Dean, found this in the "New York Times" and thought you might enjoy it: August 8, 2004 Spin Doctorate: Learning How to be a DJ By KELEFA SANNEH DJ is someone who controls the music, so you're all already DJ's." That's what Rob Principe, president and chief executive of Scratch DJ Academy in Greenwich Village, told the class on the first day. Anyone who had spent time fiddling with an iPod or stuffing CD's into a stereo, he reasoned, had already grasped the basic concepts. Now all that remained was to follow the technological trail backward, from iPods and CD's to turntables and vinyl records. The class was an intensive one-week program called DJ 101, and the instructor, an enthusiastic and  more important  patient turntablist named DJ Damage, started at the very beginning. "How many people have used a record before, not just seen one?" he asked, and nearly all of the 25 students raised a hand. He breathed a sigh of relief, and on that note introduced the day's special guest, a stocky, wisecracking guy named Grandwizzard Theodore. The Grandwizzard is a turntable hero, credited with inventing the art of scratching. Having him stop by your DJ lesson was the equivalent of having Bill Gates stop by your Intro to Computers class. (Although Mr. Gates, unlike the Grandwizzard, probably wouldn't use the phrase "You gotta lick it before you stick it.") Scratch DJ Academy is the most prominent of a number of young schools that provide professional instruction to just the sorts of people who might once have spurned it. Until recently, aspiring DJ's had to rely on a combination of osmosis and experimentation: you'd take mental notes at nightclubs, then you'd retreat to your room and keep practicing until you got the hang of it. Now, more and more people are learning how to DJ in classrooms. The turntable may be the most important musical instrument of the current era  it's certainly the most ubiquitous  so it's only fitting that turntable conservatories are starting to emerge. The University of California, Berkeley, started offering student-led DJ'ing courses in 1998, and this spring, after a few years of wrangling, Berklee College of Music in Boston began offering formal instruction, too. Stephen Webber, the Berklee professor who helped establish the school's course, recently published "Turntable Technique: The Art of the DJ" (Berklee Press), and the DJ historians Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster recently published "How to DJ Right: The Art and Science of Playing Records" (Grove Atlantic). Scratch DJ Academy, founded in 2002, is the country's best-known DJ school, but other academies  not all of them reputable  are springing up. Oddly enough, the professionalization of DJ'ing seems to be lowering the barriers to entry, not raising them. The vast majority of DJ's still learn their trade informally, on their own; no club would penalize a DJ for not having a diploma. But formal instruction can help novices (and veterans) get better quicker. So it's getting even easier to become a DJ, and at a time when  as you may have noticed  there seem to be too many DJ's already. Could this possibly be good news? To get to Scratch DJ Academy, you ascend a narrow staircase from the Sixth Avenue lobby, stepping over the skinny bodies strewn about the hallway. (No, it's not a crack house  the Joffrey Ballet School is upstairs, and the students tend to nap in the corridors.) Pass through a dingy waiting room and you're in the main classroom, with 17 workstations arranged in an oval, each equipped with two turntables, a mixer and tiny speakers just loud enough to drown out your neighbors. The crew that had paid 0 each for the one-week class couldn't have been more motley, in the best sense of the word. The brothers Byron and Brian Pendergraft, both in high school, were hoping to turn a hip-hop obsession into money for college. Danielle Polk, a college-radio DJ, had traveled from San Francisco to learn new techniques. A beefy mixtape DJ named 350 wanted to learn how to scratch. ("The right way, not just the sound-right way," he said.) And Tessa Cook (DJ Tickles, she sometimes called herself) had recently graduated from the Stanford business school, and wanted to cross "learn how to DJ" off her to-do list before returning to London. Monday, the first day, had been devoted to the equipment, but Tuesday involved a bit of rudimentary music theory: DJ Damage was teaching the class how to count. The students gathered around Damage's workstation, solemnly nodding their heads and intoning, "1-2-3-4, 2-2-3-4," while out of the speakers came Jay-Z's "Big Pimpin' "  produced by Timbaland, who loves to disguise hip-hop rhythms with unexpected syncopations. Damage was training his class to find the "one"  the downbeat  on any record, and soon the pupils were back at their workstations, learning how to stop a record exactly on the downbeat, dragging it slowly back and forth under the needle, listening for that dry wooshing sound of a kick drum in slow motion. This emphasis on the downbeat has a funny way of changing your perception. Once you start listening for the one, you hear it everywhere: a song comes on the radio and instead of noticing the words or the tune, you notice a particularly crisp kick drum, or a downbeat that arrives a few ticks too early, or a gleaming split second of emptiness before the one. That song, you think, is just begging to be cued up. No one who has ever watched a DJ at work would be surprised by the seriousness of Scratch DJ Academy ([URL="http://www.scratch.com"]www.scratch.com[/URL]), which gives its students lab time, homework assignments and a 103-page course pack, complete with histories, exhortations and practical advice. ("When scratching, imagine the fingers and wrist in a straitjacket so that movement must come from the arm.") The academy was founded by Mr. Principe, along with the poet and playwright Reg E. Gaines ("Bring In da Noise, Bring In da Funk") and Jam Master Jay, Run-DMC's widely influential DJ, who was murdered in October 2002. Between its introductory and advanced courses, Mr. Principe claims the academy has produced more than 5,000 graduates (everyone who completes a course receives a certificate) over the last two and a half years. This is a good time for DJ's. Concertgoers are so accustomed to seeing one onstage that some stars now bring them along purely for show. Aspiring performers gravitate toward turntables the way an earlier generation gravitated toward guitars, and to prove that it has changed with the times, Guitar Center is currently sponsoring a DJ competition called Spin-Off '04. (The final round takes place Wednesday at Hammerstein Ballroom in midtown Manhattan.) At the same time, it's getting harder and harder to figure out what, exactly, a DJ is. Most serious DJ's still use turntables to spin vinyl records, but some now use DJ-friendly CD and MP3 players, which are often built to resemble traditional turntables. (Technics, maker of the industry-standard turntable, recently unveiled the SL-DZ1200, which plays digital files but has a big, spinning platter that promises a "realistic vinyl feel.") Mixtape DJ's can splice together tracks on a computer. Radio DJ's often just talk; someone else spins. And at a typical house party, the DJ is often a laptop in the corner, working its way through a long playlist that was compiled hours or days earlier. The Norcal DJ and Music Production Academy, a fledgling school in San Francisco, aims to pull the DJ out of the analog age. Thoryn Stephens, the president and chief executive, says he wants students to learn vinyl first, then move on to digital media. He also stresses the importance of music theory, noting proudly that the school teaches TTM, a turntable notation system. By comparison, Scratch is proudly old-school, concentrating on the nuts and bolts of vinyl manipulation. But whatever the approach, and perhaps without knowing it, more and more musicians and listeners are learning how to think like DJ's: hearing songs in terms of beats and breaks and vocals and samples and intros and outros; thinking about downbeats and backbeats; wondering, what would that track go with? That's exactly the question Damage asked on the third day of school, Wednesday. Wednesday was devoted to the fundamentals of beat matching  the finicky but enormously satisfying art of getting two different records to play perfectly in sync. Beat matching may be the most important tool in a DJ's arsenal: once you master it, you can turn two beats into one, or turn a crate of records into a seamless set, or turn a vocal track and a rhythm track into a weird new hybrid. (The recent popularity of mash-ups  computer-enhanced collisions that put, say, Christina Aguilera's voice on top of the Strokes' music  puzzled some veteran DJ's, who had been making old-fashioned mash-ups for years.) But though any competent DJ can hear two records and tell you instantly which one is faster, beginners do it by trial and  even more  error. At one workstation, a couple of pupils were trying to get OutKast and the Roots to behave themselves, while not far away someone else was trying to pacify the Chemical Brothers and Tiësto. By Thursday, the day's guest lecturer, Excess, was leading the class up from the baby scratch (a simple rhythm created by dragging the record back and forth under the needle for a phrase or a beat) to more advanced scratches: the scratch release (where you play a phrase, rewind the record  with the volume off  to the right place and play it again), the drag (which is slower), the stab (which is faster), the chop (which is shorter) and the scribble, which is so fast it may cause  or indeed require  muscle spasms. A virtuoso scratch routine is the DJ equivalent of a guitar solo  just as intricate and, in the wrong hands, just as tiresome. After a few hours, you might have found that the four-step process of performing a scratch release was starting to sink in, but you might also have realized, as one DJ devoted to soul and disco did, that scratching wasn't really for you. Scratch Academy is officially neutral on the question of musical preference, although most of the instructors come from the hip-hop tradition, which prizes quick cuts and baroque ornamentation. Disco and house DJ's, by contrast, love long, seamless segues  the idea is often to find records that are somehow compatible, and then beat-match them so precisely that dancers don't even notice when the first one gradually fades away. Damage says that it doesn't really matter what style you're interested in: "The same techniques that are used in hip-hop can be used in house, or whatever genre you're spinning." These classes alone don't make anyone a good DJ: even the most eager students know that mere competence requires months  not hours  of practice. But just as learning how to play the piano was once part of any serious listener's musical education, learning how to DJ, even if it's only an introductory lesson, may now serve a similar purpose, helping listeners navigate the beat-driven cacophony they encounter in the rest of their lives. Not everyone in the summer session of DJ 101 seemed destined for dance-floor fame, but it seemed as if everyone was becoming a better listener. And if we need DJ schools right now, then that's why: not because we need more DJ's, but because we need more  and better  listeners. On the last day of class, Friday, Damage tried to get everyone to combine the skills they had learned  or started to learn  that week. When Neil Armstrong, the day's guest DJ, warmed up with a couple of baby scratches, Damage asked the class what Armstrong was doing, and Ms. Polk, the college radio DJ, immediately called out the answer: "He's finding the one." About half the class stayed late, exchanging e-mail addresses and trying, one last time, to make the lessons stick. One eager if not talented student (hint: the one with the notepad) had Lloyd Banks on one deck and Terror Squad on the other; he was beat-matching furiously and, every once in a long while, successfully. Five days at Scratch DJ Academy had pointed him in the right direction; now all he needed was ,000 worth of equipment, a soundproof bedroom and 18 months of diligent practice. Sometime around 4 p.m. on that last day, as Neil Armstrong laid Beyoncé's "Summertime" on top of R. Kelly's "Step in the Name of Love (Remix)," it was getting easier to believe Mr. Principe's claim, and its unspoken corollary. In a world where listeners are demanding more and more control over the music they hear, we're all already DJ's, whether we like it or not. So we might as well get better at it.
