Your Questions: Why Doesn’t Your Beginners Course Tell Us What Music To Play?

How To Digital DJ Fast course student Kelly writes: “I am looking for some help in this course in regards to material, as I do not have a library of digital music and would like to practise these skills that I have observed in the course videos to create a foundation of understanding and technique. It would also be helpful for a list of music that is key and tempo compatible for experimentation to reduce the frustration and needless waste of time while trying to learn the basics of skills.

“As mentioned in the introduction video of the course, a student should be able to develop from a novice without skills to someone adept enough to be able to debut in a matter of four weeks. Although I enjoy music of many genres, I have not paid much attention to artists, groups or genres of music besides the very general. I have no digital library of music at home; I mostly listen to music on the radio in the car which rarely gives information on artists or names of songs…”

Digital DJ Tips says:

Thanks for writing Kelly!

The reason we don’t formally list the music we happen to use for demo purposes in our Foundation course How To Digital DJ Fast is that the most fundamental thing about DJing – way before mixing or key matching or beat sync or anything else – is what music you choose to play. That’s why the course early on gives you the tools and coaching to work out what music to collect for YOU. Those tracks will be different to the tracks chosen by absolutely anyone else.

We would never give lists of tunes and say “this is what you need to DJ with”, because 1. They’d be out of date immediately, 2. It differs from person to person, crowd to crowd, city to city, mood to mood, night to night, 3. We’d be shortchanging you by not coaching you to do that important work yourself.

It’d be like a photography course saying: “Here’s how to take a landscape… and here’s the GPS coordinates of the place where we took this example. The only way for you to learn is to go exactly there and do what we did.” Even if you could, would you ever find the weather, light and so on the same as when the example was taken? Of course not. And you’d be missing the point of the photography training in even trying to.

So to be absolutely clear: The music used in our beginners course is to demonstrate the skills – you are 100% meant to have your own music by the time you reach that point in the course, which is why we teach music discovery before mixing, and tell you as much. That way, not only do you gain the skills, but you’re building your set towards that first gig a few short weeks away.

If you find yourself at the Mixing section of our beginner course without any music of your own, it’s because you haven’t followed the preceding Music section of the course properly and done the work needed to move on. It’s very important that you do that. In your case, it’s clear that developing a system for finding and collecting music is a task you need to start – don’t jump this step.

I understand how it must feel being asked to do that work, but far from being a “needless waste of time”, building a collection of music you love that you want to DJ with is actually 80% of what DJing is about. Please trust us – this is the best way to do it, and absolutely the fastest way to be doing the seemingly impossible: DJing within four short weeks!

Our How To Digital DJ Fast course contains training to help new DJs find music thay love and want to DJ with, but this is a good opportunity to throw it open to our readers, too. Do you remember being where Kelly is now? What did you do to build that first core few tunes in your collection? Any advice you’d like to pass on? Feel free to do so in the comments.