Ivano Bellini
Makes the Miami Scene
By Ned Davis
Published in the July 2003 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volumn 17 - Number 7

In his two decades of DJing, Ivano Bellini has become a fixture on the Miami music scene. Though he resides in Manhattan, the Swiss-born house jock maintains three area residencies (Space 54, Opium Garden and Crobar), performs globally and records for S.F.P. Records, an imprint with many subsidiary labels that he co-founded in 1996 with fellow DJs Pierre ZonZon and Marc Sacheli.
His varied approach to house, which includes tribal, progressive and garage flavors, is represented on The Real Miami House Sessions, his latest DJ-mix comp, and with his throbbing remixes of the 1996 hit “That Sound” by E-N feat. Ceevox. We caught up with Ivano Bellini and talked tech.

DJ Times: What was the Swiss club scene like when you were coming up?
Bellini: House music has been a big part of the club scene there in some way since the late ’80s. Before that, there was no house music. When I first started to play in clubs, I could play anything from New Wave to what we used to call Alternative Rock or I used to play some hip hop. I used to play some freestyle – I mean stuff that you could dance to. I was really into ’80s funk and soul music.

DJ Times: What’s your method of creating tracks?
Bellini: It depends. When I work on a remix I already have a bass to work on because it’s taken from an original. It’s either the vocal line or the melody or the bassline that I can work with. So I just have to put my own vision of the track and make it sound in a way that I can fit it in my set – because that’s what I love to do. The only reason I would produce and remix is for me to be able to fit it in my set. I’m not trying to invent music for a crowd that I don’t know. I try to do what I know and what I know can work. It’s automatically designed for the dancefloor – but not only the dancefloor, my dancefloor. If I can’t play it in my set I’m not going to do it. It’s not gonna fly.

DJ Times: Where do the sounds and musical ideas come from?
Bellini: I just try to put sounds that I like at the moment, take an idea from what I hear, and new ideas. I’m not spending days and nights in the studios looking for sounds. That’s why I have great sound engineers. That’s what they do. I tell them what I’m looking for and they do the research. They tweak the sounds and they prepare it. And we find the good sounds.

DJ Times: Do you catalog or digitize your records?
Bellini: It would take me the rest of my natural lifetime. I’m waiting for Final Scratch to become available on Mac platform. [Ed. Note – At presstime, Stanton’s FS V1.1 powered by Native Instruments’ Traktor for Mac and PC had just begun to ship to retail.] I’m going to start with the new stuff. I’m not going to start back and take all the old stuff and put them on the format to be used on Final Scratch. But everything new that I buy I would digitize and make them ready for use with Final Scratch. I mean, when you travel it’s just so much easier.

DJ Times: What’s in your ideal DJ booth?
Bellini: Two Technics MD3 turntables – it’s the one with the little switch for the pitch – the one that doesn’t have the middle click on the zero. Also, three Pioneer CDJ-1000 CD players. As for the mixer, I’m really open. I love the Pioneer DJM-600 and I love the Rane 2016 combo. If it’s on a big sound system, I like the UREI mixer. But it has to be on the big system – otherwise you don’t really enjoy the full potential of it. You can put a UREI mixer on a small system and it’s really not going to sound much better.

DJ Times: What advice do you have for young DJs?
Bellini: I hope that they love what they do. I mean, I do. My main interest is the love of the craft of mixing, playing the music that I love, the communication with the people. The rest is just the cherry on top of the icing. It’s fun to work. I’m having more fun now than I’ve ever had before – because of the music, maybe because of the technology, because of the work that I put in for 20 years to be where I am right now. What I’m doing right now is just having fun.