How To Become A House Music DJ In Your 40s, 50s And Beyond – Forbes
by June 3, 2024Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon aka DJ D-Sol at Casamigos Presents Sports Illustrated “The Party” at … [+]
The world of electronic dance music (EDM) is exploding. The market for this music—and the experiences associated with it—is on a serious growth trajectory. And it’s not limited to any single demographic, age group, generation or geographic region. The trend is global and just about universal.
To be clear, EDM is nothing new. It’s had its ups and downs since house music was pioneered in Chicago in the early ‘80s on the heels of the disco revolution. The pandemic played a role in the current resurgence, as many dabbled with DJing and music production while sheltering in place, but there was plenty of momentum leading into the Covid-19 crisis.
In 2023, at the age of 51, I decided to become a house DJ. This may seem old but consider that some of the biggest DJs today are in this age range: Deadmau5 is 43, Kaskade, who became the first DJ to play the Super Bowl this year, is 52 and Tiësto is 55. Then there are newcomers Shaq aka DJ Diesel (51) and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon aka DJ D-Sol, who is 62 and now semi-retired from DJing. It’s fair to say that this art form is open to anyone.
Personally, I enjoyed the music enough to want to understand the craft of DJing and eventually perform. It’s not unlike being a fan of Formula One and wanting to drive a race car on a track to appreciate the sport and skill it requires. That’s a big part of what my DJ journey has been about. If you’re attending music festivals or going to nightclubs, having DJ skills enhances those experiences, as you can better appreciate the performances and what goes into them. Plus, it’s a great skill to have for hosting parties—whether at your home, on a boat or at a family function.
“Since DJing has become more mainstream, many music lovers find the barrier for entry much easier than a conventional musical instrument such as guitar or piano,” says Matt Pekmezian, Vice President of Sales & Marketing for AlphaTheta Music Americas (parent company to Pioneer DJ). “Folks between 40-60 feel that DJing would yield quicker musical results than, say, learning the guitar or piano later in life.”
Indeed, the following is the story of this journey as well as a guide to becoming a DJ at any age—but specifically at an age when many might assume it’s too old to get started.
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS – AUGUST 04: DJ Diesel (Shaquille O’Neal) performs in concert during Lollapalooza … [+]
This should go without saying, but you should enjoy the music you play. If you’re young and wanting to pursue a career as a DJ, you might make sacrifices in this area. For example, you might be passionate about house music, but you also have to take wedding gigs to pay the bills. This requires open-format DJ skills, where you play hip-hop, Top 40, classic rock and pretty much whatever the customer wants. In this case, you’re playing for the audience as opposed to playing to the audience. It’s a key distinction. The latter is an audience that has come to see a particular DJ or a particular genre. That’s the type of DJ experience and performance I’m pursuing.
Within the broader genre of house music, there are many sub-genres including tech house, melodic house, progressive house, bass house, deep house and more. I personally gravitated toward tech house, which has gained popularity in recent years through high-profile artists such as Fisher, John Summit, Dom Dolla, Peggy Gou and James Hype…along with influential tech house producers Wax Motif, Mau P, Max Styler, Martin Ikin and others.
As the name suggests, tech house blends the core of house music with the stylistic features of techno. It includes the bass grooves and 126 BPM average that house music is known for and marries that with harder synth sounds and beats found in techno. This creates a more aggressive club sound than traditional house and tends to create more energy and enthusiasm from the audience.
Choosing a genre will be followed by identifying some key influences. In other words, you’ll find artists who inspire your set lists, your DJ style and eventually the music you produce if you end up going the DJ/producer route. For my part, Fisher and James Hype have played that role. I appreciate Fisher’s stage craft, his board sports background, his bucket hats and how his music pushes and even defines the tech house genre. I’m also in awe of James Hype’s technical DJ skills and his ability to craft live mixes with the biggest drops in the business.
One of the best ways to explore genres is through the Beatport online music service. This is essentially Spotify for DJs. Beatport uniquely organizes music into all of the EDM sub-genres with Top-100 lists for each. I’ll explore this more in the section on building a music library.
There are dozens of DJ controllers to choose from, where you can simply plug in a laptop and start to learn the craft of mixing music. There are also portable, all-in-one systems that are used by mobile DJs for events and the like. But if you’re serious about DJing, it makes most sense to learn and master the club-standard equipment from Pioneer DJ. What you’ll essentially build with the following is the ultimate bedroom or living room DJ setup, which is ideal for not only learning to mix and perform but also creating content in support of your DJ brand.
Pioneer DJ CDJ-3000 Professional Media Player
The club standard CDJ-3000 digital DJ player
This is the pro-level DJ controller/player and the one you’ll find in just about every nightclub and music festival around the world. It’s become a universal standard and for good reason. The CDJ-3000 enables DJs to create amazing sets using up to six decks at a time to mix several tracks simultaneously in ways that were not previously possible. If you’re not using CDJ-3000s, then you’re not being exposed to all that is possible in the current era of DJ performing. And you certainly won’t be equipped to play a club when the opportunity arrises.
The key feature of the CDJ-3000 is its nine-inch touchscreen display. This is where you visualize tracks as they are playing i.e. you see the visual representation of a track as a multi-colored waveform. This tells you exactly where you are in a track and what’s coming. With multiple decks networked together, you also see a stacked waveform with tracks on top of one another for the purpose of precise beat matching and mixing. In many ways this reduces the need for headphones because you can actually “see” the music before it goes live…presuming you’re already familiar with the track.
The display is also where you access your library, and this can take several forms on the 3000. In most cases you’ll have a thumb drive plugged in that stores all of your music locally. When the decks are networked together, you can have one drive per deck. This is handy when multiple DJs are playing simultaneously in a back-t0-back scenario. The 3000 also has several network options. The first is a cloud-based version of Pioneer DJ’s Rekordbox software. The next is a streaming version of the Beatport music platform. These both require an ethernet internet connection to the decks. I’ll go into more detail below in the music library section.
Mixing in key is one of the basic principles of DJing. This just means that the two tracks being mixed are in a compatible key such that they sound good together. Mixing in key isn’t essential for every transition, as that would be too limiting, but compatible keys does offer a lot of latitude in terms of how two tracks can be mixed. The 3000 makes it easy to filter your library and playlists by key so you can quickly identify key-compatible tracks on the fly. And this is just one way to filter your library on the 3000 that makes performing more efficient.
There are far too many features to list them all, but I’ll call out three others that I use in every set. First are the hot cues. There are eight along the bottom of the display from A to H. Every track in my library is effectively coded with hot cue points, such that I can use them in various ways to transition in and out of a track.
Next is the eight-beat loop button, which is new to the CDJ-3000. I find that I most often start with an eight-beat loop and pull back from there. In previous models that meant starting with a four-beat loop and clicking another button to double it. This just makes it easier and more consistent.
Finally, I’m a big user of the Beat Jump feature, which is located just below the looping buttons. This allows you to jump forward or back by a set number of beats or bars while keeping the track in tempo. This is preferable to the less precise Fast Forward/Fast Back buttons, which I never use.
There are a few key Beat Jump use cases. One is to effectively jump ahead in a live track—perhaps it’s too redundant or you just want to get to the next track sooner—without the audience noticing. But more often I use this to quickly find the ideal mixing points of a track with which I’m not too familiar. I set the jump to 32 beats (eight bars), which is length of a typical phrase. A phrase is a specific section of an EDM track—e.g. intro, build, breakdown, drop, outro—and the most common transitions line up these phrases in ways that make the mix sound most natural. So you can mix in key, you can mix in phrase and you can do both. The Beat Jump feature allows you to quickly isolate those phrases so you can make seamless mixes on the fly with no prior knowledge of the tracks.
Pioneer DJ DJM-A9 4-Channel Club Standard Mixer
The DJM-A9 four-channel, club-level mixer
The mixer is the heart of any system, and the relatively new DJM-A9 is the ideal choice for an ultimate home system that includes two or three CDJ-3000s and the RMX-1000 (see below) remixer.
My personal preference is to have three CDJs, which are going to be on channels one, two and three. Then I reserve the fourth channel for Bluetooth, which allows me to play Spotify from my phone to the mixer when not actively DJing. So I don’t need a separate speaker system for playing music at home; this is it.
The mixer is really where the magic happens and where DJs demonstrate their technical skills. The A9 features many improvements over previous generations, including better spacing of the controls and few extra effects including Mobius. One of the more obvious changes is in how you select channels for the beat effects. It was previously a knob and now it’s more intuitive buttons for each of the four channels along with those for the master and microphone. There are two separate headphone jacks with corresponding cues, which is seemingly designed for back-to-back DJing.
The Sound Color effects on the left side of the volume sliders are pretty much unchanged, but the knobs now feature a lock option. When enabled, they will stop at 12 o’clock and require a deliberate nudge to go past it. This allows you to quickly and accurately flip them back to the neutral position—complete with the theatrical emphasis that accompanies an effect drop.
Pioneer DJ RMX-1000 Remix Station
The RMX-1000 Remix Station is truly a musical instrument
As the name suggests, the RMX-1000 enables you to remix your tracks and transitions. I personally consider this essential gear for DJing, as it enables a level of customization and personalization that makes a DJ’s set truly unique.
There are two primary sets of features in the RMX. The Scene FX is an expanded version of the Sound Color FX found on the mixer. These include noise, reverb, echo and a range of different effects that are divided into up and down varieties. These use a big knob and can be further tuned with two different parameter knobs, so the possibilities are near limitless.
Next there are the X-Pad FX, which include a set of common EDM percussion sounds: hi hat, clap, snare and kick. These can be set to the beat using the Quantize feature, and you can tap in some freestyle beats using the overdub button. There are two knobs that control the volume and pitch of these drum sounds. The X-Pad FX create additional sound layers in buildups that can add tension before a drop. When done well, the audience can’t tell which is the original track and which sounds are being added on the fly.
Pioneer DJ XPRS122 Loudspeaker and XPRS1152s Active Subwoofer
The XPRS122 active loudspeaker turns any space into a nightclub
This set of speakers and subwoofers is the ultimate home setup…that also happens to pack enough power for a small bar or club. Of course, the size of your home and the neighbor situation needs to be considered. Otherwise, playing sets through these is a true representation of what it will sound like when you’re playing at a nightclub. In particular, this pair of active subwoofers gives you the low frequencies and floor-shaking thump that standard monitor speakers will lack.
A booming sub-woofer is how you’ll feel the music
Both the speakers and subwoofers are designed for portability with multiple handles and a rugged design. They can be stacked on top of one another, and you can get a speaker pole to give them some separation. The A9 mixer connects to the subwoofers (right and left) with XLR speaker cables, and then the subwoofers connect to the loudspeakers in an XLR daisy chain configuration. The only drawback is that they make a rather loud hissing sound when powered on. I address this with single power strip that controls the entire system with a single on/off switch.
The Beatport Top100 shows the current pulse of EDM universe
The craft of DJing has a few key elements. The first is mixing tracks and mastering the equipment. These are the technical aspects. It’s like learning to play an instrument, as there are a set of mechanics you need to know, which then enable you to transition from one track to another in countless ways. Though there is a lot of creativity in mixing, the bigger aspect of DJing is song selection and creating set lists. This is ultimately the experience you’re creating for your audience: Where will you start? How will it progress? Where will you take them? Where will they end up? Every DJ set is a journey, and each track is a stop along the way.
There are a number of different sources from which to build a DJ’s music library. Spoiler alert: Spotify is not one of them. Though the streaming music giant can be great for discovery and building playlists, the music is not exportable in a format DJs can use. Fortunately, there is a Spotify-like platform that is built and designed for DJs. Beatport supports both streaming and high-quality music downloads, among many other features, such that it’s become my core resource for curating and building a music library.
Beatport’s killer feature is its Top 100 lists. There is a global, multi-genre list that pretty much reflects the state of EDM at any given moment. Next, there are Top 100 lists for tech house and every other EDM genre/sub-genre imaginable. These are updated on a daily basis as artists release new tracks. There are countless other curated lists from producers across the EDM spectrum. And, of course, you can just search the platform for tracks you already know but haven’t yet purchased for download (which is necessary if you want to play them as a DJ).
It’s important to establish a process for discovering and acquiring new music and then organizing your library such that the thousands of tracks you’ll eventually have will be easily accessible as you build sets. Your library will live in Pioneer DJ’s Rekordbox software, which is an integral part of the Pioneer DJ system. This is not only the place where you’ll organize your library, it’s also a place to “code” your tracks with hot cues, loops etc., to create your set lists and to rehearse transitions. Then you export everything to a USB and take that to your DJ setup or gig.
Additionally, the CDJ-3000 player (see above) supports Rekordbox Cloud and Beatport Streaming. In other words, if your system is connected to the internet via an ethernet cable, which typically requires a router that connects multiple decks and the mixer, you can stream the entire Beatport library to your system. While this isn’t practical for playing in clubs, as most systems are not internet enabled, it allows you to build Beatport playlists and then to practice with those tracks before deciding to purchase them. This requires a Beatport streaming subscription, and then you log into Beatport directly from the CDJ-3000.
This is the shortest part of this story but the longest part of the journey. Because the process of learning to DJ and performing never ends.
There are a number of online DJ courses including Crossfader, Pete Tong DJ Academy, Point Blank Music School and others that will teach you the basic skills. For my process, I started with some YouTube tutorials about the equipment, together with a few on how to beat match and do basic transitions. These are widely available from a number of sources. From there I explored on my own with occasional help from DJ friends. Personally, I found the process of self-guided discovery and trial-and-error was the best path for how I learn. There were certainly some key moments in watching other DJs play, where I’d pick up a new trick or technique that became a breakthrough moment. Again, being a DJ adds depth to the overall EDM experience…such as adopting new DJ techniques.
The ideal camera for recording DJ sets with direct audio
One of the key elements of my learning process was to record my sets. I use the GoPro Hero 12 Black camera, where the audio ports directly from the A9 mixer (see above) into the camera. Note that you need an RCA cable and GoPro adapter. Then I watch my sets like a football coach watches game tape. It becomes a way to rapidly iterate and efficiently critique transitions while honing your stage craft in complete privacy. It becomes a process of failing forward as you experiment and push your own boundaries with zero consequences.
This led me to start a YouTube channel, where I could essentially perform in public and start to get feedback from people who didn’t know me. Because the feedback you’ll get from friends and family will undoubtably be positive. That’s their role, for one, and they also may not be qualified to offer insightful feedback. Indeed, YouTube is one of the most valuable and perhaps underrated tools for becoming a house music DJ in your 40s, 50s and beyond.
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