DJ Tips
When I joined Twitch in the summer of 2019, it was a ghost town for DJs. At that time it was strictly a community for gamers, and I only joined because I saw a way to repurpose it for my needs. I played a lot of outdoor b-boy shows, and friends of mine around the […]
As the year comes to a close, I’ve been reviewing some of the questions I’m most commonly asked on Reddit and Twitch, and more than any other, the topic I’m always addressing is music organization. I know that subject matter has been addressed here previously, but that was before my time at Heavy Hits, and […]
Thanksgiving is over and Black Friday is a day of the past. That means the Holiday Season is upon us! Or, as some say, cuffing season; to DJs it’s something more serious: engagement season! Is it the time spent indoors due to cold weather, the Christmas spirit, or the heart-shaped boxes of candy on Valentine’s […]
A staple for turntablists for years was the switch on the mixer that toggled between the phono input and the line input. Originally designed to allow a DJ to easily switch between two devices plugged into the same channel, and get double-duty from one channel on a mixer, the switch was quickly repurposed by scratch […]
Today let’s talk some DJ 101. This is applicable to any DJ who hires out for performances, whether you are a wedding DJ, club DJ, festival DJ, or any other flavor of DJ. If you are trying to get people to pay you to show up and spin tunes, keep reading. We’ve all been ghosted. […]
If you play at bars or clubs with one set format, your hands are pretty much tied when it comes to changing up the musical genres in your set. If you play a hip hop club, you’re expected to play hip hop, if it’s techno night, you’d better spin techno all night. If you have […]
I’ll cut to the chase: I am not an EDM DJ. I know next to nothing about that scene, or that music. I am aware that what used to be called house music, or even simply electronic music, has now been subdivided into dozens, maybe hundreds, of categories, but I can’t tell progressive house from […]
An unheralded advantage to pulling tracks from a properly managed record pool is having access to quantized versions of classic dance tracks. If you mix only modern electronic or hip hop music, just about everything you play likely comes already quantized. It was made on a computer, and even if the producer opted to swing […]
One thing that you learn as you grow up within the DJ industry is that there are a lot more facets to the trade than you realised as an outsider. And a lot of the best DJs have fingers in more than one of these pies, for all sorts of different reasons. Today, we are […]
Something that I am extremely passsionate about is one of the more unglamourous aspects of being a DJ. But it is also one of the most important. Backing up your data. Primarily, this means your music library. But it extends beyond that. Your file system, the way you arrange your crates, your invoices, artwork, photos from […]