Ben Modigell

I DJ and produce as so I so, downtempo, minimal, dub house, tech house, and techno (releases on Spotify and SoundCloud, links above). Everything I write here comes from my own gigs, studio sessions, and library cleanups: the rules I follow, the failure modes I've actually hit, and the workflow I use when nobody's watching. If a technique didn't earn its place in my own sets, it doesn't make it into a tutorial.

Behind the decks

I'm completely self-taught. It started in 2018, when a friend bought a controller and we set it up on an old fridge, downloaded music, and just played. We ran a SoundCloud as “Persomnia,” releasing melodic techno mixes together. The lesson from those first sessions still drives everything: just do it, and only ever play music you genuinely want to hear.

My library was a mess from day one: downloads piled up at random, and tracks I loved got buried instead of played. The fix I eventually built started right there. Seven years on, I'm part of bTbT, a collective in Cologne, and I play the local rave scene, our own nights, spots like Odonien, and other collectives' events. Usually 1.5 to 2 hour sets, often back to back, which is my favourite way to play. The one I still think about is a daytime back to back on the hay-bale floor at Zugvögel Festival. I'll always take a big, warm sound system over a big name.

I've gone deep on the gear too. A borrowed Traktor, then my own Pioneer DDJ-400, a Denon Prime 4 I loved, a Pioneer XDJ-RX2 and RX3, then I sold all of it to fund synths and production gear. Today I run a Denon Prime Go: small, battery-powered, always on my desk, easy to grab and plug into a single speaker. Fun over firepower. Out in a booth, though, nothing beats proper club gear: CDJs and a Xone mixer with its four-band EQs, where there's real room to play with the music.

In the studio

I produce as “so I so” in Ableton. Most of my 120-plus tracks came in the first couple of years; since then it's been quality over quantity, and right now production is mostly on hold while I focus on Vibes.

The build

By day I'm a frontend developer with around six years in the field, currently building large B2B shops in Next.js. Vibes is mine end to end: I designed and coded every screen myself, built first for my own workflow, then refined it around what early testers actually ran into.

My own routine is simple. I import my latest finds, tag them by vibe by hand instead of fighting folders, and the sorted library goes onto a USB for the night.

I sort it all by hand on purpose. I won't hand that to an algorithm, because knowing my own crates is exactly how I read a room and adjust on the fly. That's the whole point of Vibes: a personal, visual way to organize that respects how a DJ actually thinks. Not a faceless startup, just one DJ who plays out, ships the updates, and answers every email.