In this post I’m going to share with you some little known secrets about scratching with your DJ equipment. We’ll utilize a special technique used by my deejaying mentor and passed onto me. The technique is called deliberate practice. And you will thank me for making you into a better DJ in time if you follow exactly the tips that I share with you. It’s the kind of deejay technique that you can start to use right away as opposed to those ones that you need to master in theory first. This will help you to gain confidence when scratching on your equipment. First I will say this, that technique is only a minute part of the scratching as a whole, important to remember this. Let’s check out a bit about the background of the deliberate practice technique then.
As I’m a pro DJ in the Chicago house circuit one of the most common questions I always get asked is how much time should any DJ spend practicing every day? I have this question in my in box a lot and I struggled to answer it until I came across the deliberate practice theory applied to scratching on your DJ equipment. Basically, it’s not all about the number of hours that you put in, that’s only half the battle. It is in fact also the quality of the practice sessions that you’re achieving day in, day out. This may seem obvious to some, but this blatant fact can sometimes be slightly overlooked. If you’ve heard of the Malcomm Gladwell book called Outliers, it states very clearly that it takes 10,000 hours to master a given skill that you’re totally focused on mastering – In this case mastering DJ scratching.
However, there are issues with the 10,000 hours to become a scratch master. Because, it’s only half the scenario as I mentioned earlier. It’s more about how you practice scratching in the right way that will mean you will become the master of your DJ equipment. So for example, you could say that you are now focused on a very specific technique and you want to master that one first. Or do you choose to randomly begin to freestyle and assortment of techniques in the hope of improving your skills in all these at once? This is a basic difference in your approach to mastering scratching during your practicing but can and will make a huge difference. In the next part – We will discuss more about how to become a master of the newly acquired dj equipment for beginners so watch this space and thank you for reading.