Darrin Johnson
English 111 Composition I, Section W3
23 May 2012
The Art Of Djing
Most people find a passion sometime in life that they just love. Whether it’s an activity, sport, hobby, group membership, job, etc. it’s something that means a lot to that person. A year back I found a passion of mine that I think I’m going to hold onto forever. That passion is disc jockeying or also referred to as djing. Since I was a young child I’ve been pretty much as obsessed with music as one could get. I was in percussion in middle school, and listening to music almost constantly whenever I could since 5th grade. Finally in my senior year of high school I decided I wanted to check out djing and see what it was all about and since then I’ve been absolutely in love with it.
At the time, I had several friends into djing so when I would hangout with them I would just fool around with their equipment. I got to use many different controllers, midis, and programs and also see many different djs perform to have the knowledge on the subject I have today. After much time spent djing for fun and researching how to get better I feel like I know the basic concept of djing pretty well.
The very most important part of djing is what music you play. They say “A Dj is no better than their music selection” and that quote is totally true. If one doesn’t have music to keep everyone interested and having fun, they aren’t doing their job. A dj needs to have a broad selection of music because different audiences require different types of music to be entertained. For example a wedding needs to have a selection of fast and slow dancing classics rather than club music.
It is obviously very important you know how to use your dj equipment and software but beat matching is the most import dj technique to learn. Beat matching is achieved by matching the bpm’s (beats per minute) of the next song with the one previous while transitioning. The reason this is so important is because without similar bpm’s songs will not flow and will sound choppy when combining. It is possible to transition songs without beat matching and have it flow but regardless it is critical for a dj to know how to beat match and to do it while transitioning because a dj can’t be successful without it.
Another very important part of djing that I already touched on a little is transitions.