DJ Q-bert

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DJ QBert performing on stage

This article is about the DJ. For the arcade and computer game, see Q*Bert.

QBert (born October 1969) is the performing name of Richard Quitevis, a Filipino-American (of Ilocano descent) DJ and composer. Living in San Francisco, he started playing with records at the age of 15 and was influenced by the street performers of San Francisco's hip-hop community in the mid 1980s.

He started his musical career in a group called FM20 with Mix Master Mike and Apollo in 1990. They were playing a show in New York when Crazy Legs saw them and invited them to join the Rock Steady Crew. They accepted, and going by the name of the Rock Steady DJ's they proceeded to take the 1992 Disco Mixing Club (DMC) world title. Q-Bert was also one of the founding members of the band Invisibl Skratch Piklz. Although there were other turntablist crews before the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, the Skratch Piklz were the first to apply the band concept to turntablism, layering drums, basslines, and scratch solos on top of each other.

Although he can be seen in the 1991 DMC US competition performing beat juggles, creating melodies with test tones, and performing other tricks, since then he has almost exclusively focused on scratching and "drumming," a variation on scratching in which the DJ scratches a drumbeat rhythmically. Of his performance routines, one of his most famous is a scratched reworking of LL Cool J's "Rock the Bells." QBert scratches "hamster style," which means that his mixer's crossfader works in reverse order. (Many other scratch DJs prefer "hamster style" to regular style.)

QBert, along with other Skratch Piklz, created a series of videos entitled Turntable TV. Now out of print, the first 5 episodes were released on VHS and contained demonstrations, showcases, skits, and other dj related content.

QBert's solo efforts include 1994's Demolition Pumpkin Squeeze Musik, and 1998's Wave Twisters. The latter album was created mainly with samplers and beat machines versus the turntable, and later turned into an animated feature of the same title. Wave Twisters (2001) the movie was somewhat unusual in that the animators and digital artists had to invent images and movements to the pre-recorded music, as opposed to the other way around. Wave Twisters is often compared to The Beatles' Yellow Submarine for being an animated-feature-as-soundtrack, but in terms of the composition of the album itself, Wave Twisters actually bears much more of a resemblance to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

His music was also featured in the video games Tony Hawk's Underground (in which he was also an unlockable playable character) and FreQuency.

He is featured in the 2001 documentary film Scratch.

He is also featured in the first documentary film on battle DJing - Battle Sounds - 1997.

More recently he has worked with Vestax to develop the QFO, an all-in-one scratching instrument. The QFO combines a turntable with a mixer's crossfader. (needs citation) In 2006 he introduced the QBert turntable cartridge, a model put out by Ortofon. (needs citation) Thus far, the cartridge has received mixed reviews for its sound quality and skip resistance.