My DJ Education Continues

Last year I took a DJ 101 class at the Scratch Academy after work to avoid the horrendous traffic between Santa Monica and Hollywood. Tried the next level class but found that they were trying to teach two many skills at the same time: beatmatching, vinyl hunting, and song selection. It was just too much for me and I dropped out about half way. It would be way cool if they taught beatmatching class where they provided you with the song list, and everybody focused on just getting them to flow into one another. That alone takes a lot of practice! Trying to do that when you're hunting for records, not knowing exactly what tempos they will be, getting them home, then finding the tempos are two far apart... starting over... and then going to class being expected to have your chain of songs with one added song each week, practiced and sounding good. Aaaaah! Too much.

But now I'm at it again. Familiar faces from 101 class are in my DJ 202 Scratching class taught by the acclaimed DJ Shortee, the most famous female DJ and scratch master (featured in the Hip Hop documentary movie Scratch). So far, it's great! Much easier for me to learn with specific drills that we do together and then sequentially.

Of course, to practice reliably I need a turntable and a good quality, scratch-worthy needle, like the Shure M477 or M44G. So this week I've been looking for a used Technics turntable and a mixer. Missed a few good deals on Craigslist last week, but finally a single, black Technics 1200 Mk2 in excellent condition showed up for a very good price. Even better, it included a good (albeit older model) Stanton Battle-mixer. Tonight, it's mine! Whohoo!

Now the tricky part... how to set it up properly.