After years of mobile and scratch-jock work, David Arevalo (aka DJ Davey Dave) found a way to put his stamp on the DJ industry. In his capacity as Uberzone’s live-show DJ, Davey Dave meshes vinyl and CD scratching with digital looping techniques to bolster the group’s ultra-funky breakbeat sound. Additionally, in the past year, Davey has become TASCAM’s product specialist and conventioneers can find the Cerritos, Calif.-based DJ furiously working the company’s CD-302 player at exhibitions like NAMM and the recently completed DJ Expo West. We caught up with Davey Dave to hear the latest on his exploits with Uberzone.

DJ Times: How do you work together with Uberzone onstage?

Davey: For the “digital mix,” we play original Uberzone material as well as other artists’ music. We both mix in and out of each other and add a lot of live elements. Although it is dubbed as a DJ set, there is a lot of performance and live aspects throughout. Q is a great percussionist and he gets really crazy on the Trap Kat, the sampler and the drum machine. I get busy with the TASCAM CD-302 creating loops, triggering samples etc, and on the turntables I scratch and mix as well. Along with a laptop computer, it’s all connected to a submixer that we manipulate as well. From the submixer, we have just one stereo out that goes to the PA. So we can control all of our outgoing mix. It feels really natural when we play off each other. Nothing is rehearsed, so it’s cool to have a different sound every time, but still be on-point in the process. It’s a great mesh of two minds – Q’s incredible, crazy, twisted sounds with my DJing skills.

DJ Times: How does the CD-302 further come into play?

Davey: We use the CD-302 to do things on the fly that vinyl can’t do, such as looping to create builds or 100-percent tempo changes to create various sounds and effects, sampling, etc. The fact that we can create a remix the night before a show, sometimes hours before, and just burn a CD to play the next night is great, too. It’s an awesome performance piece. I started scratching with vinyl so, yes, I do scratch both vinyl and CDs.

DJ Times: Why are funky breaks so big these days?

Davey: Since everyone was hit by trance so hard the past year and half, people are now looking for an outlet. I think we’ll start to see a style that is a mesh of breaks and trance real soon, basically progressive breaks. The West Coast and the South are our best audiences simply because they are both deeply rooted with breaks history – the West with electro breaks in the early ’80s and the South with the whole Miami bass movement in the mid ’80s.

DJ Times: Which DJs impress you these days and why?

Davey: For scratching, QBert, Melo-D, DJ Flare. QBert has obviously taken scratching and scratch DJing as a whole to new heights. He has opened up the minds of so many people in the last decade. Melo-D is just so clean. No matter what he does, no mistakes, not sloppy, just the cleanest technique, very tastefully done, not overkill. Without DJ Flare, scratching would not be have been taken to the next level for a long time. With his incredible flare scratch came a whole new blueprint to scratching. He broke the rules and created new ones. The club or rave DJs that impress me the most are Simply Jeff and Donald Glaude. Simply Jeff is an incredible DJ because he can play any style of music and still keep it funky as hell. He is definitely my biggest influence when I play. I wish more DJs would play all styles of music like it used to be in the early ’90s. Everything is so segregated now. There are like 10 different rooms at a party now each having its own style of music. That’s cool and all, but I would just like to see more unity in music. Donald Glaude is an all-around good DJ. He can mix, he can scratch, he has the best showmanship I’ve ever seen and it's real. You can see he feels the crowd.

DJ Times: What did you contribute to the upcoming Uberzone album?

Davey: I’m on the remix of “2 Kool For Skool” and I’m also featured on two album tracks, one called “Beat Bionic,” which uses DJ scratching as the “vocal” of the song, and another song called “Bounce” where I scratch the hook of the song and have a solo on the breakdown.

– Jim Tremayne