45 King, The
Serato Contol Vinyl

Listening notes

The 45 King, the New Jersey-based hip hop producer born Mark James, released this functional pressing on his own 45 King Records imprint. The release is a piece of Serato control vinyl, a format that exists not as a conventional listening record but as a tool for use with Serato's timecode-based DJ software systems.

The record carries no catalog number and no listed release year in available documentation. Both sides — designated A1 and B1 — contain the same content: a Serato Control Tone labeled Cv2.5, each running for exactly ten minutes. The identical duration and content on both sides is consistent with the functional purpose of this type of record, which is designed to give a DJ software system a continuous timecode signal it can read from either side of the platter.

Control vinyl of this kind works by pressing a timecode tone onto a standard 12-inch record. When played on a turntable connected to DJ software, the software reads the tone and uses it to control the playback of digital audio files, allowing a DJ to manipulate digital tracks using the physical motion of a real record. The Cv2.5 designation refers to a specific version of Serato's control tone format.

What makes this release a point of interest for a record reference site is that it represents a hip hop artist and label participant operating within the infrastructure of DJ culture at a functional level. The 45 King built his reputation in part through his relationship to sampling and record culture, and this pressing connects that biography to the digital DJ workflow that became prevalent in the years following the introduction of timecode vinyl systems.

No personnel, pressing plant, or production credits are documented in the available data for this release.