dj debate

Yes and No. It depends on the skill level and how much your willing to do as far as how much effort you wanna put into the mix.

Yeah, it’s easy just to mix a song into another song with the same tempo, but if your a little more skilled than that, you can change up the song selection and match different song speeds, a mixing the unmixable.

It’s kinda like balloon animals. Anyone can blow up a balloon and call it a worm or make something simple like a snake or a caterpillar, but it takes a little more skill to make it into say a dog, or platypus.

And for the people who take things further and just won’t let them be what it is, some people even call it an art.

In some ways, DJing resembles the circus tricks of spinning plates or juggling objects. As the DJ, it’s their job to "keep everything up in the air" in a smooth fashion, so that the music never stops as they move from one song to another. All of the tools available to them merely influence and cajole the playback of music that would normally play straight through, uninterrupted and independent from each other from beginning to end. It is therefore a necessity to think one step ahead of where they are, since some DJ techniques must be performed before they actually want their audience to hear them. This ability to anticipate changes in the music directly relates to how well they know the music in their library. If they know the structure and patterns of a song like the back of their hand, they’ll know what sections are appropriate for looping, interesting places to introduce filters and other effects, and empty or quiet areas where you might need to mix in another song. Intimate knowledge of their music library is also what helps them select the right progression of songs, by choosing songs of similar style and feel, which to some DJ’s are their entire library if you know what I mean.

There’s food for thought.

I dunno, I kind of agree with Deadmaus, despite being a DJ myself. You can talk it up all you want, but a trained monkey could do it. Beat Matching is a piece of piss. Admittedly I worked with samples and studied Sound Engineering in college, so was already pretty familiar with the basic concepts, but it only took me about a day of dicking about to get club ready.

The problem with DJing is that everyone now has an iPod. You can literally go an entire day without listening to a single song you don’t want to hear. With Walkmen you were at least restricted to 90 minutes in a prechosen order. You either had to put up with that one dodgy song you weren’t really in the mood for or fast forward it. In a way, people have become their own personal DJ’s. They’ve become so used to listening to exactly what they want to hear that the idea of going to a club and listening to someone else choose the music is becoming a bit alien to them.

People don’t go to clubs to be "educated" anymore, which is something I miss about DJ culture. Not because I have a massive ego and like to tell people what they should be listening to (though I do), but because when I go out I don’t just want to hear the same 10 songs being played, I want the DJ to show me something I’ve never heard before, or to surprise me by playing something I’d never even consider dropping myself.

The thing is, in reality, no one cares about beat matching, or your collection of rare Detroit Techno white labels or how well you can scratch, they just want you to play something good. That’s the real skill of DJing, what sets you apart from some guy at a party with iTunes. There’s this one DJ who plays every other Sunday at the bar I work in, and I utterly adore her, because she gets it. The other week I was shockingly hungover and trying my hardest to just get through the day. I was filling some fridges when all of a sudden she started playing Sultans Of Swing by Dire Straits. Is it an incredibly naff song? Yes. Is it something I’d ever play during my set? Christ no. Was it exactly what I wanted to hear at that moment in time? You better believe it.