Marcus [DJ Marcus T] Thompson
TSC founding member - Interview - January 2009

Explain your progression as a DJ?
Well, it all started back in like 10th grade. My mother bought me a Radio Shack DJ mixer for Christmas and I never looked back. I started making mix tapes right away. I only had one turntable and a tape deck, so my mixes were what I call Pause Button Mixes. I would basically set the tape deck to record, play the record while recording and hit the pause button at the point were I wanted to make an edit, and then repeat this.

I remember breaking so many tape decks pause buttons. I must have gone through about 3 decks making tapes that way. Over the years, I progressed to 2 turntables, better mixers, mics and outboard gear, but I learned a lot in the trenches.

What gear do you use?
Im a fan of the Denon DN-S series of CDR/MP3 players. The scratch response is crazy and gives me the feeling of manipulating vinyl. Besides my Denon decks, I match those up with a Gemini mixer and a nice pair of Mackie SRM-450s. I love my Mackies; they are iron clad and reliable.

Whats your favorite Equipment?
I love my Denon decks! They have the ability to spin like turntables when they play + feel to me like real vinyl and I can scratch on them bad boys as well. Im with the original gangsta DNS-3000s.

How do you feel about sampling?
Man, I love sampling. To me its the natural progression of manual scratching that the pioneer hip hop DJs invented and perfected, back in the day. To take bits and pieces of other sounds and insert them into your songs is just genius.

Now, sampling an entire loop from an old school classic and laying down new vocals/lyrics and renaming it to create a new song, was just lazy to me, but at the same time it was the basis for Rap music today.

For example, look at Sugar Hill Gangs Rappers Delight. That was just them looping Good Times by the group Chic and rapping over it. Simple huh? Real simple.

The funny thing is that folks request Rappers Delight at a lot of my sets, hell I even had a cat request it last weekend. I threw on the 15 minute version and watched him dance and shook my head at how a simple song like that, still makes em shake it in 2008.

I guess I have to sum it up by saying that I feel good about sampling and the royalties from sampling are not too shabby as well.