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How To Become a DJ [2020 Guide For Beginners]

What do you need to become a DJ? What are the requirements, and how long is it going to take? The answers and our steps on how to become a DJ in no time.

If you have been close to a DJ or were a part of an unforgettable DJ event, then it may have passed through your mind to give it a try yourself. And what’s not to like? Music, Nightlife, Party, Drinks, or getting paid for something you love…? The truth is, being a DJ is not a total dream job that happens in a day or two. Do not expect that being a professional DJ is a paradise for everyone where you just travel around the world, always play music in front of thousands of people, and you will get shit lots of money for that.

There are plenty of things to consider before you decide to go into the music industry and DJing.

Before you decide to become a DJ, ask yourself the below:

  • Are you willing to invest a respectable amount of time and money on equipment, lessons, and self-promotion?
  • Do you have spare time to practice and to learn? In the end, you will work more than your 8hour daily job.
  • Are you capable of daily updating your online presence?
  • Are you ready to DJ in an empty club or front of a “dead” audience? Unfortunately, it will happen more times than you might think. Even the best have performed in empty places more times than they can remember.
  • Are you sociable and willing to collaborate with other musicians? Collaborations can only do good for you and your career.

HOW TO START DJING

What is the job of a DJ:

As you probably already know, a DJ, short for ‘Disc Jockey, simply selects and mixes pre-recorded music. It is not an easy task as it sounds; it takes several hours of preparation, practice, and music knowledge to make a successful performance in public.

From parties and festivals to weddings and birthdays, DJs are here to play, mix, scratch, and entertain the crowd with their music selection and performance. Or mostly with music, since there are “professional DJs” who are mostly known for throwing cakes. While it is true that you do not need formal education or diplomas to become a DJ, there are many lessons and courses you can follow to upgrade your skills. In 2020, the job of a DJ is much more than that. So let’s go more in-depth and start by finding your own musical style and character.

How to start getting into DJing:

  • Find Your Sound: First of all, select the genre of music you are interested in. If you haven’t found it already, then go to Beatport and check out dozens of favorite electronic music genres. Pick one, explore and listen profoundly and carefully to the tracks and playlists from various artists. Make an account and save your favorite tracks. If you can afford to buy, then I would highly recommend it. That way, you will add good quality tracks to your library, you will have extended music info(artist, composer, etc.), and most importantly, you will support the artist. An action you will appreciate more when you will become a music producer yourself.
  • Explore other Artists: Next, visit various audio platforms such as Mixcloud and SoundCloud and listen to DJ sets from live performances and radio shows. Most of the mixes have an available playlist, and that will help you understand when a song end and another one starts. Then ask yourself how the DJ mixes those songs, what techniques he/she used, what filters, what BPM(BitsPerMinute) the songs are playing, and what duration had the transition of the tracks. For that, of course, you need a basic understanding of a DJ mixer, and it’s capabilities.
  • Gain Experiences: Attend events and parties that advertise the music style you like. I’m sure, no matter how small your city is, there will be an event of Techno, House, Progressive, Electro, or any other at some point. That will be an excellent opportunity to start connections with people involved in the field, and who knows, maybe a future booking for you.

Pick The Right DJ Tools

Even if you can start DJing only with your smartphone or iPad, we would not recommend it. Two CD media players or DJ turntables, a DJ mixer, and headphones. That’s all the equipment you need to become a DJ.

Now, if you have a friend or colleague with a DJ setup would be ideal for you to start practicing. If not and you decide to invest in your DJ equipment, let’s see what you will need.

  • Sound sources: First of all, we need at least two audio sources, which can be cd-player, turntable, or PC with DJ controller. There are options with touch screens, USB ports, and many exciting features. Each of those options has its pros and cons, but it’s up to your preference and budget. I’m sure you are familiar with the CDJ series by Pioneer DJ, so if you want to find out more, check The Best DJ Media Player in the market.
  • DJ mixer: Then, we want a mixer to connect our sound sources. The job of a mixer is to consolidate the sound of two or more sound sources and mix them before you send the final sound to our outputs(speakers, monitors, headphones). With a DJ mixer, you can control up to four different inputs, and by control, I mean control volume, frequency level(low/middle/high) of each track, and effects such as reverb, delay, filter, and more. Most mixers also have a microphone input and “record out” output to record your live set. For a beginner, a big 4-channel mixer is not necessary. 2-channel mixer will do the job and get you ready for a live gig. To the mixer, you connect your pair of headphones; some mixers even offer two headphone ports for B2B sessions. That way, you will listen, beat-match, and equalize the tracks before the master output. Find out more in our article with The Best DJ Mixers for Beginners and the best professional DJ mixer.
  • Outputs: The last part of our setup is the sound outputs; DJ headphones & DJ speakers for home use. Connected to your mixer, they give us the final sound to you and the crowd. Furthermore, you listen to the monitors during you choose the next track with the help of your headphones and beat-match your final mix.

Introduction

This page covers some comments and opinions on the basic skills and attitude of a  DJ. How does a typical audience behave ? What they expect and how they react. Afterward we give a set of recurring, but wrong, ideas about ‘DJ-ing’.

The Audience

The audience is the most important of all. They are the final judge of what you’re doing. A party without people is no party. It is as simple as that. People can be at a party for a number of reasons

  • They are there because they are organizing the party.
  • People can come for social contact.
  • To take pictures of the room (I hate the Japanese tendency to run around with half a ton of lenses and photo machinery)
  • To drink & forget their problems. As the night goes on, people will become drunk or stoned (or both at the same time).
  • To dance and have a good time. These people are the ones which will be your judge.
  • People can also be there because they came along with other people. These people aren’t expecting anything. So don’t expect anything from them.

So, a party is not that difficult at all. Nevertheless some DJ’s have quite a strange picture of what’s going on at parties.

Dirty Trick: If you throw salt over the floor before people come in then the audience will drink more later on the evening.

Some Recurring Misconceptions

A number of DJ’s have the tendency to act as if they are god. This is wrong, they are not. A number of these wrong attitudes are stated below.

  • Playing music is not only using your intuition. The times you have an aha-erlebnis and you know what to play will be very small. If you play 300 songs overnight, 80% will be based on ratio. Only 20% on ‘feeling’. Especially in the beginning because you will be nervous and will need to fall back to your technical skills.
  • Do not expect everybody likes what you are playing. Often DJ’s are very explicit about the music they like and the music they don’t like. Don’t be like that. It is not because you are playing music, that other music is bad, also don’t insult somebody if he doesn’t like what you like. You are not the center from which music comes. (technically this is true, but it doesn’t go any further than that). There will be songs which you like, which nobody else will ever like, try to detect these and cut the crap, how painfully it might be to play a night without your favorite songs.
  • Learn different styles. New influences are absolutely welcome for a DJ.
  • For most DJ’s the following holds true: you are playing for the audience, the audience isn’t there for you. So, look at how people react to your music. You are playing music either for money, for personal reward or because nobody else wants to do it. In any case the result: ‘the audience stays and is happy’ is the most important.

And the worst kind of god-attitude that is embodied within current day DJ’s and Party-organizers is that:

  • DJ-ing with MP3’s ain’t cool.
  • It doesn’t sound the same.
  • Sorry, we only do turntables.
  • You don’t have to do anything yourself
  • and so on..

It is just required to point out that more and more DJ’s nowadays use CD’s, which weren’t cool enough a while ago, then we can safely say that this kind of ‘oops, I don’t like it when the world changes’-attitude won’t bring them any further.

Indexing and Selecting Your Music

Whether you have CD’s, vinyl or MP3’s, have an index at hand, sorted by style, annotate with the BPM and marked with the ‘sound-color’. This list should contain cross references between styles: ‘switch to this style using this song’. On top of this style list, also have a full index by name available every time you play.

Creating such a list takes a lot of time. You can easily spend months to create it, but when you have such a list it is your treasure. This will be half the money you make with DJ’ing. So never give this away.

Warning: A mistake often made is only to exploit the index and not to explore anymore. This is wrong because you might encounter better mixes. It’s also wrong because you’re definitely not looking at the audience, and above all it’s wrong because DJ’ing isn’t fun anymore this way.

Tempo

It is also a very good idea to accurately measure the tempo of all your songs (that is up to 1/100 of a BPM). Programs such as BpmDj, BpmCount or BpmLive can help you with this. The tempo in general is necessary to a) match the tempo of the new song to the old song and b) set the tempo of various effect boxes exactly to the current playing tempo.

Finding Cool Music

Tip #1: Comb the aisles of your local record store, hit all the online music outlets and follow the dots from song to song and artist to artist (this is the fun part of DJ’ing – research).

Tip #2: ask producers for previews of music and songs that will come out.

The sound quality, timbre, color is created by the original artist. A DJ cannot modify this much. Your set on the other hand belongs to you and the artist has little control over it. What audience you will see depends on the party organizers.

This means that if the songs is not good or boring that it is not your responsibility to fix it. You should select songs that are already good in the first place. How you weave them together in your set is on the other hand your task. Even 5 minutes of crappy songs can ruin your set, so be sure to use the best music you find.

New CD’s

Often if you buy a new CD you want to know what is usable on that CD. In general if I get a new CD I play it from front to back. If I survive that first play then it is a good record. If not then hopefully there were some excellent and remarkable good songs in it. Once this is done, I’m interested in finding mixes that fits to the good songs. This requires some fiddling. Which song can be linked to this cool song. Basic trial and error. I do however only work with the songs that are worth it. I don’t spend much time on songs that ‘might be good if handled like this or this’. Bottom-line is that these were not sufficiently good in the first place.

Select Music

A good strategy to play music for a specific audience is to rely on a number of prototype people you know that like the music that is typically played at a certain kind of party. Think: ‘would this person like this music ?’ This works quite well !

Welcome to Harmonic mixing

Harmonic mixing is easy to learn the technique that helps you sound perfect every time you play. It will offer you a creative way to mix songs together and most likely improve your DJ sets. Your next track will complement the one you’re playing, and your mix will sound musically correct.

Not to get me wrong, harmonic mixing is not a law of professional mixing. It is not a requirement to be a good DJ.

Elements of Harmonic Mixing

There are 2 actions required in order to have a smooth harmonically mixed DJ set.

1. Find the musical key of your tracks

At first, you need to analyze and figure out the musical key of your songs and label all your music so you can find the key quickly.

There are 3 main ways to find the musical key of your tracks.

  • Mixed in Key Software. Mixed In Key is a DJ tool that analyzes music files to determine the key of each song in seconds. Makes it easy to explore your music collection and find songs in the same or compatible keys. It also tags their metadata, so the results will show up on all your favorite DJ software and hardware.
  • Learn to find by ear. It will take time and practice, but with the help of a virtual piano, you will be able to find the key of a song by yourself. There are multiple videos on YouTube to guide you better than words.
  • Research. If your music genre is exclusively electronic you can find the music key of every track on Beatport.com. If not you can still research online and find out.

Don’t forget to write down the key results, so you can find the key quickly. If you use CDs, write it on top of them or an extra cheat sheet. If you use Dj software or Ableton Live, make sure to rename each song and add the key at the end of the track name.

2. Learn which keys sound good together

Harmonic mixing doesn’t mean you’re mixing in the same key for in your entire DJ set. It means you’re mixing two songs that are harmonically compatible. Thankfully, you don’t have to study music theory to learn which keys complement each other. All you really need to know is the musical key of every song you play as a DJ.