As a digital DJ, if you have been on the look out for a digital mixer & midi controller for your dj software in the guise of a Pioneer DJ Mixer such as the DJM 600 or the more current DJM 800, then maybe Behringer’s new  DDM4000 mixer could be the alternative choice for you.

Since most of us do not have over £1,000 to splash out on an Allen & Heath Xone 4D or a DJM 800, this cheaper yet more viable alternative may well shock you into an impulse purchase.

Coming from a vinyl background and knowing the Pioneer DJM600 as a world renowned standard club mixer, the latest offering from Pioneer in the form of the DJM800 where you can assign most of the controls for MIDI was going to be the obvious option. However, I was still taken aback by the price of this mixer and as I looked further into the Midi controls if this unit, I realised it simply does not offer the right feature set as I assumed it would.

Jumping from one controller to the next, the Behringer caught my eye. It looks like a baby sister of the Pioneer DJM series, slightly bigger, two patented FX units built in, a MIDI clock and BPM counter – again patented, a 2 bank sampler plus another couple of features that you would of thought someone else to come up with in a sync’d crossfade effect and a boost of the snare or bass in the headphones depending on how you mix.

All this and the option to adjust the frequencies of the EQ’s, kill switches and FX to how you play out. This sounded too good to be true, but as I have known from past mixers built from Behringer the FX and sound quality were always on the cheap side showing the true price of the units.
I dug deeper online and found some YouTube clips of the unit in use, a couple of reviews which only praised this new monster from Behringer, and then realised I needed to try it out for myself.

So I quickly got my hands on it, purchased it simply because I couldn’t fault it enough to put me off it at such a cheap price…almost at a quarter of the price of the Pioneer series. I tested it out over the weekend setting it up to suit my needs with Traktor as a controller and mixed a new promo CD with it just as a tester. From this hands on experience, I can safely say it’s more feature packed, more fun, and really easy to setup in comparison to the Pioneer series.

The only thing that lets this mixer/controller down is the lack of a built in audio interface. In comparison to the DJM 800 midi features, the Behringer DDM4000 can be totally configured and customised by turning off sections of the mixer to enable midi control from them. The Microphone section, sampler section, crossfader section, each channel and EQ’s can all be turned off and enabled as midi in any config you like. The DJM 800 cannot be configured in the ways you require, it simply sends out midi messages all the time from any control you use on the mixer. The problem here is when you setup the fx button or the EQ’s or volume faders to control something via midi, and you have audio running through the mixer as well, then those controls are applied to the audio as well. Imagine triggering a clip in Ableton or a cue point in Traktor with the ‘FX ON’ button and you realise you have triggered the FX on the mixer too because you can’t turn them off. This is where the Behringer has more than one over on Pioneer.

At such a cheap price, with more controls that can be assigned than the Pioneer DJM plus a whole lot more, the Behringer DDM4000 is a bargain mixer/controller that no digital DJ can overlook – and I never thought I would say this about a Behringer product.

If your interested in getting a hold of one of these – visit www.soundware.co.uk to place an order or if you want more information give us a call on 0191 260 33 33.