Your 5 Proven Steps To DJing Like a Pro, Part 2: Music [Summer School Podcast]

So you want to be able to DJ like a pro, but it’s hard to know where to start, it’s hard to know what to practise, and it’s hard to know if you’re getting better.

This proven five-step formula, first popularised in our book Rock The Dancefloor! (which has now reached its second edition and is a global bestseller), is your answer.

Here we’re going to look at step two, which is the music, before moving on to look at the next three steps in order (the order is important). We’ve already looked at step one, the gear, so if you missed it, you can head over there now.

You’ll find a YouTube video where I give you extra thoughts, and a podcast version as well, which you can subscribe to – do this now, so you don’t miss any of them.

You’ll learn plenty from the articles and accompanying video/audio to make solid improvements in your DJing, but if you want to learn more, we’ll direct you to a free online version of the book, and I’ll also explain what extra material is available in our course based on the book, The Complete DJ Course.

Step 2: Music

Hopefully, this is why you got into this. Finding, choosing, buying, organising, and learning the tracks and songs you’ll be dealing with is obviously an integral part of DJing. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. And indeed, with today’s abundance of digital music and the necessity to use computers to organise that music, this is a huge pain point for many DJs.

You know you need to work on this step when:

• You feel overwhelmed at the sheer amount of music out there
• You struggle with the concept of managing digital music
• Your music library is a hopeless mess, and you’re in denial about it, too scared to fix it

Read this next: Help! My DJ Music Library Is A Mess..

Our biggest tip

More than in any other area of your DJing, the trick to making progress here is to tackle the job little and often – literally one track at a time. This is a job that’s never done. But if you add a track you like, remove a track you don’t, tidy up the information you have on a track or two, and then rinse and repeat, this is something that over the days and weeks, will slowly but surely lead to a properly organised and functional music collection.

Do make sure to listen to those tracks while you’re doing it, though! One of the biggest mistakes that DJs make is to sit down with an idea in their head about their music collection and spend a whole chunk of time rearranging things, reorganising, fixing up, but never listening to a single track. This is music we’re talking about here. Listening to it is the single most important thing you can be doing while you’re working on it. So always have music playing as you’re working on your library.

Audio version

Here’s what’s covered…

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:14 Episode overview
• 1:35 Tip #1 – Develop a weekly routine
• 4:11 Tip #2 – Discover old gems
• 6:25 Tip #3 – Learn about your music

Find Out More

The second section of our Rock The Dancefloor! book deals with this step, with chapters on discovering great music, choosing and buying music, setting up your DJ music library, your DJ software’s role in your music library, tagging your music, organising your music, and adapting your existing music workflow for DJing. Go here to access the book for free.

Ready to take the next step? With 10 video lessons dedicated to this step, you can join me as I teach you all of this and more inside our Complete DJ Course.