How I became a DJ


Here's how it started.

I like to say I grew up in a musical household. Where some musical households will be filled with pianos, guitars, and saxophones. We had record players, boomboxes, and radios. In retrospect, we had a device to play music in pretty much every corner of our lives. My sister and I would even bring a portable radio out to our tree house.

High school was when I was introduced to DJ culture.
There was a halloween party that a kid in school was a part of. It could have been called a rave, i guess. Just a big room with a dj, sound system, and a bunch of glowie stuff. This was  the first time I saw a DJ mix electronic music.

I ended up taking a summer job washing dishes. I became friends with one of the servers, who happened to be a dj. I would go over to his house and he would show me how to mix records. I eventually acquired two turntables and a mixer. Although you could barely call them turntables, and the mixer was as basic as you could get while still using electricity. After some time passed, and many dishes washed, I got a better mixer and better turntables. and thus started my shao lin jedi turntable training.

From this point, all my music came from the dusty bins of various record shops. I completely tuned out of what was going on in the rest of the music world. There was always a hidden gem by some artist who no one's heard of, on the b-side of an EP that no one knows. I decided it was my mission to find those records.

My approach to DJing was, get good enough and you will get booked. So practice.
I would spend hours a day playing records. Some people set aside a few hours to go to the gym, or exercise. I would set aside a few hours to play records. I thought if I do it well enough, people will fly me around the world to do it for loads of cash. Then I'll have vacation homes on foreign beaches, and eventually I'll get a unicorn.

So now it's come to this.

-Doc Jones