Grimes’s DJ mess-up – Lessons for us all? [Live Q&A]

In this replay of our live Q&A lesson, we kicked things off with some crucial DJing lessons we can all take from the Grimes Coachella “debacle”, before diving into all sorts of questions from our DJ community.

Here’s what’s covered…

• 0:00 Intro
• 3:18 How to avoid the “Grimes Coachella mishap”?
• 9:48 DJ news this week
• 13:03 Why is manual beatmixing important?
• 19:33 Any tips for DJing with trance music?
• 28:02 Is Pioneer DJ going to buy Serato?
• 29:52 Will offline streaming “lockers” come to all DJ platforms?
• 33:03 What wireless DJ speakers should I buy?
• 37:15 The best way to mix with EQs?
• 41:11 Should DJs “quick mix”?
• 49:01 Tips for dealing with tinnitus?

Learn to DJ with us: The Complete DJ Course

Lesson Notes

We led this week on the issues with the Grimes DJ set at Coachella that has been all over social media. I found some of the social commentary out there to be unfair, unhelpful and judgmental. So we held our fire and waited until we could talk properly about it, which we did here. There were definitely lessons to be learned, but as the old saying goes, “he who is without sin cast the first stone”!

We also talked about Tidal’s renaissance as a music streaming platform, with new features for DJs. While they have come at a cost and haven’t been handled very well by the company in our view, overall they might turn out to be an advantage for DJs wanting to use Tidal as their music streaming service. We looked at what’s changed and predicted what’s coming.

And we also looked at a question that comes up increasingly nowadays, which is “should DJs quick mix?” – and by “quick mixing”, we mean moving quickly from one track to another, playing maybe 90 seconds of a track instead of the whole thing. This led to me doing an impromptu bit of teaching that I’ve never done in public before, so if you want to see how bad my freehand drawing is, then you should definitely watch as far as this part!

As always, it was a great live session and wonderful to hang out with our students and subscribers. I hope you enjoy it too. If you have any questions on what you see here, then please ask in the comments.