《djing101.9 lesson01》.pdf

DJing101.9 Lesson 1: Song Structure Our First Mix Revision 2. Written October, 2011 by Oker Chen. The “Disk Jockey” Say youre a radio station back in the prehistoric days of broadcasting music from your cave, eating the fresh gazelle you caught with your rock-on-a-stick. All you bright minds probably spotted the made up fiction in the previous sentence; nobody eats while working with sound equipment. If youre broadcasting hours and hours of music, you want to keep peoples attention by minimizing the dead air between tracks. The person who would switch from one vinyl record player to the next as a song is about to end is the disk jockey. This meaning has changed greatly. It now applies to the act of playing music from any platform, whether it is switching between streaming Internet music videos or merely playing from a playlist on a portable MP3 player. The ultimate goal is the same: DJs are there to create an atmosphere and instil a general feeling for its listeners. DJs are also archivists and historians of the music world. As you play and experiment more with different genres and eras, you begin to have a extremely deep understanding of the music and the social movements that created them. Music is not made in a vacuum – it depends on technology, politics, and social structures. Hip hop was created through looping machines and (to be an alternative to) systematic poverty. Reggae was created through Jamaican independence, when the economy collapsed and ska looked upon American rhythm and blues to find its political voice. The origins of rock, pop, and house music all have similar beginnings rooted in culture, whether its the founding of MTV or a reaction against decadence. The most prominent DJs today are probably better described as producers. Think of it this way, a DJ is equivalent to a singer, while producers are equivalent to a songwriter. Most singers start off performing other peoples music, but as they become success