This Video Explains Why Krewella Most Likely Did Not Fake Their Set
Shortly after Krewella finished their performance at Ultra Music Festival, the internet went crazy as many people began to notice there were no cords plugged in to the back of their CDJs. Deadmau5 who tends to be one of the most vocal artists, sent out a tweet to Krewella accusing them of faking their DJ set. The girls quickly wrote back stating that they did not fake their set, but there were actually “USBs plugged in2 the CDJs/mixer.” You may be thinking, “how does that work out?” YouTube user Christian Jackson explains.
“To the untrained eye it could look like none of the audio cables are plugged in and there’s no way for the signal flow to be going from their computer to the speakers. All you need to make this set-up work is a computer running Traktor, a USB cable for each of the CDJs and a USB cable for the mixer. Basically how it works is the CDJs are acting pretty much as expensive controllers for the expensive Traktor Scratch software.”
Watch the video to find out more.
For anyone who missed the actual back-and-forth, deadmau5 first went after Krewella on Twitter during their Ultra Live Stage set, joking that they had “new completely wireless DJMs” and pushing further with “you wanna plug your shit in? or you wanna go home!” Krewella responded by pointing out that USB cables — not traditional audio cables — were in fact plugged into their CDJs and mixer, and asked people to zoom in on the photos to see for themselves.
Rather than let it go, deadmau5 kept the jokes going for hours, tweeting out a string of joke acronyms for “USB” alongside photos of DJ gear plugged into random household objects, according to reporting at the time. He didn’t publicly walk back the original accusation, and Krewella didn’t offer much beyond their initial defense, so the exchange mostly played out as a very public war of words rather than a resolved dispute.
What the Christian Jackson breakdown above adds to the conversation is the technical piece that got lost in the Twitter jokes: a USB-based CDJ/Traktor Scratch setup is a legitimate, commonly used configuration, and it doesn’t require the kind of visible audio cabling that fueled the original “unplugged” claims. Whether or not that technical explanation ever changed deadmau5’s mind isn’t clear from the public record — he didn’t post anything walking the claims back — but it did give a lot of onlookers a more grounded way to evaluate what they’d actually seen at the Live Stage that day, instead of just going off cable-spotting from festival photos and video.
