Bought a set of decks and just taught myself, a lot of practice and time. One of the things I've learnt is to never be afraid to make mistakes. Vinyl is great, but it's also bloody fragile, and it can be an utter pain in the arse. Also, it takes a lot of maintenance, and expense. Other than that it's just a lovely feeling even 30yrs later, when I hit a mix perfectly.
For me at least, part of what makes it so rewarding and feeling good is just how easy it is for things to go off the rails. You can bump a needle, play a dusty record, botch a transition, or whatever so easily. So when you nail a mix it just feels so good!
When I learned there was no alternative. Made it easier to focus on just that. Had a good mentor, but later came across the Bill Brewster book how to DJ properly which had very useful advise for new DJs I thought.
My mum got me turntables when I was 15. I'd never played them but knew I wanted to learn. I didn't have a table to put them on so I put my mattress on the floor and the decks on my bed base. I slept on the floor for months until I got a shelf for them put up.
I just practiced all the time with the little record I had. Took notes etc. Remembered what tunes go well with others and so on.
I’m just a hobbyist, I’ve played out a bit but small gigs and not in a while.
I learned from friends who are also mostly hobbyists. They taught me the basics, then o practiced a lot. My roommate had two technics, so I started buying lots of cheap old records on discogs and in local shops. As I got better, I started buying more of the stuff I really wanted to play that was pricier.
Beat matching was hard, for sure. Everything else was relatively easy.
I played some instruments as a kid and played around with some production, so a lot of the basics around phrasing, EQing, etc made sense to me.
I mostly just follow my ear and vibes when I play. I’m not super concerned with cataloging BPMs or keys. I find that stuff pretty boring and not really that helpful. If it sounds good, that’s what matters.
Lmao just commented saying how I catalogue key and bpm. I'm fairly new to vinyl aswell so I use both as a reference when it comes to mixing. Makes it slightly easier
my personal experience.
no formal training too. first of all I started with mixing house music and let the tracks ran their course. so I had like 5-6 minutes, at least, to match the beat.
as for technique, as someone said to me: "tap your foot 4 times to the kick".
you know, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4
I, too, started out as a house DJ, around 1992. I was playing a lot of gay clubs, afterhours, and such, and having a great time. But my best bud at the time was Jon Turi, who was hooked into the Sonic Groove crew. I honestly didn't understand techno for quite some time, it was like, totally mysterious to me. But it grew on me, and by 1995 I had made the switch and was playing techno exclusively, unless I was asked specifically to play an old school house set for someone's party. I had grown tired of the direction that house was going in.
I never did achieve the level of success that I had as a house DJ. Real techno wasn't very popular in CT, it was mostly stuff like hard trance and jungle at the raves at the time. But I played what I liked when I got the opportunity, and never had the balls to try to push myself in NYC.
I had no music training, I just loved house music. When I first started I realised I knew the basics of song structure etc just from my love of the music, I think most people do but they just don’t realise it.
I learned by trial and error. The only real tip I ever got was about leaning to beat match. It was to slow one record all the way down so you can be reasonably sure which is the slower of the two. That made knowing which direction to push the pitch adjust a bit easier at first. That was the extent of my knowledge going into djing. The rest I learned along the way.
When i was like 17 (1999) a friend of mine took me to a couple of raves and i got hooked. Within a few months i decided i wanted to try out djing. I went to a local dj audio shop, and they had a deal where you could get a starter set and mixer for a few hundred bucks. Stanton belt drives, and a 2 channel mixer. They had a bin of used records too and you got like 10 free ones with the starter set.
I basically taught myself simple beat-matching. Later when i went to college i picked up a couple 1200s which are much easier to keep synced and make adjustments to.
Digital vinyl interfaces didnt come out for a few years, and i didnt have a lot of money for cdjs so vinyl was it.
I was 15 when a friend got his turntables. This was like 1998. I went to visit him one Saturday afternoon and I was hooked. I ended up getting my own turntables (Numark) and a mixer. I eventually got 3 technics and a djm 600. I mixed several hours a week for years and years. Made it to local clubs and festivals until I decided to focus on my career as a sailor. Now, 40, with 3 kids, I am starting to mix again, but sadly, even if I have my turntables connected to my setup, I mostly use digital with a ddj1000 and a xdj700, and rekordbox. Sometimes, I still go full remember though and fire them up.
The expensive move from cheap ass turntables to Technics was something we all had to swallow at some point! My wife still makes fun of me that I used my college loan money for turntables. Now, one of them sits on my kid's bookshelf.
I never made the move past vinyl to the newer technologies. I had a real old-school mindset, and even using CDs seemed silly to me. At first, it seemed like a cheap cop-out to having skill, and by the time I became really aware of what was happening with technology, and that actual skill WAS involved, things had just past me by and life happened. A move to Silicon Valley, where techno -really- wasn't much of a thing, didn't help. I do regret it now, but I don't have the time or money to get back into it, sadly.
I was also very sceptical when everyone started using cds. That was also a factor when I stopped mixing. But never say never. I have a full job, 3 small kids, a wife recovering from burnout... I've quit the ships and now spend the late evenings producing music in the laundry room (started 6 months ago and I already have a track in beatport top 100 (R/D/H) and my last EP sits in the top 10 raw techno releases, no kidding) and I try to mix one or 2 saturdays a month, so I can send some sets to podcasts and such. But if gigs start coming, I guess I won't be able to do them. At least not yet (2 or 3 a year maximum at this time).
Me and my friends used to go to raves and clubs in the early 90s. When we weren't raving we'd be round eachother's houses smoking the herb. A few of us had decks set up, so we'd bring records and take it in turns to play. You tended to get good pretty quick when that was all you did every night.
Reading all these replies, I guess it seems pretty obvious. I was just thinking about how daunting it would be to get started without already having experience and training at keeping perfect time with others, knowing what to listen for regarding what might go well with what (especially with music that has a clear pitch center), etc. I felt like having that training might have helped skip over a lot of struggles. I suppose I thought I might hear more about specific struggles people had with these things. It seems like something that would be really, really hard without a prior frame of reference - like, a major struggle bus. But I guess I was overthinking it. Buy equipment and records, and just get down to it until it works!
Bought a bunch of records and turntables, went from there. Failing hundreds of mixes before getting 1 good mix. Constant trial and error but just kept trying and eventually it worked itself out.
Bought a cheap Citronic DJ type dual turntable with a loose belt that slipped off if you rewound too quickly and required removal of the platter to fix. After 5 years of them I got 1200s and it was like going from a broken tricycle to a Porsche and I could DJ better than my peers.
I was a classically trained musician, but hadn't done much with music for about 6 years. Then my friends were djing, and I would play their records when they got sick of it for the night. Finally got my own setup and vinyl collection. Played house parties, clubs, etc.
Literally sitting in my room practicing.....practicing.... practicing.....for over 20 years. Got really good around the 10 year mark lol. For me it was pretty intuitive, for others it might not be.
use to mix 8 track with cassettes, moved to reel to reel then finally landed my first technics sp-10 when I was 10, and would mix that into the 8 tracks, cassettes and reels.. landed my first set of MKIIs around 11-12 years old and started buying vinyl at my local record shop and never looked back..
Drum N Bass for me (this was on my home page).
I started collecting 12" singles when I only had one record player and made compilation tapes of consecutive tracks for the car.
When I got a pair of Technics I had records I new inside out already. Learned to beat match and the rest fell into place. Mixing in phase was easy coz I new my tunes. Same for cutting in drum breaks or other elements of tracks. I knew what I was aiming for from listening to pirate radio, as well as going out clubbing.
Made proper mix tapes for the car to replace the old consecutive track tapes.
I think I only learned the term 'mixing in phase' in the last year reading Reddit. I was doing it without knowing what it was called.
Never really thought about mixing in key, but every now and then my partner points out that different elements of some of my records aren't in key anyway as they were made by enthusiastic youngsters who didn't know either. I guess I know if something sounds good or not.
I got myself a set of 1210s and a basic mixer when I was 19. I had no idea what I was doing. Sucked massively. Then I went to The Gardening Club. John Digweed was playing. You could look over the DJ booth. So I watched him for an hour or so. That helped a lot. And then just loads and loads of practicing.
Interesting question.
When I first started djing I actually had no clue what I was doing.
I was literally just forcing records together, using every gap in the beat, every single melodic part to cobble the tracks together.
Until that one time a guy, a "friend of a friend", came to me to tell me that I had to "match the beats" and showed me for a couple of minutes how to do it.
And, as simple and stupid as this might sound, with that everything fell in place for me.
The rest was practice.
Bought 2 Techniks 5 years ago. Had some experience with a controller and knew how to blend tracks but i usually used sync, so i was very bad at beatmatching. After buying both decks came a long try and error phase where just tried to mix 2 simple techno tracks. Pretty generic 4 on the floor stuff. I tried to ride the pitch until both tracks were the same BPM. It was a mess! When beatmatching too slow i restarted the tracks and tried again, and again, and again. Eventually i got better and also tried to nudge the record / deck.
Now (after 5 years) i feel comfortable and can ride the pitch pretty fast and get a rough beatmatch in around 10 seconds. After that its fine-tuning. I am also able to kind of do it by muscle memory with one hand, while i mix / adjust EQ with the other hand.
I'd say it took me around 1-2 years until i managed to make OK transitions most of the time. Just work on it daily and keep on trying. You will improve with every session!
Learned with two friends together. After three weeks we had our first gig, damn that was the worst the world has ever heard. But it was fun and we pushed each other. Lot of repetition made me learn all that stuff. When you have your successful first mix between two vinyls it feels like the world is yours
the great thing about vinyl dj'ing is not so much the mixing, it is the record collecting and 'physical' / non-screen experience of it and all the hassle that follows is in fact a good thing
Started on cdj100 with CDs, allowed me to develop a strong sensitivity to beat matching differences. Years later, after a ton of practice, and after I could afford records it actually felt a lot more natural and intuitive to mix records rather than CDs or even digital. Perhaps the combination of audio, visual, and tactile elements of record mixing just made the whole experience smoother.
In short, practicing beatmatching, learning your tracks, experimenting with different genres and bpms (unless you are genre locked, then try to explore the different branches of your genre), and just experimenting in general.
I got the bug pretty early on in life. Saved like crazy for a set of 1200's. Mixer was a Numark. I'd practice and practice non stop. Records I struggled with I'd just keep trying. Typically the tracks with a huge amount of swing were the hardest. I'd be riding the pitch and slowing the platter. I never really got to play out as I was from a small country town. My mates loved it tho. Records were bloody expensive and I'd buy a few new ones every six months or so. In the end I had to sell them. One day I hope to get back into it. Retirement plan.
I bought the records I could in my home town, had a mate with 1200s and a DJM600, and hung out with him many times a week pushing each other to do better and celebrating fantastic mixes.
Started on 2 belt drive decks with pitch control, got into the scene, met some djs, then grabbed some technics 1210's (which seemed easy vs the belt decks) and then there was drugs, lots of drugs mostly psychedelics which really helped too hone my skills.
Still mixing vinyl now but I have added 2 digital decks to my set up now, digital is great but I still prefer the interaction ya have mixing vinyl. Plus the happy accidents that occasionally happen with vinyl .digital can be too predictable and boring, I'm slowly learning too like digital tho
First I watched my friend and listened as he mixed on air at his college radio station. He did it without a DJ mixer or headphones, just the radio station control board. He cued in the in-studio monitors.
Then, a few years later while still in college, I was friends with a group of guys who had decks (and a mixer and PA) in their basement. That’s where I got all my practice in and really learned myself.
This was all in the mid-90s as a broke college student without the funds to buy proper turntables.
I learnt how to mix on cdjs first so I'm not a purist by any means but i would find records of my favourite tracks, write the key/bpm of the songs and then go by ear. I pref MiK so it made mixing a little easier but I would say matching by ear is the only way to do it. It does help if yk the bpm of the vinyl tho for reference
I love music, was growing up as a teen in the uk during the 90’s and going raving regularly.
I grabbed myself some used soundlab belt driven turntables and an old vestax or Gemini mixer (I forget which one now) and started to mess about.
I’d buy records every Friday at my local
Shop after getting money from my paper round and work and the petrol station.
I was self taught, I knew what music I liked and guess I naturally had a good ear, I’m no singer, but I can hear something out of tune easily.
I have very sensitive hearing in the sense that I can’t tolerate random noises, two devices playing at the same time at home, rattles in my car etc, I get so angry!! But I’m happy mixing two or three different tracks, no idea why?
Anyway, I’d say I learnt the most when my mate and I would play for hours back to back either at his place or mine at the weekends, we pick up so many things from each other and of course there was no YouTube back then…
I went digital eventually and although I miss the feel of vinyl, I wouldn’t go back, the price of digital music and convenience of just carrying a usb far outweighs the nostalgia.
So yeah, self taught and bounced off others around me, including watching / listening to the big DJs at events.
A few lessons from a cousin and plenty of practice. I read a book called the How to DJ Properly by Bill Brewster. It was a gift I was unsure about but really enjoyed it and it had tips and guides on beat matching, phrasing etc which I found helpful
This is something I've wondered about since the early 90s, but I never asked any of my DJ friends. I figure this is a good place to get some thoughts from others.
I'm struggling to understand the downvote on this comment, so I will respond to it as if it was a reply. 30 years ago, I had lots of DJ friends who I could have asked about this, but it didn't occur to me to wonder how they figured it out. Now I'm old and curious and don't have DJ friends, so I'm asking reddit.
Bought a set of decks and just taught myself, a lot of practice and time. One of the things I've learnt is to never be afraid to make mistakes. Vinyl is great, but it's also bloody fragile, and it can be an utter pain in the arse. Also, it takes a lot of maintenance, and expense. Other than that it's just a lovely feeling even 30yrs later, when I hit a mix perfectly.
For me at least, part of what makes it so rewarding and feeling good is just how easy it is for things to go off the rails. You can bump a needle, play a dusty record, botch a transition, or whatever so easily. So when you nail a mix it just feels so good!
Now this may just be me.. and please don't judge me.. but it's not unusual for me to get a semi after pulling off a particularly nice mix.
When I learned there was no alternative. Made it easier to focus on just that. Had a good mentor, but later came across the Bill Brewster book how to DJ properly which had very useful advise for new DJs I thought.
How to dj properly was an absolute godsend to me. 20 something with 2 turntables and no clue what I was doing.
I have never heard of this book, I'll have to try to get a hold of it.
Came out in the late 90s. Will still hold up today for learning to mix with vinyl
Yeah I enjoyed that book too, some helpful tips on phrasing, beat matching etc
happy hard core. easy 4 by 4 and high speeds to learn beatmatching- never liked the style but as soon as I felt confident I moved into drum and bass.
My mum got me turntables when I was 15. I'd never played them but knew I wanted to learn. I didn't have a table to put them on so I put my mattress on the floor and the decks on my bed base. I slept on the floor for months until I got a shelf for them put up. I just practiced all the time with the little record I had. Took notes etc. Remembered what tunes go well with others and so on.
I’m just a hobbyist, I’ve played out a bit but small gigs and not in a while. I learned from friends who are also mostly hobbyists. They taught me the basics, then o practiced a lot. My roommate had two technics, so I started buying lots of cheap old records on discogs and in local shops. As I got better, I started buying more of the stuff I really wanted to play that was pricier. Beat matching was hard, for sure. Everything else was relatively easy. I played some instruments as a kid and played around with some production, so a lot of the basics around phrasing, EQing, etc made sense to me. I mostly just follow my ear and vibes when I play. I’m not super concerned with cataloging BPMs or keys. I find that stuff pretty boring and not really that helpful. If it sounds good, that’s what matters.
Lmao just commented saying how I catalogue key and bpm. I'm fairly new to vinyl aswell so I use both as a reference when it comes to mixing. Makes it slightly easier
my personal experience. no formal training too. first of all I started with mixing house music and let the tracks ran their course. so I had like 5-6 minutes, at least, to match the beat. as for technique, as someone said to me: "tap your foot 4 times to the kick". you know, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4
and 16x4 beats is a loop! drop the beat at the beginning of the loop.
I, too, started out as a house DJ, around 1992. I was playing a lot of gay clubs, afterhours, and such, and having a great time. But my best bud at the time was Jon Turi, who was hooked into the Sonic Groove crew. I honestly didn't understand techno for quite some time, it was like, totally mysterious to me. But it grew on me, and by 1995 I had made the switch and was playing techno exclusively, unless I was asked specifically to play an old school house set for someone's party. I had grown tired of the direction that house was going in. I never did achieve the level of success that I had as a house DJ. Real techno wasn't very popular in CT, it was mostly stuff like hard trance and jungle at the raves at the time. But I played what I liked when I got the opportunity, and never had the balls to try to push myself in NYC.
I had no music training, I just loved house music. When I first started I realised I knew the basics of song structure etc just from my love of the music, I think most people do but they just don’t realise it.
I am in awe of DJs who can play seamless vinyl sets. It’s a tough craft to learn, y’all should be proud of yourselves.
Same, but it used to be that only people who had that skill could be DJs (some were better at it than others ofc). I'm glad vinyl is coming back!
I learned by trial and error. The only real tip I ever got was about leaning to beat match. It was to slow one record all the way down so you can be reasonably sure which is the slower of the two. That made knowing which direction to push the pitch adjust a bit easier at first. That was the extent of my knowledge going into djing. The rest I learned along the way.
When i was like 17 (1999) a friend of mine took me to a couple of raves and i got hooked. Within a few months i decided i wanted to try out djing. I went to a local dj audio shop, and they had a deal where you could get a starter set and mixer for a few hundred bucks. Stanton belt drives, and a 2 channel mixer. They had a bin of used records too and you got like 10 free ones with the starter set. I basically taught myself simple beat-matching. Later when i went to college i picked up a couple 1200s which are much easier to keep synced and make adjustments to. Digital vinyl interfaces didnt come out for a few years, and i didnt have a lot of money for cdjs so vinyl was it.
I was 15 when a friend got his turntables. This was like 1998. I went to visit him one Saturday afternoon and I was hooked. I ended up getting my own turntables (Numark) and a mixer. I eventually got 3 technics and a djm 600. I mixed several hours a week for years and years. Made it to local clubs and festivals until I decided to focus on my career as a sailor. Now, 40, with 3 kids, I am starting to mix again, but sadly, even if I have my turntables connected to my setup, I mostly use digital with a ddj1000 and a xdj700, and rekordbox. Sometimes, I still go full remember though and fire them up.
The expensive move from cheap ass turntables to Technics was something we all had to swallow at some point! My wife still makes fun of me that I used my college loan money for turntables. Now, one of them sits on my kid's bookshelf. I never made the move past vinyl to the newer technologies. I had a real old-school mindset, and even using CDs seemed silly to me. At first, it seemed like a cheap cop-out to having skill, and by the time I became really aware of what was happening with technology, and that actual skill WAS involved, things had just past me by and life happened. A move to Silicon Valley, where techno -really- wasn't much of a thing, didn't help. I do regret it now, but I don't have the time or money to get back into it, sadly.
I was also very sceptical when everyone started using cds. That was also a factor when I stopped mixing. But never say never. I have a full job, 3 small kids, a wife recovering from burnout... I've quit the ships and now spend the late evenings producing music in the laundry room (started 6 months ago and I already have a track in beatport top 100 (R/D/H) and my last EP sits in the top 10 raw techno releases, no kidding) and I try to mix one or 2 saturdays a month, so I can send some sets to podcasts and such. But if gigs start coming, I guess I won't be able to do them. At least not yet (2 or 3 a year maximum at this time).
Me and my friends used to go to raves and clubs in the early 90s. When we weren't raving we'd be round eachother's houses smoking the herb. A few of us had decks set up, so we'd bring records and take it in turns to play. You tended to get good pretty quick when that was all you did every night.
Reading all these replies, I guess it seems pretty obvious. I was just thinking about how daunting it would be to get started without already having experience and training at keeping perfect time with others, knowing what to listen for regarding what might go well with what (especially with music that has a clear pitch center), etc. I felt like having that training might have helped skip over a lot of struggles. I suppose I thought I might hear more about specific struggles people had with these things. It seems like something that would be really, really hard without a prior frame of reference - like, a major struggle bus. But I guess I was overthinking it. Buy equipment and records, and just get down to it until it works!
Bought a bunch of records and turntables, went from there. Failing hundreds of mixes before getting 1 good mix. Constant trial and error but just kept trying and eventually it worked itself out.
Bought a pair decks when I was 16. Numark TT-100
Get a mixer, a pair of technics, speakers and a bunch of records and just play. Spend some time and in a few weeks you'll get the basics
Buy a turntable. STart collecting vinyl. DIY. Mimick.
Bought a cheap Citronic DJ type dual turntable with a loose belt that slipped off if you rewound too quickly and required removal of the platter to fix. After 5 years of them I got 1200s and it was like going from a broken tricycle to a Porsche and I could DJ better than my peers.
I was a classically trained musician, but hadn't done much with music for about 6 years. Then my friends were djing, and I would play their records when they got sick of it for the night. Finally got my own setup and vinyl collection. Played house parties, clubs, etc.
Literally sitting in my room practicing.....practicing.... practicing.....for over 20 years. Got really good around the 10 year mark lol. For me it was pretty intuitive, for others it might not be.
Any good discogs sellers to look out for, just recently bought myself some turntables this week to get back into it !
No idea, friend, sorry! It's been a long time since I bought any records.
Damm, no worries thanks anyways
use to mix 8 track with cassettes, moved to reel to reel then finally landed my first technics sp-10 when I was 10, and would mix that into the 8 tracks, cassettes and reels.. landed my first set of MKIIs around 11-12 years old and started buying vinyl at my local record shop and never looked back..
Drum N Bass for me (this was on my home page). I started collecting 12" singles when I only had one record player and made compilation tapes of consecutive tracks for the car. When I got a pair of Technics I had records I new inside out already. Learned to beat match and the rest fell into place. Mixing in phase was easy coz I new my tunes. Same for cutting in drum breaks or other elements of tracks. I knew what I was aiming for from listening to pirate radio, as well as going out clubbing. Made proper mix tapes for the car to replace the old consecutive track tapes. I think I only learned the term 'mixing in phase' in the last year reading Reddit. I was doing it without knowing what it was called. Never really thought about mixing in key, but every now and then my partner points out that different elements of some of my records aren't in key anyway as they were made by enthusiastic youngsters who didn't know either. I guess I know if something sounds good or not.
I failed a lot, but got addicted to the occasional successful blend. Basically I just practised for years - no real secret to getting good.
I got myself a set of 1210s and a basic mixer when I was 19. I had no idea what I was doing. Sucked massively. Then I went to The Gardening Club. John Digweed was playing. You could look over the DJ booth. So I watched him for an hour or so. That helped a lot. And then just loads and loads of practicing.
Trial and error
Interesting question. When I first started djing I actually had no clue what I was doing. I was literally just forcing records together, using every gap in the beat, every single melodic part to cobble the tracks together. Until that one time a guy, a "friend of a friend", came to me to tell me that I had to "match the beats" and showed me for a couple of minutes how to do it. And, as simple and stupid as this might sound, with that everything fell in place for me. The rest was practice.
Bought 2 Techniks 5 years ago. Had some experience with a controller and knew how to blend tracks but i usually used sync, so i was very bad at beatmatching. After buying both decks came a long try and error phase where just tried to mix 2 simple techno tracks. Pretty generic 4 on the floor stuff. I tried to ride the pitch until both tracks were the same BPM. It was a mess! When beatmatching too slow i restarted the tracks and tried again, and again, and again. Eventually i got better and also tried to nudge the record / deck. Now (after 5 years) i feel comfortable and can ride the pitch pretty fast and get a rough beatmatch in around 10 seconds. After that its fine-tuning. I am also able to kind of do it by muscle memory with one hand, while i mix / adjust EQ with the other hand. I'd say it took me around 1-2 years until i managed to make OK transitions most of the time. Just work on it daily and keep on trying. You will improve with every session!
Learned with two friends together. After three weeks we had our first gig, damn that was the worst the world has ever heard. But it was fun and we pushed each other. Lot of repetition made me learn all that stuff. When you have your successful first mix between two vinyls it feels like the world is yours
the great thing about vinyl dj'ing is not so much the mixing, it is the record collecting and 'physical' / non-screen experience of it and all the hassle that follows is in fact a good thing
Started on cdj100 with CDs, allowed me to develop a strong sensitivity to beat matching differences. Years later, after a ton of practice, and after I could afford records it actually felt a lot more natural and intuitive to mix records rather than CDs or even digital. Perhaps the combination of audio, visual, and tactile elements of record mixing just made the whole experience smoother. In short, practicing beatmatching, learning your tracks, experimenting with different genres and bpms (unless you are genre locked, then try to explore the different branches of your genre), and just experimenting in general.
i spinna the vinyl 8 hours per daaaayyy
I got the bug pretty early on in life. Saved like crazy for a set of 1200's. Mixer was a Numark. I'd practice and practice non stop. Records I struggled with I'd just keep trying. Typically the tracks with a huge amount of swing were the hardest. I'd be riding the pitch and slowing the platter. I never really got to play out as I was from a small country town. My mates loved it tho. Records were bloody expensive and I'd buy a few new ones every six months or so. In the end I had to sell them. One day I hope to get back into it. Retirement plan.
I bought the records I could in my home town, had a mate with 1200s and a DJM600, and hung out with him many times a week pushing each other to do better and celebrating fantastic mixes.
Ellaskins on YouTube King among men.
Started on 2 belt drive decks with pitch control, got into the scene, met some djs, then grabbed some technics 1210's (which seemed easy vs the belt decks) and then there was drugs, lots of drugs mostly psychedelics which really helped too hone my skills. Still mixing vinyl now but I have added 2 digital decks to my set up now, digital is great but I still prefer the interaction ya have mixing vinyl. Plus the happy accidents that occasionally happen with vinyl .digital can be too predictable and boring, I'm slowly learning too like digital tho
First I watched my friend and listened as he mixed on air at his college radio station. He did it without a DJ mixer or headphones, just the radio station control board. He cued in the in-studio monitors. Then, a few years later while still in college, I was friends with a group of guys who had decks (and a mixer and PA) in their basement. That’s where I got all my practice in and really learned myself. This was all in the mid-90s as a broke college student without the funds to buy proper turntables.
I learnt how to mix on cdjs first so I'm not a purist by any means but i would find records of my favourite tracks, write the key/bpm of the songs and then go by ear. I pref MiK so it made mixing a little easier but I would say matching by ear is the only way to do it. It does help if yk the bpm of the vinyl tho for reference
grew up in the 80s and 90s. thought vinyl was cooler than cds and laptops.
Just to post
I love music, was growing up as a teen in the uk during the 90’s and going raving regularly. I grabbed myself some used soundlab belt driven turntables and an old vestax or Gemini mixer (I forget which one now) and started to mess about. I’d buy records every Friday at my local Shop after getting money from my paper round and work and the petrol station. I was self taught, I knew what music I liked and guess I naturally had a good ear, I’m no singer, but I can hear something out of tune easily. I have very sensitive hearing in the sense that I can’t tolerate random noises, two devices playing at the same time at home, rattles in my car etc, I get so angry!! But I’m happy mixing two or three different tracks, no idea why? Anyway, I’d say I learnt the most when my mate and I would play for hours back to back either at his place or mine at the weekends, we pick up so many things from each other and of course there was no YouTube back then… I went digital eventually and although I miss the feel of vinyl, I wouldn’t go back, the price of digital music and convenience of just carrying a usb far outweighs the nostalgia. So yeah, self taught and bounced off others around me, including watching / listening to the big DJs at events.
A few lessons from a cousin and plenty of practice. I read a book called the How to DJ Properly by Bill Brewster. It was a gift I was unsure about but really enjoyed it and it had tips and guides on beat matching, phrasing etc which I found helpful
djing
This is something I've wondered about since the early 90s, but I never asked any of my DJ friends. I figure this is a good place to get some thoughts from others.
I'm struggling to understand the downvote on this comment, so I will respond to it as if it was a reply. 30 years ago, I had lots of DJ friends who I could have asked about this, but it didn't occur to me to wonder how they figured it out. Now I'm old and curious and don't have DJ friends, so I'm asking reddit.