At some point in his 23-year career, Dave Ralph must have developed a means of channeling the drive and energy of his own sets into his ambition. For after touring the world with the likes of BT and longtime friend and ally Paul Oakenfold, Ralph still holds onto the enthusiasm that encouraged him to get behind the turntables as a mobile DJ decades ago. And even then, he was bringing more to his gigs than just his records.

“We actually built our own equipment,” he recalls. “We brought the drivers. We made the cabinets ourselves from Celestion Designs. My friend who started it was and is an electronic genius. He built the mixer and bought all the diodes and capacitors and resisters and faders and stuff like that, and he built the mixer. I built the cabinet and the mixer to go in and we brought two Gerard SP-12 turntables and put them in the same box and that’s how we started.”

From there, Ralph learned the fine points of entertaining a crowd and mixing up his set for any given audience – even Germany’s massive Love Parade, where he recorded his latest mix CD, Live at the Love Parade (Kinetic). And luckily, he’s earned the right to play whatever record he feels will work for his crowd, be it trance or techno. “I’m pretty much one for letting records play and finding places to blend them,” he says. “So if it’s a nine-minute record and the right place to take it out is at five minutes, because that’s where it breaks down into drums, and after that it gets a little twisted and that’s when it’s right to take it out, then that’s what I’ll do. I’m not into chopping and changing. I’m more into building, to take the tempo from A to Z and the feeling from A to Z.”

These days, Ralph likes to work with a variety of mixers in a club setting – he names the Rane 2016, the Vestax and particularly the Urei as favorites. “I like the Ureis because of their durability and their clarity of sound,” he says. “But I think that the best configuration of the Urei is when they’re coupled with an EQ. [Liverpool’s] Cream has a really great sound system. It’s like a bass-on sound system with a Urei mixer, and they have these Vestax EQs for each turntable. But the Vestax EQs can only take out; you can’t add in. So you can take frequencies out. It’s kind of idiot-proof, in a way. They also have a huge parametric EQ on each system. It’s a very complex and difficult-to-learn system. It’s like a Ferrari. It’s not the easiest car in the world to drive.”

Since moving from Liverpool, England, to Miami, Ralph has been assembling a new home studio along with the one he still keeps in England. While his British studio is mainly analog, Ralph has planned his current setup to be digital and largely mobile, so that he can work on his tracks on his laptop during long plane rides to and from shows.

“I’ve already done 50-percent of it sitting on my laptop, virtual synthesizers, all integrated into Logic Audio or Cubase, either one or the two, for different reasons. Cubase, because of all the plug-ins you can get for it, all of the native instruments that are becoming more available, and Logic because it runs really, really well with ProTools. I’m going to get some keyboard modules, and then, I’m going to buy a desk, and the desk will be a Mackie 8*Bus Digital.”

For those just getting started, Ralph advises patience and learning through trial and error. After all, it always worked for him. “You can read manuals, but they only tell you so much,” Ralph says. “It’s actually sitting there and twiddling these things to understand it. Like compressors, I couldn’t get my head around compressors at all at first. ‘I put this thing on and it makes the bass drum sound better? Or it will make a bassline sound better? Or it will bring a hi-hat out? Sorry, I don’t understand it.’ It’s only when you sit there physically and you’ve got a mixer [that you do].”

– Justin Hampton