Managing your music like a pro, building a DJ booth at home, and mixing on “dumb DJ gear” were among your favorite topics in 2024.
The basis of our blog, The Bridge, is to look at three main areas of DJ life. Advice on the craft and the world of DJing; reflections on DJ and club culture; and the stories behind your favorite Pioneer DJ / AlphaTheta products.
With the CDJ, DJM-909 (our first-ever scratch mixer) and rekordbox reaching their 30th, 20th and 15th anniversaries respectively this year, we did plenty of looking back. While a big slice of nostalgia is always fun, we also find that these articles help us to look at modern DJing in a different light. If you haven’t already, check out the digital version of Deckades, a limited-edition zine we printed, which looks not only at the history of the CDJ, but the story of Pioneer DJ and DJ culture overall.
Of course, we also brought you stories from the here and now. We asked Why are “no phones” policies becoming increasingly popular? and spoke to nightlife figures around the world to learn how these policies work and what people think of them. With the arrival in 2024 of the euphonia, our first-ever rotary mixer, we wondered Why do some DJs love rotary mixers so much? And while sleep and mental health may not be new issues for DJs, we spoke to two experts in these fields this year to give you some of the latest thoughts and advice.
Your engagement with what we do via social media helps us to decide what subjects we cover on The Bridge, and so when it came to summarising 2024, we wanted to celebrate the articles that seemed to resonate with you the most.
Being in touch with your music is a key part of DJing, and it doesn’t happen on its own. As your collection grows from dozens to hundreds to thousands of tracks, you’ll need methods and routines to maintain a clear picture of what you’ve got, what it sounds like, and when and how to play it. The truth is, the better you know your tunes, the better you’ll play. Organization, preparation and a bit of (eeek) homework are the real keys to delivering your A-game. This is a primer on how to manage that crate like a pro.
We’d decided to look back on the DJM-909, our first-ever scratch mixer, as it seemed like there was still some love for it in the DJ community. Even so, the reaction to the article and the DJM-909 itself was pretty overwhelming. “This mixer is a beast,” said the renowned hip-hop DJ ESKEi83, one of several pro DJs who voiced their love for the DJM-909. “Game changer,” said Skratch Bastid. “By far the best mixer ever made by pioneer!” MELL STARR said. The main things that DJs seemed to remember was the DJM-909’s robust build quality and, crucially, its dual FX engine.
For the article, we spoke to Joel Clements, AKA Prime Cuts from Scratch Perverts, who consulted on the DJM-909’s design. “I still remember the first time running through the features on it and just thinking, Christ, this is just incredible,” he told us. We also heard from Phil Lembke, known professionally as Sticky Dojah, who has kept the DJM-909 in the public eye through his fantastic performance videos. “It’s quite a thing to witness that this machine is still so beloved,” he said.
Although home booths are as old as DJing itself, the internet has opened countless avenues for finding information about them, whether it’s video guides on YouTube, articles by fellow DIYers, chat threads on forums or Reddit, or Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members.
In order to get a handle on the broad subject of home DJ booths, we spoke to some experts, while also taking input from members of the popular DIY DJ Booths group on Facebook and the UK garage star DJ Spoony. Whether you’re looking to modify your Ikea Kallax unit using the widely-known hack, or if you want to invest some serious capital in a luxury bespoke unit, we here gather all the information you need to make an informed decision about your home setup.
Even when we love doing something, it’s easy to get stuck in ruts. How does this apply to DJing? It’s there in the way you swap the bass EQs in the same way each time. Or buy music from the same record labels. Or select tracks through the same thought processes. Even the most growth-orientated DJs among us will have stuff they learned early on and never deviated from. Put all of this together, and you might eventually find yourself feeling a little jaded by your technique.
These six challenges are designed to break you free from your familiar workflows and inspire new creative possibilities. At root is the idea that we grow or change when we’re out of our comfort zone and are forced to think differently.
During the 1990s, dual, “rackmountable” CD players created the first wave of digital DJs and they were a widespread alternative to playing vinyl. They were most commonly used in smaller venues and by mobile DJs, but they could conceivably have been found in most DJing environments. To give you an idea of the prevalence of rackmount CD players, the DJ equipment archive site DJ Resource lists 20 companies and 191 different products that were produced in this category. Which is to say that, for a long time, dual CD players were a big deal in the DJ world.
With this in mind, we decided to dust off our original dual CD player, the CMX-5000. We wanted to see how it felt in the mix, while exploring the history of rackmounted CD players, a class of products that required DJs to play in a pretty different way from the one we’re now accustomed to.
