Trying our hand at DJ-ing

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In our previous poll, we asked our followers this question:

“To be a DJ all you really need is a few CD's and a stereo system.” - True or false?


100 percent of our followers on Facebook answered false! We were impressed at how our poll participants knew that being a DJ is so much more than just a few CDs and a stereo system.  

Indeed, turntablism is an art of using records or CDs to make your own music by scratching, juggling, sampling etc instead of just playing the songs. It requires hours of training, and a keen ear for music.

In the past week, as our team interviewed two local DJs at a DJ school, we got to experience this first hand through a free taster of DJ-ing from them!


These are some of the thoughts shared by our crew as we tried our hand scratching at the DJ deck and realised that DJ-ing is anything but easy.

“Why I can’t hear the rhythm? Can I drop the beat now” – Huang
 
 “Huh huh got beat? Oh no my hands cannot move together!” – Ding Ran
 
 “I thought DJ-ing was just pressing a few buttons. How wrong I was!” - Theron

 “Omg, and I thought I was coordinated. How do DJs do this stuff?!”- Jia Yi
 At the end of the session, not only did we develop a newfound admiration for the effort DJs make in putting out the best tunes on the dance floor, we also learnt some DJ terms from our patient DJ mentors! Check them out below!

5 New technical DJ terms we learnt
  1. Scratching – move the disc back and forth with your hand to alter the music, normally done with another song playing as a background. (This is what we learnt and it was already so hard to do it with style!) 
  2. Scribbling – a basic scratch technique where you just move back and forward around a sound
  3. Juggling – a technique used by turntablists to rearrange musical samples to sound like something new. This requires two copies of the same songs and lots of skill, or two different songs, lots of skill and incredible creativity.
  4. Crossfader - A transitional slide control on a mixer for fading in one channel while simultaneously fading out another.
  5. Pitch Fader – the control used to alter the speed or tempo of music.

Do you think you have what it takes to be a DJ? Share with us in the section below and stay tuned for our next blog post on the DJ-ing scene!


References
Deejay Sky (2013). DJ Terminology. DJ Techniques. Retrieved from http://dj.wikia.com/wiki/DJ_terminology/lingo

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