Ty Burrell

Everybody s a DJ these days. Or so they say. A guide to making it (or at least faking it) in the world s coolest profession

"This is a million-

dollar sound system. Trust

me, it works."

That's Emmett.

He's not happy. The wiry middle-

aged manager of

John Barleycorn,

a popular bro bar in Chicago's River

North neighbor-

hood, is grow-

ing increasingly annoyed with my

apparent incom-

petence. I stand

before him, star-ing down at two

turntables and a

mixer, trying to

exude machismo while facing a

firing squad of

under-the-breath,

mocking laugh-ter. Emmett sees

me for what I am:

a suckling pig in

the fetal posi-tion, sucking on

the teat of regret.

What grand plans

I had: the ambi-tious writer who

believed he could deejay after a few weeks of private lessons. Now I'm a scared schmuck, one with the audacity, no less, to question the effectiveness of the audio system in Emmett's bar—a behemoth of inputs and outputs and AV cords and speakers providing big-testicled bass to the hundreds of patrons who regularly cram into this watering hole to worship at the throne of the almighty DJ.

The DJ booth overlooks an enormous beer-hall-size, dark-wood-furnished room. A small crowd is gathered be­neath. They're expecting something. Anything. When I decided to throw my hat in the DJ ring, my family and friends could only wonder, Can he actually pull it off? Did Dan really dub himself "DJ Lips" for his notoriously large smackers? Tonight is the culmination. Good-bye, sweat-inducing dreams of turntable fail­ure. No more late nights sneaking into my guest bedroom, strapping on head­phones and desperately attempting to blend two songs on my laptop. DJ les­sons, instructional DVDs, tips from trust­ed professionals: over. John Barleycorn has tasked me with deejaying for an en­tire hour. The speakers are primed and ready, Emmett tells me.

"Don't fuck this one up, Lips."

D

eejaying looks easy. Push some buttons, pump your fists, let the song build, drop a massive beat and the half-naked club honeys eat it up. It's why every­one calls themselves a DJ these days— from the greased-up, backward-hat-

wearing, tank-top-rocking bros itching for opening slots in Vegas clubs to the basement-confined trolls uploading their masterworks to SoundCloud and praying for Facebook "likes." Blame it on the trickle-down effect: Those big-dog Top 40 DJs, the Guettas, Aviciis, Tiestos, Afrojacks—guys who look like they should be ruling the Swiss luge game— are the new rock stars. Dudes rake in six figures a show. But they're just props up there, pushing buttons, right? And plus, every celebrity now claims to be a DJ. Like that one A-list female pop singer who deejayed a gigantic Las Vegas club last year. Anyone can do it, right?

"Um, there was actually another guy onstage deejaying while she fucked around and just showed her face," an executive at a prominent Las Vegas hot spot reveals to me, crushing my cock­sure swagger.

Temporarily dejected, I call up Afrojack, the Dutch DJ who has produced some of the biggest pop stars in the world. He claims he could teach me to deejay in five minutes if he had the time. "Deejaying is basically just playing records for people," the superstar explains.

Easy enough.

F

abian is unexpectedly ordinary. The Venezuelan-born 27-year-old son of a former teenage Latin rock star is wearing a gray turtleneck sweater and tight-fitting black denim. His look is more clothes-folding J. Crew employee than DJ instructor. "What did you think I'd look like?" he asks me. "A douchebag?" I nod. "It's all right," he says. "A lot of DJs are douchebags." I like Fabian.

We're in a nondescript building scrunched next to a culinary school on a rather unimpressive block of North Side Chicago. This is Scratch DJ Academy. I'm here to learn how to become a superstar. Eight turntable-and-mixer combos are situated on two rectangular tables in a sterile room oddly decorated with graffiti bunnies. We'll be using the technologically advanced Pioneer machines called CDJ-2000s. These high-tech devices have virtual vinyl platters; most major nightclubs use them nowadays. The rest are traditional turntables that play vinyl records. CDJs, I learn, make life easier: Rather than lug around crates of records, you can put all your tracks on a single thumb drive, plug it into the digital mixer and be slamming tunes in minutes.

The CDJ also analyzes each track's beats per minute (bpm) and allows you to set up cue points for where you want to start a song. If you insist on vinyl, there's an app for that (of course): Many DJs use advanced vinyl-mimicking software such as Serato or Traktor. We're truly living in the plug-in-and-play DJ era.

What's there to even learn, then? I know how to plug in a USB.

Oh, how quickly my cockiness sub­sides. I realize I have not the first clue about how to even turn on the CDJ, let alone cue up a song. An hour of pathetic attempts later I am unreserv­edly humbled.

Deejaying is a test of patience and timing, creativity and endless prac­tice. Even executing the simplest of blends—combining one song with another—proves an arduous task. My main challenge, beatmatching, or seamlessly blending one track with another, is brutal. If two songs' beats don't line up, expect an audi­ble train wreck. Becoming a master beatmatcher requires a keen ear for rhythm and tempo, as well as an abil­ity to assess musical taste and style. At first I'm a lost cause.

But slowly, with the benefit of the complementary computer program Rekordbox, I'm able to practice at home. At all hours. My wife tells me it has to stop. She starts to instantly recognize all my blends. She's sick of them. I don't care. I'm obsessed.

By my fifth lesson I'm confident enough to finally attempt my own blend on the CDJs. Relying on their beat-recognition technology to assist me in my mission, I choose two songs with similar tempos—Robin Thicke's "Give It 2 U" and Deadmau5's "I Said"—but

Anatomy of a Hit

We're not saying every electronic-dance-music radio smash is exactly the same. Then again, most follow a similar formula.

I— THE CATCHY VOCAL HOOK

• A feel-good vocal greets you on arrival. Female vocalists excel at handling first-verse duties. Australian singer Sia is the master.

See: Calvin Harris's "Sweet Nothing" and David Guetta's "Titanium"

THE SWELL

• It's the beat slowly building to a fever pitch. Before the surefire mammoth chorus, there's said vocalist again, raising a fist to the heavens in anguish. See: Swedish House Mafia's "Don't You Worry Child" and Zedd's "Clarity"

AFROJACK'S ADVICE TO

WANNABE DJS

The 26-year-old Dutch

DJ, born Nick van

de Wall, is one of the

worltVs most prolific

beatmasters, pulling in

an estimated $18 million

last year. He has produced cuts for big-time stars from Pitbull to Chris Brown. Naturally, dude started out just as clueless as the rest of us. "I started producing music on a PlayStation game," he admits. We figured he'd know a thing or two about how

to jump-start a DJ

career. We gave him a

ring, and he dished out

killer advice.

my head is too busy throbbing with self-instruction. Faders. Cue points. Tempo shifters. "Nudging" the track to keep up with the one currently playing on the speakers. Nausea sets in. I grow a pair and begin the process: I crank up the Thicke track, raising the input-one fader. I then look to the CDJ, which

tells me the track is 127 bpm; next I ad­just the Deadmau5 track's bpm to match it. Slowly I decrease the CDJ's tempo shifter so it matches Thicke's. I must keep Deadmau5 in line with Thicke, so I fast-forward, or "nudge," it to get it synced. Once Deadmau5 is tempo- and time-adjusted, I press pi.ay on the CDJ and slowly fade in Deadmau5 by raising the input-two

fader, and the two \ tracks become one. I gently lower input one. Thicke is out. Emotion­ally, so am I.

"Not bad," Fabian tells me after the lesson. "You definitely pick it up a lot faster than most stu­dents." Confidence. Then

reality: Beatmatching is a multitask-er's nightmare. It's like trying to solve a calculus problem while receiving an under-the-table handie from the prom queen: nearly impossible but unbeliev­ably gratifying.

Fabian's praise, for me and his oth­er students, is dangerous, though: In the year and change since Scratch DJ

Academy opened in Chicago, enroll­ment has increased every term. Sure, Fabian says most of his students aren't naive enough to think they'll soon be headlining festivals. But as more peo­ple suddenly fashion themselves as DJs, a crop of unprepared, cheaper "tal­ent" emerges. This semester there's

Ruben, early 20s, quiet­ly confident with a bull nose ring and a pair of headphones wrapped around his neck; Jeff, upper 50s, wearing a soccer-dad windbreak-er, dragged here by his teenage daughter but now planning to fin­ish the entire yearlong DJ-certification course; and Ali, an early-30s rapper from Turkey, sporting mid-1990s-era Michael Jackson circular turquoise sun­glasses, here from Is­tanbul expressly for DJ classes. The vast major­ity of DJs, like Fabian, gig locally and rely on cash from performances

to pay the bills. Now this new crop of DJs is sud­denly undercutting them for bookings.

"It's affecting everybody in the DJ industry," Fabian says.

F

eel it, Dan!" My brother-in-law Eddie, 34, is yelling at me. I'm standing in my sister and his suburban bedroom, hunched over an old-school DJ setup: two turntables and a mixer. My

I— THE DROP

• Can't take the anguish? No worries: Here comes that massive, sweat-inducing electronic breakdown. Cathartic release— if only for a moment. See: Afrojack's "Take Over Control" and David Guetta's "Without You"

THAT VOICE AGAIN

• Breakdown got your head in a tailspin? Come back to earth with the tortured vocalist; he or she is back but still in therapy, forever soul-searching. See: Calvin Harris's "I Need Your Love" and Avicii's "Wake Me Up"

THE EMPOWERING OUTRO

• No need to leel bummed, the linger will figure his or her shit out. In the meantime, here's another gargantuan electronic breakdown to send you home flying. See: Tiesto's "Red Lights" and Avicii's "Hey Brother"

DO YOUR HOMEWORK

• As with any

endeavor, you're

best served if

you know what's

in store before

you pursue

deejaying. "Do

some tutorials

on YouTube and

use Google to find

out where to take

classes," the DJ

says. "And then

just go there. Just

try it. Success is

not as far away as

you think."

BECOME A BRANDING BEAST

• You could be the

most technically

proficient DJ

on earth, but everyone wants to party with a superstar. "The difficult part is creating an image for the people," Afrojack explains. "The people want to go see you. They want to listen to your music live."

LEARN TO READ MINDS

• Half the battle for a DJ at any level is knowing whether the audience is feeling the music he or she is playing. "Music is a form of communication," Afrojack says. You have to read the crowd: "Do they

scream? Do they shout? Do they start jumping? Or do they just stand around like, What the fuck is this guy playing?"

EASE YOUR WAY IN

• Take your time when you're first learning the craft—especially when it comes to the production game. "You have to try out every button." Afrojack says, comparing making music to flying a plane. "You don't go in a plane and try to fly right away. You download the flight simulator first and just learn."

IT'S NOT ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Sure, dudes like Afrojack make millions a year. But don't expect club owners to instantly start ponying up for you to deejay. "They didn't pay me money for a long time," Afrojack says. "They didn't even allow me to touch the decks. I was happy just to sit in the DJ booth. It's hard work. If you don't give a fuck and are just there for the fame, you're going to disappear really quickly."

newborn nephew, Dylan, cries as we blast house music steps from his crib. "Soft fingers! I want your hand cup­ping the edge of it!" Eddie, who dee-jayed more than a decade ago when he was in college, is teaching me how to deejay using vinyl—not that digital crap—with the subtlety of a snuff-film director. The touch, the feel, the exhil­aration of physically interacting with a record—deejaying without technologi­cal assistance—gets him off.

I amuse him, trying to understand his rampant passion for meticulous old-school artistry. Still, I can't help but wonder: Even if a DJ is a trained tech­nical wizard, a blending machine, if he doesn't produce his own music, will he ever reach the top of the food chain?

"It really has become a producer's game," Bad Boy Bill says. Bill was ranked one of the top DJs in the 1990s but has never produced a far-reaching, crossover single. He still deejays for a living but is now forced to take any gig he can get, such as a recent suburban club show in a nearly vacant strip mall. He doesn't harbor resentment, how-

ever. "The thing that's sad to me," he says of millionaire production gurus half his age, "is when I see somebody up there using a preprogrammed set. They're not creating anything. They're more of a puppet."

So it takes mad production game to be legit. Fair enough. The next day, I'm firing up my laptop and install­ing the top-notch audio-production software Ableton Live. For the next 12 hours I stare helplessly at what looks like a nuclear reactor. Constructing a song? Ha! This shit is so damn com­plex I'd beg for a synthesizer fart to emerge from my speakers.

I'm beyond frustrated. I consult Afrojack.

"Production is insanely hard," I tell him.

"I could teach you to produce in five to 10 minutes," he says. If he had the time.

P

erhaps it's the ever-present alcoholic beverages I've been guzzling or the fact that the DJ performing after me gives me an approving fist-pound. But when my one-hour set concludes at John Barleycorn, I feel like a le­gitimate DJ. Sure, my beatmatching

wasn't perfect and I made one glaring error—Trinidad James popped up by mistake during a Swedish House Mafia groove—instantly followed by my wife mock slitting her throat. I don't care. The attention. The approving head nods from the crowd. It's infectious.

"Like, oh my God! That was so amaz­ing!" my overserved friend Blair tells me as I walk downstairs. I need a real opinion. I hunt down my best friend, Jason. He'd never lie to me.

"How shitty was I, dude?" I ask him.

"You weren't," he replies. "It sounded like any other DJ when we go out to a bar."

My brain goes into overdrive. I start thinking crazy thoughts: Maybe I'm, like, you know, a real DJ. Then I stop myself, remembering something Fabian told me.

"There are so many wannabe DJs out there," he said bluntly. "It's a real problem."

I know the truth: I'm a wannabe.

You think I care? For the next two

hours, three vodka tonics and several

dozen congratulatory high-fives, I'm

DJ "Fuckin"' Lips. ¦

MUST-HAVE DJ GEAR FOR ALL LEVELS

So you want to deejay? Mews

fkish, buddy: Those songs aren't going to play themselves.

Whether you 're a wide-eyed

beginner, midlevel mixmaster or

cash-pocketing pro, equipping

yourself with top-notch

equipment is crucial. Lucky for

you, these days the best gear is

only a mouse click away.

BEDROOM BEGINNER

¦ Dive into the craft by grabbing an easy-to-use controller, which is an all-digital turntable-and-mixer combo. Go with the Pioneer

DDJ-ERGO-V ($499,

pioneerelectronics.com), the

most cost-effective controller

in Pioneer's fleet. We also

recommend easy-to-use

SeratoDJ software (serato

.com), which comes free when

you purchase your controller.

ON THE GO

• CDJs, or CD-based

turntables, are the way

to go. Not only are they a

staple in most major clubs,

they're fully compatible

with laptops. No need

to go crazy and buy the

most advanced model,

though: Two Pioneer CD J-

B00MK2 decks ($799) and

a Pioneer DJM-350 mixer

($599) to bridge the gap are

all you need.

CLUB THRASHER

• So you think you're hot

shit? Pony up the cash

and invest in some top-of-

the-line CDJs. Grab two

Pioneer CDJ-2000NXS

multiformat media players

($1,999). They're the

industry standard. You

also need to snag a

top-notch mixer: the

Pioneer DJM-2000NXS

four-channel linkable

model ($2,499).