DJ Diary: Part 2

24th Jan: This week I’m attending Point Blank for two separate sessions after booking myself in for a practice run the day before our actual class. This was on the recommendation of our tutor – ‘the more you practice, the better you’ll get’, makes sense of course. So, on Tuesday I head down to the college to have a little play around on my own for six hours. For this practice session I basically run over some of the techniques that Ben taught us during our first class… one of my classmates, an American guy named Taylor, is also in for some practice. In the time between the first class and today I’ve asked a few mates who DJ for their hints and tips – one which really stuck with me was using two tracks you know really well and practicing almost solely with them. So that’s what I do for most of the day, alternating when I get bored but mainly using the same tracks over and over. Once again, it’s the beat matching aspect that I really want to get within my grasp, so I try to match beats for the whole day… even though Ben will be teaching us this properly tomorrow. In my mind it’s gone pretty well, I’m still not quite ready to step into David Guetta’s shoes (which are probably hand-tailored by naked virgins) but I’m making baby steps…

25th Jan: This is it, beat matching week! I’m well excited and have copied a few more tunes onto CD especially for this week’s class. Last week I wasn’t using my own music so after practice yesterday, having my own tracks to mix has motivated me even more than before. Anyway, we get cracking – first up Ben tests us to see how in tune we are with the music by playing two tracks together and seeing if we can work which is faster (we need to learn how to do this in order to speed up/slow down a track and mix it with another one). The class do well. Ben shows us how to handle the CDJ decks – advising us that we can be quite tough with them and not to pussyfoot around… sound advice as always. We’re soon invited to step up and use the decks and I get to use the set up that has speakers for the first time – there are eight sets of decks in the training room, but only one has speakers obviously, otherwise we’d all be playing over each others’ music and no one would be able to hear anything. Doing this certainly makes the DJ dream seem a little more ‘real’, but I have to admit it is a little difficult trying to pick up on the beats at times… maybe my hearing is going? Well, I am 31 this year.

After trying a few mixes we get another revelatory lesson from Ben – he plays the exact same track on both decks, plays them at the same speed, but then speeds one up and adjusts the decks accordingly to slow it down and get them back in sync. I probably overuse the word amazing, but it is pretty amazing because it really helps you to train your ear to pick up on the speed of a track. I’m using a hip hop track on the speakers and I have to admit, it’s a piece of piss playing around with the two tracks.. probably wouldn’t be such a walk in the park with some DnB, but hey – we’re taking baby steps here. After lunch we work on BPMs, identifying the speeds of different genres and discovering new genres through our classmates (I’d never heard of Hard Dance until this lesson). We also use manual BPM counters on the decks to work out the BPMs, again it’s all about fine tuning our hearing and sense of the music in order to be able to mix with confidence and not have to rely on the equipment (which isn’t always accurate) to do it for us. Back on the decks it’s a tough little session, despite the lessons Ben has given us I still frustrate myself by not picking things up quicker – the amount of times I mess up a mix is pretty demoralizing, but to be expected. I’ve literally only been on a pair of decks three times in the space of a week, so my superstar DJ ambitions are hardly going to become a reality in such a short space of time – and Ben reminds us that we’ve made massive strides in such a short space of time. Again, his one-to-one tuition helps massively and my struggles are soon forgotten as I manage to really focus and start to find mixing a little easier. Towards the end of the class Ben shows us a few tricks that, amusingly, I taught myself when I was a kid – that is, cutting the sound and highlighting specific parts of the beat structure… something that’s known as ‘Transforming’. I used to do this on my tape decks when I was a kid, imitating what I heard DnB DJs do – and now, over ten years later, here I am being shown the very same technique in a college class. Brilliant. We spend the rest of the lesson on the decks, cutting up beats, trying to beat match and generally learning/practicing everything we’ve been shown. I leave with a slight headache, but looking forward to my next practice session. That night I repeated play out the mixes I’ve been practicing over and over in my head and I even dream about them. Obsessed me? Never…

- Marcus Barnes

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