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bump! 
I saw this on another forum and thought it might be kinda cool to check out, i dont have the money right now or the time for that matter but i still thought the concept was kinda cool...
Spin Doctorate: Learning How to be a DJ
August 8, 2004
New York Times
By KELEFA SANNEH
A 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 $300 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 (www.scratch.com),
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 $2,000 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.
http://www.scratch.com/
i just wish they had a course like this in college or something cool like this to take an elective...
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5 fuckin stars!
