Disco gizmo: The Pacemaker is more than a match for the average DJ's decks and mixer

Let's face it; of all the world's technology tribes, DJs are probably the coolest. What IT consultant can mash-up Moby with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and get away with it? What software engineer can get a room full of people jumping like Jazzy Jeff? Well, only the ones who spend all their spare time in their bedrooms, hunched over a £2,000 pair of decks and a mixer, practising like crazy.

Until now, that is. May I present the Pacemaker, a hand-held device with all the functionality of those decks and mixer, for less than £500. It's small, simple and Swedish – and its creators hope that it will democratise DJing. Richie Hawtin, the star DJ, is a co-investor in the company, and he's claimed that the Pacemaker "could be to dance music what the guitar was to rock music".

The Pacemaker is the brainchild of four Stockholm thirtysomethings with a shared love of technology and, more importantly, of music: Jonas Norberg and Daniel Wallner, two PhD engineers from the city's Royal Institute of Technology who had something to do with the European Space Programme; Martin Renck, who once graced Top of the Pops with his song "Here We Go", under the name Stakka Bo; and Ola Sars, a business school graduate who loves DJing despite, by his own admission, being "lousy" at it. They started a company called Tonium in 2006 and set to work building the Pacemaker.

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"We could see young, affluent consumers becoming more proactive with media, making their own music, film and editorial," Sars says. "We saw the door of portability kicked down by the iPod, which taught consumers that you can take all your music everywhere. We wanted to move both things a step further."

The device they've come up with, the size of one-and-a-half iPods, boasts 120Gb of storage space for MP3s. With sockets for a line-out jack and a set of headphones, two feeds and a cross-fader, it has the basics of a mixing set-up. A touchpad takes you to more advanced functions – reverb, graphic equaliser, beat counter, looping and plenty more.

The Pacemaker comes with its own Pacemaker Editor software package, which allows you to import your iTunes MP3s en masse to the device's hard drive. The software then analyses each track and takes a note of its beats per minute – which is a pretty big help later when you're trying to mix Nas with New Order.

That said, matching tracks means more than just counting beats, as any non-DJ novice like me will learn when they pick up the Pacemaker. Despite its cutting-edge features, it still requires you to learn some basic DJing and mixing skills. It emphatically does not do all the work for you. But it does mean you can practise mixing far from the bedroom.

So I spent a week or two with headphones on, at home, on the Tube, at work – it was research, after all. At the end of that time, I'd still only managed a few mixes worthy of anyone else's eardrums, but I was improving, and it hadn't quite ruined my social life. I could even take the thing to the pub – it's a conversation-starter (as well as a conversation-ender).

"The best thing about it is the wow factor," says Nick DeCosemo, editor of Mixmag and a DJ himself. "I remember starting out DJing when it was all big Technics decks and massive mixers that didn't work. To condense all of that into a sleek little object is amazing. DJs are genetically predisposed to love gadgets; most of them are genuinely impressed by the Pacemaker, and rightly so."

Watch a demonstration of the Pacemaker

The DJ Judge Jules was one of the lucky few invited to test a prototype of the Pacemaker. He soon succumbed to its charms. "It was so unique and newsworthy that it was talked about on the bush telegraph of the DJ community even when it was still at the development stage," he says. "I often use it for parties. It's smaller and a little more fiddly than having two decks and a mixer, but it incorporates all the features one would expect of decks and a very modern, feature-laden mixer. I've created a couple of mixes for my Radio 1 show with it, which I played out and nobody was any the wiser."

You wouldn't necessarily want to rely on the Pacemaker when it really counted – in a club, say, with 1,000 ravers baying for a killer break. Its battery life isn't all that long, and it can crash. These glitches are, no doubt, being ironed out.

But then, Sars says, the device wasn't designed for professional DJs. "The top DJs are using it and love it," he says. "They can use it as a sketchbook to test new music and mixes. But it's not meant for them, it's meant for the normal guy."

The last, crucial element of the Pacemaker experience is online, at www.pacemaker.net, where the amateur DJs who have already got their hands on the device can share their mixes. Despite still being in beta, the website is full of streamed mixes and playlists uploaded by users.

"The idea of sharing, whether it's in the pub, on the beach, at a club or online, was the driving force of the project," Sars says. "If you have a party at home and everyone loves the music, you can take the music you've mixed, save it on the device, then upload it to the online community via Pacemaker Editor. Then you can just email everyone and tell them, 'Here's my music from Friday night.'"

In future, Sars and his colleagues hope, the music on the Pacemaker site will be available to purchase and download, allowing friends and fellow users to buy each other's mixes in their entirety.

"We are not out to substitute professional DJing," Sars says. "We're coming to the market with a complementary product, a new way of viewing music. It's about having a go anywhere, anytime. Genre doesn't matter – just mash it up. If you look at the fresh, intelligent young generation of people today, that's how they view media. You don't have to follow one genre; as long as you love it and go for it, you can be totally unafraid."

Watch a live performance with the Pacemaker (contains strong language)

Mixing it up: beyond the wheels of steel

Chosen by Nick DeCosemo, editor of 'Mixmag'

* Pioneer CDJ-1000 decks

The number of DJs using vinyl is diminishing rapidly. There are a few purists who still love vinyl but they're in a minority. Most DJs use CDJs now, and the Pioneer CDJ-1000 is the industry standard. It mimics a record deck, and has functions for looping and effects.

* Ableton Live

More and more people are using laptops to DJ in clubs, and there are various bits of software that turn a laptop into a DJing tool. Ableton Live's main function is as a live remixing tool. Normally you'll have two, possibly three, decks on the go when you're mixing. With Ableton (below) you have up to eight MP3 audio banks in front of you, which you can mix live. You can also process tunes to stay in time. Ableton gets scoffed at by purists, who see it as cheating, but it's really popular; Mylo used it at Mixmag's 25th-birthday party.

* Traktor Scratch

Traktor Scratch is software that comes with an interface – a disk you can put on to a vinyl deck, or a CD you can put into a CDJ-1000. You connect that to your computer and do the DJing through the interface: the sensor relays back to the computer your hand movements, so it feels like you're DJing with decks. It's a bridge between the old and the new, and it's pretty ingenious.

* Faderfox DX2

With laptop DJing software, you have various interfaces that stop you having to scramble about with a mouse on a computer monitor to select your effects. Instead you can connect your laptop to an external interface with lots of buttons, knobs and sliders to which you assign properties. So, for example, instead of having to search through menus to find the reverb option, you'd have reverb assigned to one of the knobs on the controller. Faderfox (below left) is an interface for Traktor Scratch.

* Numark iDJ2

The iDJ2 is a little control desk for your iPod, with a cross-fader in the middle, a mixer and graphic equaliser. There are two jog wheels on either side, as you'd have with a CDJ-1000 or a record deck. You can take MP3 tracks off the iPod and DJ with them. It's not a bad starting point for someone who wants to learn the basics of mixing.

* Tenori-On

DJing with laptops is boring from a performance point of view, compared with old-school mixing. There are a lot of devices designed to bring back the performance element of dance and electronic music. The most interesting of all is Yamaha's Tenori-On. I'm not entirely sure how it works, but it's both an electronic instrument and a touch-screen interface for samples from your laptop. And it looks amazing.

* Pioneer SVM-1000 audio and visual mixer

Pioneer has made an audio and visual mixer, which means you can mix both sound and visuals. You download video on to a hard drive or use the built-in visual effects, or you can drop Jpegs into the mix, allowing you to name and shame anyone who asks for Shakira during your set!