TV. Something I can use to remotely control my computers. Something I can use to stream family events to family members who aren't there. Something I can use to stream shows and events. Something I can use to control the drapes in my house. Something I can use to jot down a quick musical idea and maybe even record a little vocals into it. I always wanted put a TV in my shower. It's very cost prohibitive to do so—I have to break through the wall and all that, but now I don't have to. I'm not a tree hugger but if I can help out and make things look cool I will. Something I always wanted to do in my studio was have a touchscreen where people can write their lyrics down on something that didn't have to be paper, and when they're done, they can save it and have it e-mailed to them. I never had a way to do it that wasn't complicated. The iPad wound up being the answer to a lot of unrelated issues that I wanted to resolve over the years. I really feel that, for me personally, it's one of the most important advancements in mobile entertainment technology in the past five years."

Death Star

Year released: 1977

Just Blaze: "It blew up planets."