Detroit techno DJ Claude Young is back again for the fifth and final installment of his DJ Tricks series, in which he's shared some of the essential knowledge he's picked up throughout his career, like balancing a turntable's tone arm, gain staging your mix, and other basics of the craft.
This week however, Claude has a fully professional trick up his sleeve—the upside down reverse record trick—which dates back to the early 1990s, when Claude was just starting out and living in the UK.
With the upside down reverse record trick, you can bring in a track in reverse and mix it into your set—to the shock and bemusement of your audience. Claude tells us that he'll often pull the move when he has two copies of the same track, playing the beginning of the record as normal before mixing in the reversed track to raise the energy in the room.
As with Claude's first lesson on marking records, this process requires a few unconventional materials to get the job done. To follow along with Claude, you'll need to grab your favorite record, a standard spool of thread, and a cigarette filter.
As Claude demonstrates, you place the spool onto the turntable's point and the record (upside down) on top of the spool. To connect the materials, you thread the cigarette filter through the record's hole and the spool's top. Then, you turn the tone arm's needle from its normal, downward position to facing up, re-balancing the tone arm so that it's weighted to rise instead of lower.
Finally, Claude demonstrates how to play the record in reverse and mix it into your set. Watch the video above for the full tutorial, and be sure to check back through Claude Young's previous Reverb lessons for more beginner DJ tips.