That one person…

“So, all you do is push the play button then”

Well, unless that’s what you do, he doesn’t know how hard it is to keep the music playing without breaks for a couple of hours running.

To the crowd, a DJ is simply someone who plays music. How they do it is irrelevant. Only a DJ can understand the difficulty of another, so I would say there is no point arguing with him. Not because he is correct (he’s definitely not) but because you will never make him see this fact.

Don’t waste your time on him, instead make a mix and post it in the Music and Mixes section of the forum so the people who ACTUALLY know their stuff can offer you valuable assistance and feedback.

Hope I helped!

LOL @ Terry

@Jessica: You know, he is right about one thing. Pretty much anybody can walk upto a controller and make it work. Work as in getting music out of the speakers. If he/she is tech savvy, perhaps even detect the button called sync and get a matched mix out of it. As with any skill, practice makes perfect, so yes, you need to practice your technical skills and master all the features that the controller has to offer that the guy/gal just walking up to one wouldn’t know existed, let alone be able to use off the bat.

However, even WITH all the technical skills in place, knowledge of the features and everything else, at the end of the day it is WHAT music you play in WHAT order that makes a good DJ (or not). And this is the real DJ skill and it’s hard to master and you can only learn by playing to an audience. So even if you only press the play button and play back to back tracks without anything fancy, you CAN still make a good party (I have done this a lot of times when the gear was just plain CD players and FX-less mixers. Beatmatching was about as fancy as you could get at the time, with the occassional backspin tossed in).

As others have said, your friend doesn’t get it and he is clearly entitled to his opinion. Just hang on to your love of music and do not worry what others think. If anything, you are member of a community that DOES get it and welcomes you here.

I thought I did pretty good too there ! ROFLMAO

@terry
I LOLed at that! I jokingly thought similar when it comes to drummers, but I know the truth being a drummer myself.

@DJ Vintage
I understand all of that. I think the part that pretty much ticked me off was that it kinda felt like he was telling me ‘what you are doing right now is nothing’ and saying that I should be producing music (which I’m not ready for yet. I’m still learning the features on my DDJ-SB). I also kinda conflict a bit with people who have a bit of an ego, and he’s one of em.

I know it’s all about the music. About 5 years ago, I actually DJ’d at my dad’s retirement party, and I didn’t have a controller or even a DJ program then. All I had was my laptop with Itunes, and a speaker system. I just created a couple of playlists and yeah, I did just press play, but everyone still had fun regardless.

(I am the OP, I just got my original account working again)

I have actually read those articles, I just haven’t watched the videos yet. I will though, as one of my goals is to be able to create my own remixes, mash-ups and whatnot.