Hey folks,

Last year I dived into mixing vinyl for the first time after listening to DJ Sneak talk about analog and vinyl culture of DJing and house music in the 90s on Lenny Fontana's (that and I've been hoarding a list of 90s vinyl only house tracks I've wanted). Ever since then, I've been pretty fascinated at how fun, challenging vinyl mixing is, and trying to challenge myself to train the "motor memory" that vinyl disc jocks had back in the day - Last Night A DJ Saved My Life gave me immense respect for the disco and club DJs before today.

All while this was happening, I was mixing at a a few different gigs, and encountered random technical failures (i.e., previous DJ broke the cue button) that really threw me off and notice how limited my adaptability was - I really only beatmatched/mixed one way and sometimes relied on the visuals a lot (too much), and so wanted to challenge myself by removing some of the "help" that digital tech gives us. Anyway, fast forward a couple months and there was a bit of commotion about how some pop DJs were making mistakes in front of audiences because their CDJs weren't syncing the tunes which made me think, how much do we really train our adaptability/versatility? The technology is cool and helpful but maybe I ought to train a bit more of the "fundamentals" so I can mix without all the "help".

It got me thinking and I put together / filmed a few exercises after doing some research to help train a little more versatility for digital DJs by emulating some of the vinyl DJ techniques. It's not a comprehensive tutorial and doesn't cover the whole scope of versatility as a DJ but there are some challenging exercises that might shake up your workflow a bit.

It's a free course on Udemy you can checkout here: https://www.udemy.com/course/l2dj-versatility/

Do let me know if you have any thoughts/feedback!

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I run a little blog called learningtodj.com where I post different articles about DJ theory / mixing / and more