5 Habits That Will Make You A Better DJ Fast

If you’re starting out, or coming back to DJing after a break, there are five habits that will get you good quickly – and most have nothing to do with gear. They’re about how you practise, what you play, and who you play for. Skip them and you’ll stall. Build them in early and your sets will improve faster than you thought possible. Here they are.

1. Stop fretting over the tech

DJing is a craft, and the craft doesn’t need much. Two music sources, a way to blend between them, headphones to listen to the one the audience can’t hear, and speakers so the audience has something to listen to. That’s it. Any modern DJ system gives you all of that and far more.

The trap for new DJs (and DJs new to digital) is thinking they need every feature, every latest controller, every new software innovation. They don’t. The best DJs can play on anything, and the best gear won’t make you a good DJ. Stop fretting and start practising.

2. Halve your music library, then halve it again

Most people who love DJing also love collecting music, and that’s fine. But the DJ side of your collection should stay lean. If you haven’t played a track in the last year and you’re not likely to play it in the next, it doesn’t belong in there.

A good carpenter doesn’t carry every tool ever invented. They carry the ones they need, the ones they know they can use well, and they do better work because of it. The same applies to your tracks.

If you’re working towards an hour-long set and you’ll play around 25 tracks in it, you only need about 50 tracks to choose from. Learn those 50 well and your set will be immeasurably better than if you spend the next three months packing your library with thousands of tunes you’ll never play.

Mobile DJs and others who play varied crowds can split their collection in two: a core library that follows these rules, and an “everything else” library for the odd request you’ll play once or twice in a career. Those rarities shouldn’t sit next to your go-tos.

3. Record everything you do

You’re the only person in the world who doesn’t hear your DJing the way it actually sounds. You’re too busy doing it, and you’re too close to it. The fix is to record your sets and listen back once you’ve forgotten the finer points of what you did. At that point, you’re hearing yourself the way anyone else would. You’ll spot whether the order of tracks worked, whether the transition you thought was a mess actually did the job, whether the bit you were most proud of holds up once the adrenaline has worn off.

The mistake is waiting for the “right” practice session to record. The moment you decide “this is the one”, you’ll get stage fright, over-invest in it, and quietly stop pressing record. So treat it like the cameras on a reality TV show – leave it rolling every time. After a while you’ll forget it’s there.

When you’re done, drop the recording into a WAV editor, cut out the gaps and the mess-arounds, and listen back next time you’ve got a spare half hour. It’s the single biggest piece of advice I’d give any DJ wanting to improve fast.

4. Play in front of someone

Producers know the trap of never finishing a track. DJs have the equivalent trap: never playing in front of anyone. Months or years vanish into perfecting skills nobody on a dancefloor actually cares about.

DJing is a team game. It’s played between you and the crowd. No crowd, no game. You only learn what tracks really work (compared to the ones you think will work), how to read energy, what order to put tunes in, by doing it with other people in the room.

If you’re DJing purely for yourself, fair enough. But almost every “for fun” DJ I’ve met still wants someone to nod along, dance, or tell them it sounded good. So give yourself a real target. A live stream. A house party. A recorded mix for a friend. Even a mix made just for you to listen to in the car counts. The point is to deliver something to someone.

5. Love the music you play

The saddest DJs I meet are the ones who play music they don’t understand, for crowds whose taste they don’t share. The whole thing becomes a drag. The best DJs love what they play, properly.

Notice I didn’t say play the music you love. If I only played the music I loved the most, you’d hear the same narrow selection every time, because I know exactly what my favourite tracks are. But I like a lot of other kinds of music too, which means whatever set I’m playing, I can find a way to love the music in it.

A good DJ is a student of the dancefloor – of what makes people move, and why. That alone teaches you to respect the tracks you’re playing. And a funny thing happens when you spend hours pulling tracks apart in practice: you fall in love with them. You start seeing why they work, where the magic sits, what they do to a room.

If your tastes really are limited, that’s fine. Just know your gigs will be limited too. And if you’re playing purely for fun, of course you should only use music you love – otherwise what’s the point? Just remember: “playing the music you love” and “loving the music you play” are not the same thing. The first is self-indulgent. The second makes for happy DJs and happy crowds.

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