We’ve been teaching digital DJing since 2010 and we’ve seen all kinds of challenges come and go as the industry has matured. However, five problems have hung around all the way through. These five issues with digital DJing – especially for beginners – are painfully real, and can lead to expensive errors, wasted time, and even people giving up on learning entirely. Here they are:
- It’s easy to make expensive mistakes – Back in the day, you could only buy one thing: two turntables and a mixer, job done. Now there are five major DJ software platforms and countless gear systems of every type, each with its own set of gotchas, so it’s all too easy to buy the wrong thing and only find out when it’s too late
- You need to be a bit of an IT whizz as well as a DJ – Installing drivers, setting up audio outputs, analysing and preparing your music files, exporting playlists to the cloud, troubleshooting software when it plays up… that’s a lot of computer admin before you’ve mixed a single track.
- It’s full of hidden costs – Software subscriptions and updates, music subscriptions, helper apps to fix things that shouldn’t be broken in the first place, and gear that feels out of date the moment something new comes along – or worse, stops working when the manufacturer decides it’s too expensive to keep supporting
- There’s nobody to tell you what to actually do – Loops, stems, samplers, dozens and dozens of effects: how are you supposed to know how and when to use them, or whether you should be using them at all? It’s overwhelming, and a far cry from two turntables, which were hard but at least simple
- Half the time, the crowd doesn’t know what you’re doing anyway – Back in the day, a DJ held up a record, put it on, mixed it in, and everyone cheered. Now half the room thinks you’re making the music there and then, and the simple pleasure of skilfully sharing music you love with people who understand what you’re up to gets lost
Don’t get me wrong…
Digital DJing is great – just look at the name of our school. We’ve always said that where technology and music meet is where the fun is. But these problems are real, and we know that because our students tell us about them all the time.
If you’re just starting out, our new How To DJ Fast course fixes every one of these problems, and then some. It’s the first course we’ve made for complete beginners in several years.
It’s also full circle for us. Our very first DJ course, back in 2010, was called How To Digital DJ Fast. These days you can drop the “digital”, but the aim is the same as it was then: helping true beginners get off on the right foot.
