I’ve been dj’ing for a while now and I’ve seen some crazy mixers or other outlandish gear but I’ve always managed to make them do what I want them to do. Until this Friday. I hate to admit it but I lost a battle with the maddest mixer I’d ever seen. The Behringer Digital Pro Mixer DDM 4000. This piece of electronica is without doubt designed by a an evil nerd, with a big fetish for buttons with light in them, who has been bullied by dj’s in school and wants to get back at them.

You must know that most dj’s are not that bright on the technical front. You might think there’s a contradiction in that, but there’s not. Dj’s are primarily music lovers and take the technical side of their job as a necessary evil. I know dj’s who have problems connecting the decks to the mixer, for example. The ideal mixer for a dj is simple and reveals what it does and how to do it at the first glance. That’s why Rodec and Pioneer mixers are so popular. It’s hard to not understand them.

But this particular mixer is the complete opposite of all that. For starters, it has buttons everywhere, most of them with names that leave you oblivious about their use. And they all got a light build in. The mixer is so shiny you don’t need extra lights in the room. Which is the only possible good thing I can say about this piece of gear. On top of that it’s a digital mixer with a little LCD-screen offering you plenty of options to choose. Which is a big mistake. We don’t need “flexibility” you can program through controllers which each have multiple options assigned to them.

When Behringer proudly state that it’s “jam-packed with creative tools, yet its intuitive layout will let you feel at home in an instant. Editing, storing and recalling your settings is simply a breeze!” they talking out of their ass. The first thing that springs to mind when discover you need to mix with it is “where the hell is the manual”. Not a good thing at 1am after you had a few beers. It took me 20 minutes to find how I could get sound through my headphones. One of the more elementary features of a mixer I would think.

I’m not going in further detail about the hassle we had with it but after a while it became funny. We managed to get some sound out of it and we settled for that. We didn’t even try to use the effects. Reducing it to the most basic mixer you can think of. One with 2 faders and little to nothing more. Which is a bit sad if you see it bragging with all the lights and stuff.

Apart from that we had a good time. Once you’re able to play some music, most of the frustration is forgotten and you make the best of it.