6:40
What gear, and what music to put on it
On YouTube this video is called Dj help,What gear and what music ???
What this lesson teaches
He opens by admitting he does not know every piece of equipment on the market and cannot tell you whether to buy one particular deck over another. What he offers instead is two rules for deciding, and both are better than a recommendation would have been.
Never buy it in the first six months
Two reasons, and they stack.
The first is price. A new product is at its most expensive on release and will very often be substantially cheaper within a few months. Waiting costs you nothing but patience.
The second is the one people miss: it has not been road tested. A manufacturer under pressure to ship finds the real faults after release, in the hands of people using the thing nightly, and the first production run is where those faults live. He has seen whole batches go back.
His test for whether something has survived is social rather than technical, and it is the right one. Wait six months, find people who have been gigging with it - carried it in and out of vans, set it up in cold halls, spilled things on it - and ask specific questions. Does the pitch still work? How is the arm? Has it been back?
His own evidence is a Technics deck upstairs that is twenty-five years old and still working well. You do not find that out from a review written in week one.
Be honest about how serious you are
The other buying question he asks is how much of your life this is going to be.
Half an hour on a Saturday with friends round? Then two hundred pounds of equipment is exactly right and there is nothing wrong with it.
Something you intend to pursue? Then the cheap package is the wrong purchase, and he has watched people locally make it - spend three or four hundred, break or outgrow it within six months, then buy Technics anyway and try to sell the first lot for a fraction.
The mistake is not spending too little. It is spending an amount that matches neither answer.
Watching your foot
The second half of the video is about music, and the method in it is genuinely good.
If you do not know what you want to play, go into a record shop, stay as long as you can stand, listen to as many kinds of music as you can - and watch your foot.
When it starts tapping, that is your music. Whatever it turns out to be. House, drum and bass, hip-hop, reggae, Kylie Minogue - he is explicit that it does not matter and that he is not joking about the last one.
The reason this works is that it reads a response you have not had time to edit. Taste arrives as a physical reaction before it becomes an opinion, and by the time you are deciding whether a record is any good you are already deciding whether it is the sort of thing you want to be seen liking. Your foot has no opinion about that.
Why copying your friends is a technical problem, not a social one
He is blunt about following a group into a genre because they are all into it, and the reason goes beyond authenticity.
A DJ's real instrument is their ear for the music they are playing - knowing where a track is going, which record answers the one before it, what a crowd will feel in eight bars' time. That knowledge accumulates from years of listening because you wanted to, and it cannot be assembled by studying a genre dutifully.
Play the music you actually respond to and you start with a decade of that knowledge already in place. Play what your friends play and you are learning the records and the feel at the same time, from zero.
That, as he puts it, is the difference between being a relatively good DJ and a genuinely good one.
Contents of the video
0:00 The DJ Tutor tutorial by Ellaskins, Again, I'm going to be straightfor
Right, g'day folks. It's Tuesday morning here in Wales and I've just been for a bike ride and it's fucking cold out there. But right, the reason for this video, no decks, nothing like that, possibly one of the most important bits of information as a new DJ you will ever have in your entire life. Reason being... The DJ Tutor tutorial by Ellaskins, Again, I'm going to be straightforward with you. I do not know every single bit of gear, OK? The information I can give you is this, OK? If you want to know, should I buy, I don't know, Turntable SC5 Stroke 3 or the Newmark deck or this, that and the other, well what you need to do there, again think about it logically, I'm no genius, there are thousands and thousands of bits of kit out there and I'll tell you what, if I knew everything about every single bit of kit,
I would not be here now. I'd be driving around in a huge Porsche. No, I wouldn't because I don't like them. But I'd be a multi-millionaire. The only advice I can give you is on equipment I do know about. What I would suggest you do is that you go on the internet and you actually do some research, OK? Very simple, do a bit of research. Also, on the basis of that, here's a philosophy I work by. Every day now there are new items coming out, new fantastic gadgets. Right, they're always very pricey because they're new, OK? Now think about it, what's the bloody point in buying a new piece of kit that's just come out for 500 quid? Two reasons you shouldn't buy it. One is because it's very expensive, two or three months down the line it could be half price. The next one is it hasn't been road tested, OK?
1:59 It on this point of view
Because, right, look at it on this point of view. New iPod, that comes out and you think, right, let's buy a new iPod. And then you realise, two months later, three months later, it's now, when you paid £300 for it, $400, two months later it's now £100, $50, OK? So you've lost money. The other thing is, is that six months down the line, all of them are getting sent back to the factory because the makers were so, they wanted them out so quickly, they've actually found there are a lot of faults with them, OK? Road test them. In other words, why do I still use Technics turntables? Because they've been going for years. I've got one that's 25 years old and it still works perfectly, OK? So that makes sense to me, alright? Wait till it's been road tested. In other words, if a new piece of kit comes out, wait six months. Let it have six months on the road so it's battered and broken and whatnot, and then ask people, does it still work? Is it still fine? Does the pitch still work? What's the arm like? Does the needle break? I don't know.
Ask questions, OK? So with regards kit, alright, make sure it's road tested first by other people. Do not buy the newest piece of kit coming out because you never know, it could be perfect. It may last a thousand years. Then again, because people don't know, it might only work six months and then it's broken and it's back to the manufacturer, OK? So think about that, OK? Also, when you're buying kit, alright... I would recommend don't go for belt-driven turntables. That's one important factor because that belt eventually can wear away and it's knackered, alright? You've got to buy a new belt. Always go for direct drive, OK? And also, when you're buying gear, what you have to consider, do you want to do it for a bit of a hobby? In other words, you've got lots of other hobbies in your life. DJing is like, well, we'll give it sort of half an hour on a Saturday night. If that's the case, then fine. Spend 200 quid and buy a little setup.
4:19 What music should I go for?
Get your mates around and have a bit of fun. Don't do that if you want to go in it big time, because I've seen so many people, and this is just locally, they haven't had the money, they've had 300 quid, four or five hundred dollars, and they thought, right, let's go and buy some gear. So they bought a package, and believe me, six months' time, it's either broken or they've realised they've got too good for it, and then they thought, right, I'll buy Technics turntables, and they thought, right, I'm going to sell these now and get some money. What music should I mix in? What music works? What should I mix? What music should I go for? Well, believe me, when you are born, the music you like is here, right? It's with you from day one. You are the only person that knows the music that you will like. What I want you to do, if you don't know, if you don't know what music you want to play, I want you, with an open mind, to go into a record shop and I want you to stay...
As long as you can in that record shop, and I want you to listen to as many styles and types of music, okay? Now then, I want you then while you listen to that music to watch your foot, alright? Sounds bizarre. As soon as your foot starts tapping to a certain type of music, I don't care whether it's Kylie Minogue, that is for you, alright? Drum and bass, house, hip-hop, reggae, ragga, soul, doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's pointless. You... Copying your friends. Just because there's a group of them and they're into hardhouse techno, yeah, I'm going to be into hardhouse techno. Forget it. You have to go with what your heart tells you to go for. There are so many copycat DJs out there who just because ten friends are into hardhouse, they're into hardhouse. Yeah, they're following their friends, they're not following their heart. It is so important because that could be the difference between you being...
A relatively good DJ or a fucking good, fantastic DJ. Follow your heart, go with what your heart tells you music-wise and don't forget gear by good gear. If it's coming up to Christmas, which it is now at this point, hassle your parents, get a few quid off them, alright? Hassle your aunties, your uncles, your nephews and nieces. Always buy good gear, music-wise, go with what your heart tells you. Thank you for watching. Bye bye.
This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.
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