José Reach

Best girlfriend ever!

As far as I know from researches I’ve done on controllers, the NS6 is a huge win if you want to scratch a lot. Scratching is good for hip hop, funk, and other styles comming close to that. In the other case, I would go for the traktor s4

I’ve read some great things here. Definately social/people skills, like leaving a good impression. Being good with computers and cables as well.

Things I see as a skill as well: enjoying while djing. I see a lot of djs just djing, but never communicating with the crowd, never smiling to the crowd, never flirting with girls on the dancefloor (by looking and smiling at them from the dj booth). As a DJ you should dance as well, not like a monkey but you can show that you enjoy it a lot yourself, like you would like to join the crowd and dance with them. Smiling is important, and communicating and making eye contact with the crowd as well.

Knowing how to deal with the music and crowd when there is a technical problem and the music shuts down. F.e.: start clapping and singing with the public or whatever, putting on your ipod or mp3/4 while fixing your technical problem.

Also, dealing with people requesting songs is an art itself.

And finaly, knowing which songs match and follow up other particulary songs. Like starting with a particular music genre, and then step by step changing the style of the song a little and mix them up smoothly in a way that no one knows that you’re changing styles.
For example: playing styles like Nu disco, then electro-house, follow up with avici and calvin harris shit, then go to american pop-house songs like david guetta and usher, then go to pop like kate perry, switch to rnb, go back to chris brown 3x yeah, put in a pitbull song, go to latin house, put in a song like bamboleo, shakira rabiosa, mohombi bumpy ride, kevin lyttle turn me on, continue reggaeton, change back to latin house, and go to house again and then dubstep. And that smoothly without the crowd noticing too much that the styles of the music are changing drasticaly.

Pbolle, you are standing for some questions that I am busy trying to work on at the moment.

I’m in my second year of university right now so I can share you my experiences. I always wanted to dj, but it was university who gave me an opportunity to DJ. The system in the Netherlands is different, but currently I’m in a study society, which can be compared to students societies or like in America, fraternities. These have commisions or groups which organises things or who keep the society (financialy) alive. If you have something in your college over there, try to take a closer look to them. I joined a dj commision, and it was for me an easy way to get into the DJ world. Bein new, everything was still organised by older members, the only thing I had to do was to learn DJ and play at parties.

I was motivated enough and now I became the chairman of the commision. I have to organise alot now and it learns me alot. I also have to arrange things with the other members and I learn the new people who came in the commision to dj, and they learn me new things as well. It teached me the basic stuff. Now I have to grow more, which will be a difficult task.

For me it was certain to go for a study. I advice you to do the same. You realy need the education, focussing on dj-ing solely is too risky. There are some good advices given here for study directions. I’m following a social sciences study myself. Apart from alot of hot girls, there are some creative and motivated guys here who are into hipster and dj stuff and they do great work. My study also teaches me management. Studies like these or like communication, marketing and multimedia are interesting studies which teach you valuable things for the future. They often aren’t the most difficult study (compared to enginering and medicins) which leaves you more room for other things.

Armin van Buren, one of the most famous DJs in the world, dutch as well and also educated in the Netherlands, also started as a student while studying law at the university in Leiden. He even finished his study, but did take an other path.

I advice you to find a student job, gain money, spend it on a good controller, practice and get in contact with people for parties and gigs. Once you DJed at student parties and gained some money and even more experience, buy or even download if you don’t have enough money music production programs like ableton. This is where I am now. My plan is to master ableton for the comming months and to search on internet how to master it. To my opinion: the best and most famous DJs are the ones that produce music. It will make you stand out of the non producing djs as it is a sign of skills, and will lead you to more succes. Don’t fail your study in the meantime.

DJ = Digital Jockey … I actualy never thought about it that way O_o