What is a turntabalist battle set?

0:00 Set where a DJ is concerned

Alright folks, I've had someone ask a question, what is the DJ battle set? What's this all about? Okay, now then, when we talk about a set where a DJ is concerned, we normally talk about a compilation of music they've put together, whether it be 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, 60 minutes or 90 minutes house set. Anyway, the difference is with a DJ battle set... In certain parts of the world, what you'll have is you'll actually have DJs battling it out between each other. I think that's where the terminology of a battle set originated. Now, what happens is simply this. You'll have two sets of turntables opposite each other quite often, crowd in the middle and you'll have one DJ doing his little set that will maybe only last for one or two minutes, sometimes even 30 seconds. And then all of a sudden...

The other DJ will start and he'll do his 1, 2 minutes 30 seconds and then back to the other one etc. In the middle there are the crowd and all around the crowd are watching and basically what happens is this, the crowd hype up the DJ. The crowd will always go for the DJ who's the best. That's where we get the terminology of a DJ battle set. Now then the difference between a DJ battle set like I've said earlier as opposed to a club DJ doing his set. Club DJ say he'll do a house set for 60 or 90 minutes. The DJ battle set, what they'll do is they'll only do, like I said, 30 seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, a couple of minutes. So it's almost that DJ hasn't got three hours to do a set where he can just slowly glide music from one to the other. He's got quite often two records, one, two, and he's got to do some beat juggling and make music.

1:41 All he's got is about a minute or so to impress the crowd

All he's got is about a minute or so to impress the crowd. He hasn't got time to mess around putting records on left, right and centre. He's got two records to mess around with. That's it. Now what I'm going to do, I've got a couple of tunes here. This is Roxanne Shantae here. It's the instrumental version of Have A Nice Day. And then we've got here Onyx Throw Your Guns In The Air. Ellaskins, The DJ Tutor. In no way at all am I a turntablist, okay? No way at all. Like I've said in previous lessons, I totally and utterly admire people who can just beat juggle and that kind of stuff. I can't do it. From a scale of 1 to 10, if Cuba was at number 10, I would be about minus 7, okay? So anyway, we'll check it on and let's see what happens. Okay, this one's Rox Unchanted, here we go. Let's admit it, you actually got a comment just on the laugh factor for that, but anyway, forget all that what I did.

Thanks for watching and don't forget to practice and enjoy.

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