There's an interesting paradox at play in James Zabiela's DJing. He is, on the one hand, a futurist, a DJ who embraces the latest technology and shows others its infinite possibilities. When Pioneer are deciding which features to include on their latest mixer, they call Zabiela. But viewed from another angle, Zabiela is thoroughly old school. His brand of performative DJing, a style that's largely fallen out of favour among house and techno DJs, has its roots in '80s hip-hop. He buys vinyl, and, by using the CDJ's pitch control and platter, he still wants to emulate the thrills and spills of mixing on turntables.You get a sense of Zabiela's retro/futurist personality in the brick-walled basement of his home in Southampton. The latest array of Pioneer DJ gear sits atop shelves of dog-eared records. There's a Roland TR-8, a recent update of the classic 808 drum machine, and an old MPC.andtoys are strewn across the room's surfaces (Zabiela keeps his pièce de résistance, a full size replica of a Dalek, upstairs). Whenever he gets the time, Zabiela comes down to this room to sharpen the DJ technique he's built a global reputation on.Zabiela's style feels particularly unique when you consider the time and place he came from. Back in the early 2000s, when progressive house was a dominant dance music genre, he was known as a protégé of Sasha, one of the sound's leading DJs. Across the previous decade, artists like Sasha and John Digweed developed a mixing style that prized long, harmonic blends. This captured Zabiela's imagination, but before long he was cultivating a technique of his own, one that widened the scope of progressive house to include breakbeats and electro, and was delivered with jaw-dropping technical flair. Audiences around the world grew to love him for it, but when I visited Zabiela in Southampton recently, he reflected on his longstanding approach and its effect on dance floors. Between pushing his DJ technique forwards and letting the music breath, the challenge for him these days is to find a perfect balance.Yeah, I had some belt-driven DLP Soundlab turntables, I think they were the DL-P1Rs. They're impossible to mix on. If you touched the platter or the label—you had to just use the spindle in the middle to slow it down and speed it up. I remember the first time I went from one of those to a Technics I felt like I was wrestling a bear. So I had those and I had a Made 2 Fade KAM mixer from Argos. I still have it, it's in the attic.Two faders and a crossfader. That was literally it. No EQs, nothing like that. I learned to scratch doing the—I forget the name of the move. I learned to do it with the line input. On the mixer all of the paint is worn around that line input. I used that instead of the crossfader.I was just interested in scratching. I used to watchwith Doctor Dré, and I used to see the guy in the background doing all of the scratching. I wished that Dré would be quiet for a second so I could hear what the DJ was up to. Some of the DJs they had on there were amazing.I had a friend who lived around the corner, who was an amazing scratch DJ. I used to go around there with my sandwiches at lunchtime when I was at school, and I just used to sit and watch him scratch. He had the direct-drive DLP Soundlab turntables, so they were better than the ones I had. And he had transformer buttons on his mixer, like big round punch buttons. I was so envious.I think mostly it's practice. Like with a lot of things, you just have to repeat and repeat until you get it right. I did it for a little while and then got more into the technical aspect of mixing. I discovered Sasha and harmonic mixing. Like, how he would mix wonky acetates for three minutes without dropping a beat. So I went in that direction. But I still obviously have the scratching side to my DJing.I think it just excited me. I probably got really into it when I went to Australia for the first time and I met an Australian DJ called Phil K. He showed me the Pioneer EFX-500. He was like, "Dude, this thing is a sampler, man, it's a sampler." And I was, "How!?" He didn't actually show me, but he was just like, "Here, figure it out." You can use the echo function on it almost like a guitar-pedal looper. I think there was around a bar of music that you could record into it, but you could shuffle around the different beat-bar buttons while the loop was playing and just create these bonkers edits.Actually that's something I've wrestled to keep on the effects units—so the RMX-1000, you can use the settings software that comes with it, which hardly anyone actually messes around with, but you can change it and change the echo to a feedback, and it's actually got two bars' worth. And although you don't have the buttons to jump around and make the rhythms, you can still do it if you've practised enough with the knob, which is set into quadrants. Then you can go between the user settings and the settings that come with the unit.So I always liked scratching and I think my style also comes from computer games. I used to be all about the combos on. There was even the triple whammy: you'd go in with a deep high punch, an uppercut and then a fireball—and you had to time it just right. Once you got the first deep cut in there was no way they could block the other two moves [].Yeah I do, it's probably quite a weird style. I was thinking about this. I kinda don't mix with the faders so much, and I only use a little bit of the EQs. I do a lot of filter mixing. Actually one of the things I love about the Allen & Heath mixers, which I don't use, is that you can do these lovely blends with just the filters. You can turn the resonance down, and then you can also filter out to complete silence. You don't have to touch the fader or any of the EQs.So one of the things I do, pretty much on every mix now, is I have the RMX running and the outgoing record I have running through that. I change the settings on the filter so I can filter out to silence. But I can also add a delay so I can delay out of the track. And it's got an LFO there as well, which I use a little bit of.

Yes, and also because you're taking out the low-end and then you're killing it completely, you don't have to think about anything else really. Sometimes I pull the bass back slightly, it depends on the source material, but if there's too much resonance I pull the bass back slightly. I usually mix the incoming track with a filter as well—take the high-end off before I put the fader up and then just bring the high-end in when appropriate. So this is my workaround, in a way.That's something I always used to do by mistake. I would sit there and try and find records that would go together harmonically but I never got into the Camelot Wheel thing.For me it was this whole thing of making mash-ups which I really loved, and I still do that. It's actually the way I approached making my Balance mix. At one point I remember looking at all of these tracks and I just had a shit-ton of mashups but not a mix CD. The problem then became: how am I going to put all of these mashups together so it flows?When I play out I try not to be determined by key, but when you play on the CDJs if a track's harmonically in key, on the list it shows up as green, and it does sway you. Say you've got two tracks you think, "Right, do I want to play this one or this one?" And one of them is lit up in green. You do think, "Well, this one is probably going to sound better." But I have to ask myself, "Is this the one that's going to work right now?"Sometimes with harmonic mixes, you add one track to another and it sounds beautiful, and it can completely change the vibe—it makes something new. Sometimes tracks really gel together. Then there's also those tracks which are out of key, like those strange loopy techno records, where discord can work. Sometimes you'll bring the fader up and it'll be like, "Hmm I'm not sure about that." And then about ten seconds later your ears or something in your brain changes, and it works somehow.Yes, accidentally.Yes, I've worked on some pieces of equipment on product development. I would give them my ideas and stuff. I would do a lot of testing. So for the CDJ-2000, the very first one that took the USB, I went on tour with the European product planner and we had them in flight cases. This was before they were released—probably like six months before they were out. I was doing these huge gigs, which was irresponsible really [], because they would crash quite a lot. So we'd do the gig, I'd make all of the notes, and then email Tokyo and they'd send us a new firmware for the next gig. They were up against a deadline so we were trying to get them ready.For the first-ever mix CD I did, I wanted to get an EFX-500 to use on it. The mix was for Hooj Choons. We were sort of on the blag, and someone from Hooj Choons was trying to get Pioneer to sponsor the CD so we could get one of these EFX units as well. I got hold of one and what they wanted in return was for me to go and DJ at their little booth in PLASA, the technology exhibition that they used to do at Earl's Court. I went there and I'd had this EFX thing for a few weeks. I'd been playing around with this feedback loop and I'd worked a few other things out, having not even looked at the manual of course. I went and did a little DJ set there.There weren't people dancing or anything so I thought, "I'm just going to mess around with the EFX unit." The Pioneer guys were like, "What are you doing there? We've never seen anyone do that." They started asking me questions, and then after that I got involved in the product development. I'd get an email saying, "What do you think of this?" I still try to get involved with the products that I'm interested in, when I can.Well, Rik just emailed me now, he's the European product planner or head of product development. He's trying to get me to use the DJS-1000. I don't know if it would be something that I'd use. I'd use it in the studio but I think if I was more of a producer who made a lot of tracks and I had all of my trademark sounds and loops, then it would probably be something that would excite me. So I think I'm going to hold out for whatever is next.